Nokia E7

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The new smart phone to be released by Finnish giant Nokia Corp, the E7, will be delayed until after the holiday season. It seems a pretty risky economic move for the world’s largest handset manufacturer to make, especially since many retailers depend on the season to make their yearend budget targets. But Nokia is sticking to quality over the potential or sales this year.

They say the delay is to make sure the phone will have a good user experience. This is in recognition of the fact that the company has lost a huge chunk of its market share because their current offerings don’t have the best user interface.

Although company spokesman Doug Dawson did not want to comment on the economic impact of missing out on the fourth quarter, since there is only one week left before Christmas, analysts agree that the delay’s adverse impact would be perhaps be limited. Nokia has also buffeted criticism about the delay by saying that since the E7 will be marketed to primarily business users, it would have had a smaller target audience than other smart phones in its lineup, such ...
... as the N8, anyway.

However, the delay does not sit well with investors, not the least because they have already been recently told that the N8 is also slightly delayed. There is also the fact that Nokia’s decline to competitors such as Apple’s iPhone and Samsung Electronics is partly to do with its untimely introductions of new phones onto the market. The N97 was released many months it was originally made public, negating any technical advantage it touted at the time.

The price of the E7, currently estimated at about $663, will definitely be prohibitive for many in the general marketplace, so Nokia is serious about going after the business demographic. This means that the E7 smart phone is going to have to be sophisticated and user friendly enough to dethrone BlackBerry’s popularity.

It’s no surprise then that the original December 10th release date was pushed back if Nokia had quality concerns. RIM’s BlackBerry is pretty user friendly, and its ability to cater to the needs of business people is legendary. Nokia has even hired a former RIM executive to help with its release date issues, but it does not seem to be having any effect so far.

The company was once leading the industry, both in regular cell phones and in smart phones. Now they are struggling to keep their foothold in the industry against the competition. They have had a rough year so far, with two major releases delayed,… leaving consumers free to get excited about other smart phones for the gift-giving season.

Picking up the slack early next year will involve a whole lot of tweets, blog entries, reviews and other kinds of well thought out SEO buzz content, just to get people to remember about them again. This is precisely why with online marketing, timing matters. Failure to tap into what people are thinking about right now can really hurt your bottom line, as Nokia has been finding out all this year. When the N7 finally gets released, let’s hope for their sake, it’s not with a thud.