Nokia’s Business Mobility Strategy – Does it have one?

After a long drought of truly business handsets from Nokia, the dam appears to be have been breached. The E71 has almost every feature that a business smartphone could have, and the E66 is a simpler but pleasant business slide format. 

There are also another two handsets leaked, the E63 a cheaper clone of the E71 (saves the Chinese from doing it I suppose) and a horizontal slider.  

With the E90 still a strong and well supported business device, on the face of it there is no doubt that Nokia want to play in the white collar business world.

The trouble is that Nokia has ended their relationship with BlackBerry, and Intellisync, their wholly owned mobile business platform, is no more.  

Nokia describe the demise of Intellisync as a refocusing exercise, approved at the highest level, where limited resources (presumably people) have to be deployed appropriately.  

So Ovi should be seeing a boost in employee number shortly.

This is good news for Nokia’s consumer support but I wonder if this is not an extremely short sighted decision for the overall strategy of the company.

Nokia and the networks built their fledgling mega corps on the profits from corporate and government organisations.  

Out of which came classic devices and especially the 6310(i) which is still sought after many years since it was discontinued.  

Well it does have superb battery life, call quality, ease of use and a car kit that was fitted to many executive cars.

Through the business handset boon was born the consumer craze, with Nokia’s ultimate offering the N95 (8GB) & N96. 

Not forgetting the lower end, Nokia invests a great deal of money and energy in producing handsets for every population sector imaginable.  

Though handsets may overlap in features, Nokia’s research has usually discovered a consumer niche to make the variants worthwhile. 

With Nokia’s Ovi, social networking, sharing, music, video & photography and every other consumer based service will be provided to smother the opposition and sweep consumers ever more into the Nokia fold.

Except businesses.