SAN FRANCISCO – If cell phone maker Nokia rolls out a tablet device one day, it will be late to a game where its competitors have a big head start.

Some observers think the company would be better off focusing all its resources on a successful smartphone portfolio first, then worry about a tablet down the road.

Nokia’s chief, Stephen Elop, seems to be looking for the middle ground.

Speaking at the All Things Digital conference, Elop said the company will bring a cutting-edge tablet to market when conditions are right.

“Our engineers are working very hard on something that will be different relative to everything else that’s going on in the market,” he said. “We could take advantage of Microsoft technology and software, and build a Windows-oriented tablet, or we could do things with some of the other software assets that we have.”

Unless Nokia has a hidden ace up its sleeve, “other software assets” refers to the Linux-based MeeGo operating system that Nokia’s been working on in various forms for six years, although MeeGo now sees developer help from Intel and Novell, among others.
Although MeeGo is incompatible with the more dominant Google Android platform, Elop has ruled out any Nokia Android devices, saying at the Qualcomm Uplinq conference on Thursday: “Our strategic premise at Nokia is that there is an opportunity for a third and competitive ecosystem to emerge, and that is the basis on which we are going forward.”

Investors haven’t responded in a way Elop might have liked. Coupled with warnings that second-quarter sales wouldn’t be too hot, there’s even talk of a collapse in Nokia stock.

The tablet boat is already well out to sea, and Nokia could find it difficult to hitch a ride once it is ready. Apple, Samsung, Motorola and others are already entering the second generation of their product lines

Still, there is a big market out there — and it is growing.

According to technology research and advisory firm Gartner, tablet sales could reach 295 million by 2015. Maybe that’s what Nokia is banking on, setting up a potential situation in the future akin to the early days of the PC, when pioneers IBM and Compaq ceded much of the market to later arrivals like Gateway just a few years later.
Analyst Derek Kerton of The Kerton Group said any worry of being late to the tablet market is overblown.
“Apple entered the mobile phone market about 20 years after its creation,” he said. “They seem to have done OK despite that slight delay.”

Kerton said Nokia would be better off focusing its attention on its smartphone portfolio for now.

Although Elop is a recent arrival at Nokia, the company’s hardware has a background in tablet computing.
The Nokia-driven Maemo operating system showed how Linux could be successfully adapted for mobile devices. Without it. Android would arguably be very different. The N series Internet tablets, beginning with the N770 in 2005, were eerily similar to the Apple iPhone that would arrive several years later, although they relied on stylus input and — until the N900 arrived in 2009 — lacked any cell phone circuitry.
Why isn’t Nokia building on this expertise?

“I had an N tablet,” Kerton said. “It was awful. A terrible UX [user interface] that only an engineer could love. Designed by committee, disjointed, complicated — I spent a few nights in a row until the wee hours tinkering, then gave mine away to someone I disliked.”

Kerton said Nokia should start fresh and occupy a market position not yet fully realized — true laptop-replacement tablets. As one of Microsoft’s biggest partners for Windows 8, Nokia is given “significant heft” in this regard, he said.

“Windows 8 with some kind of wireless USB docking system could be interesting. It could function as a desktop when docked, or just near its peripherals, while it could function as a tablet while mobile. Instead of just having a window on your work, cloud content, or apps, you could have full desktop contents with you on the go — no sync required,” Kerton said.
However, that idea also faces competition.

At the All Things Digital conference earlier this week, Microsoft’s hardware partners showed off various tablet devices running the full Windows 8 and even Microsoft Office, all using the same kind of ARM processor-based technology that Nokia traditionally excels in.

Nokia is going to have to produce something exceptional, Kerton said.

“The problem for Nokia is that the existing tablets and associated app stores cover a lot of ground. The iPad developer ecosystem is able to spot market opportunity and extend the devices to meet it. That doesn’t leave much for Nokia unless their hardware is significantly different,” he said.

STOCKHOLM – Nokia will abandon its Ovi mobile services brand as it prepares to sell smartphones based on Microsoft’s Windows Phone software, it said in a blog posting on Monday.

Starting with services on some new Nokia phones in July and August, Ovi services will be rebranded as Nokia services in a transition that the company expects will continue into next year, according to a blog post. For example, Ovi Maps will become Nokia Maps.

It is only a name-changing exercise and the services will continue as before. It’s likely that anybody buying a new Nokia smartphone or mobile phone later this year will see the new branding on services included on them. Users that already own a Nokia phone will see the new branding through future software updates, Nokia said.

The Ovi services brand was born in 2007, and has seen it fair share of problems. Nokia’s answer to Apple’s App Store, the Ovi store couldn’t cope with demand on opening day. However, insufficient demand seems to have put an end to another Ovi service in some countries: In January the company said it would stop offering Ovi Music Unlimited in 27 of the 33 countries where it operated.

The abandonment of Ovi is an admission that the stand-alone brand has failed, and will now act as a way to reduce consumer confusion as the partnership with Microsoft grows, CCS Insight wrote in a research note.

The reasons for this decision includes the fact that Nokia is a well-known brand the world over, Nokia’s chief marketing officer Jerri DeVard said in the blog post.

The change is the first “bold move” made by DeVard since she joined the company in January, according to CCS Insight. Nokia’s brand is not as a today as it was five years ago, but it still carries a lot of resonance in emerging markets, said Geoff Blaber, analyst at CCS Insight.

Since Nokia announced its intention to move to Windows Phone as its primary smartphone operating system, the company has made a number of changes, including outsourcing its Symbian software activities to Accenture and transferring 3,000 employees to the consulting company in the process.

However, the company hasn’t yet said when the first Nokia Windows smartphone will arrive. The company won’t divulge ship dates until closer to when the first phones arrive, but the pressure is on to deliver the devices this year, Nokia CEO Stephen Elop said when the company announced its first quarter results.