Nokia Nseries - interview with Mads Winblad

Today our guest is Mads Winblad from Nokia Multimedia Division. He is in charge of the N-series devices. We’ve discussed a lot of topics revolving around the N-series, including indexing, classification, issues with today’s devices. I hope you will find this conversation useful. And I would like to thank Mr. Winblad for that interview.

EM. Thank you Mads for this interview and firstly I’d like to ask you not about the future or the present day, but about your article “21 trends” written nearly 6 years ago. After so much time passed, how do you feel about it?

МW. As far as I remember it was in 1999 or maybe 2000? I guess it happened right before the millennium shift. Some of the described trends back then looked really fantastic, however when looking at the other ones you can see that the whole mobile market has been developing in that direction since then. Therefore in my opinion many of the 21 trends were justified, but a couple of them are still far-out, I can’t predict when they will be put into practice – the only thing I do know is that a lot of resources and technologies are thrown into that field, so a number of the trends might materialize soon.

EM. We’ve already discussed that personal experience will become the most crucial factor, rather than Wi-Fi and other high tech features – actually users will buy handsets according to the feelings of their own. What’s your point of view? It’s widely known that experience in itself is accompanied by technologies – they are always coming together, the opposite just doesn’t work out on the current market.

МW. I think what’s is really happening right now is a process I might call product-focusing – the end-users have become much more experienced and aware of brands, basically there isn’t much of a difference when you’re buying a car, a shirt, a mobile phone, personal experience is what drives you. But at the same time there is a group of people, I’ll call them tech-guys, which are keen on high-end, feature-packed gadgets – some like new technology because it’s technology, the others favor it because they can create something using it. Nevertheless people in general don’t care about technologies – they pay more attention to a particular device’s field of application.

EM. Obviously, the today’s handsets are much more complicated than the previous ones – the N80 feels like created in a different era when compared with devices of older generations. However, being an all-in-one handset, similarly to the rest of the N-series, this phone seems to confuse the end-users a bit, as it doesn’t match their experience obtained with ordinary high-profile phones. You call this ‘multimedia computer’, but how can you make the consumers learn about its new possibilities faster? Personally, it’s not that easy for me.

МW. That’s a good point. I think accessibility of the modern phones is getting better; all new handsets tend to fit the “Buy-and-Use” criteria. Similar situation with laptops – what we had five years ago, even three years ago is different from today, they still have some problems, but the users’ experience has advanced much over the last few years. There will always be products and solutions that are on the edge of technology – there you will always have this kind of interface issues and understanding of their features. But if you look into the core, examine the N-series closer you will see that we’re trying to ensure that our multimedia computer is the bottom line, all our devices are based on Symbian OS 60 and they can offer you more or less the same – there might be unique features, but are all, without exception, multimedia computers. So I think as the devices are getting more and more complicated, people are going to choose handsets which they will make more use of. And particular features will have the second priority – for example if you want to get e-mail and camera capabilities, you will probably choose the N90, or in case it is e-mail and connectivity only, you might look at our enterprise devices. In my opinion everything is moving in this direction.

EM. Do you mean in future we will have high-profile devices aimed at photography only, video capturing only etc. which will pack a number of standard features residing in multimedia computers (smartphones)?

МW. Yes, I can also explain it in a different way. When we chose that path three or four years ago, people wanted to have everything packed in one device. And some people didn’t. That was a big question. And there were people in both ends who didn’t like the idea. However there was a big group in the mid, who were used to having an MP3-player. For that person running an MP3-player is not an issue – he knows what it can and can’t do; how it works and so on. And there were people who had been stuck to their mobile phones for quite a while and knew it very well. Those consumers didn’t have anything against these two devices being combined, in case they would remain easy to manage. And when have you developed that kind of device - like the times when mobile phones have acquired SMS services - it quickly becomes a part of day-to-day activities, so people start demanding more, including camera or video for example. Once we’ve embedded that in a phone, another idea comes, which can be Mobile TV as well. So in that perspective consumers are developing in the direction of having everything in one device, but they don’t jump into three or four new areas within one device. That trend we see very clearly. We also see that people have no problems with carrying two devices – we’ve carried out some surveys. While three or four devices don’t work out, as that’s two much, two phones are what people can manage for different kinds of purposes. And we see that a person can have an all-in-one device with camera, MP3-player, and a secondary device, for instance, combining an MP3-player and phone capabilities, which is water-proof, because he is running a lot, so that his sweat won’t damage the phone. Thus there are different kinds of usage, sharing the same starting points like music, camera, whatsoever and it’s another trend, which will develop all the time.

EM. Do you have any data on which phones people own in case they have two handsets? On our market it’s normal to see a man running two devices: an ordinary handset, for example powered by S40 platform, and a smartphone for office activities, entertainment etc. But these are two separate phones.

МW. I’m not sure we have concrete researches covering that point, but we can look into that. What we know from different local markets – usage cases differ very much from market to market, everything depends on what kind of services operators have available. For example in some regions different subscription forms don’t allow the customer to have equally good voice and GPRS tarifs. So some people turn to using two devices – one for GPRS, e-mail or whatever, and voice communication on the other. These are users’ habits, which originate, in my opinion, from a wrong starting point, namely that subscription forms don’t fit consumers, but the operator instead, if you understand what I mean. So that is one observation that we have made. Now as for services - I know we have multiple devices ownership service, but I’m not sure about its state in Russia or in general, we need to look into that and we will definitely come back to that.

EM. What do you think about WLAN, Wi-Fi connectivity? Nowadays GPRS or EDGE might proove unfitting in terms of tariffs, while for WLAN access we can use any point, not connected with operators. As far as I know in Europe it’s getting more competitive, for example on the German market - two weeks ago with T-Mobile we discussed the matter of competition with pre-paid SIM-cards, as they simply failed to sell some contracts because of that. From the hardware point of view, that is going to be a huge success for WLAN-powered devices, since users will be choosing them due to lower expenses on connection.

МW. Everything you said is right, actually that’s one of the key points for all operators – how to cope with Wireless LAN and VoIP in general, because it’s of course poses a threat for voice communication and GPRS. It’s obvious that Wireless LAN is here to stay and it will be widely spread for sure. There is going to be a lot of WLAN access points in future. And I think that Wireless LAN for many countries only in one- or two-years time will become not a competitive advantage, but rather a natural method of communication in many cafes, parks, restaurants, big shopping malls, so the business case from charging you for accessing Wireless LAN will not be a business case in future, unless they combine it with other services, like Wireless voice and so on, it could be based on advertising, content, ways of billing. But the competition on pricing Wireless LAN access will disappear – the market will surely get rid of this. At the moment, I have to pay for Wireless LAN access point in the German airport, while I’m a gold member of Lufthansa, I have to pay to Vodafone, which is my network operator – but truly, Vodafone doesn’t have anything to do with me sitting in the airport and waiting for my flight. That’s totally wrong – I want to have free access there. So I think that will change in future.

EM. By the way in Copenhagen Wireless LAN is not so popular nowadays – the price in a hotel there for an access point is around 300 Euros per day, it’s not an acceptable price, since the same operator provides Wireless LAN to all hotel guests for 10 Euros per hour and it’s a huge difference. As far as I see they don’t realize the opportunities granted by Wireless LAN services. We have O2 in the UK, in Germany, in Denmark – they provide excellent service level there, so that you can even download some music tracks and pay only for them, not for Wireless LAN. But on the other hand, I have to ask you about is storage capacities of devices, as while using Wireless LAN we can not only browse web-pages or check e-mail, but also upload music and films, podcasts, pictures etc. And for all that stuff we have only 2 Gb memory cards, which seem to be not enough for many users. With Nokia Podcasting service you are currently running, which requires at least 500 Mb for storing files, the problem of storage appear to be a crucial one. The N91 seemingly tops here, as having a 4 Gb hard drive onboard solves this issue. What capacity you believe will be introduced next year?

МW. Capacity and storage are really big issues – they were, they are and they will be. When it comes to our products, he have 4 Gb product yes, but look at the memory cards – they are rapidly developing. I remember that a year ago we talked about the capacity as well – we though that this year would see 1 Gb cards and only in 2007 we would have 2 Gb ones. But as you see we have 2 Gb today, so the development goes extremely fast, and I think we will see memory cards offering 3 and 4 Gb and even more as well. From Nokia’s point of view we will increase our storage capabilities – whether it will be done with flash memory or hard drives, I will not disclose that here. We’re moving really fast into podcasting, video streaming and all that using our multimedia computers. So we need to take this storage issue very seriously and enable consumers to store what they want – if they want to watch some movies, listen to a dozen of podcasts during a flight, they need huge storage, but that memory should provide both internal flexibility within a device and external one – connectivity with other storage devices.

EM. One of the issues with the N-series devices is power consumption – while in the office, or driving a car (carkit), it’s not a real problem, but when traveling or going out, 7-8 hours of playing around - and the battery has no charge left. Is it possible to change something regarding technology in order to decrease power consumption in future, or 1-2 days of standby time will remain the same for all other handsets?

МW. I think at the moment there is no technology that could result in positive changes in the next 12, 18, 24 month, unfortunately. Power consumption is an issue, so today all we can do is to continue tuning batteries, applications activity – we are doing a lot researches on how we can save power, how can we find a compromise between power consumption and functionality. But unfortunately the big technology shift, if I may say so, is not there.

EM. We could see many materials being applied to Nokia phones casings – like metal etc. The N-series devices are made mostly of pretty standard materials though – plastic combined with a metal casing for the display. Will we see the development of the N72’s idea in future? Because of having fashion elements combined with N-series capabilities it looks appealing on the market, when people are searching not only for a feature-packed device, but for a phone they could show off.

МW. It’s clear that we’re looking into this area of design, but now when we’ve started the N-series line-up, our target group includes early adapters, who are really into technologies, so we need to reflect the needs of this audience more than any other group’s, but it’s for sure that later we will come up with fashion devices. We’re currently focusing on these premium high-tech feature-packed devices and trying to somehow match design elements with that, and there will be different kinds of devices, when we will get into the fashion segment or other segments.

EM. You have mentioned tech enthusiasts – however people always ask me about classification of the N-series devices, they don’t get the idea of “what is what”. For example the N70 is meant for mass markets, it’s very cheap; the N80 is all-in-one, the N90 – imaging, but the N72 – I don’t get the indexing, the N91 is a music-centric phone; however the N71 is more like the N70. What do these indexes stand for?

МW. You can say that it’s related to price a little bit, but in general higher indexes, like the N91, represent the ultimate flagship products and it depends on the category –the N90 was a flagship in imaging, but now we have introduced another top device focused on imaging – the N93. So the point here is that the first flagship in imaging was the N90 and now we have the N93 as the successor – “9” here stands for ‘flagship’, for example the N91 is the flagship in music; so the first numbers indicate hierarchy, while the last ones represent just the number of product itself. The “7”, I personally don’t like using this word, means “lower end” – not the lower end of the market, but of the N-series, and then the N80 is somewhere in the mid.

EM. Most users tend to compare the N-series with enterprise solutions, as that niche is almost unfilled. People usually choose between the E- and the N-series. And here the issue of indexes rises again – there are E60 and E70, but seemingly no hi-end products available in the E-series, however their price is comparable with the products coming from the N-series line-up, even with the N80 sometimes. In my opinion there is some kind of misunderstanding, because if we compare these devices feature-by-feature, we’ll see that the E-series is an enterprise solution, it has great connectivity, etc., but it is positioned lower than the N80, which has higher index.

МW. I cannot give you a definitive comment about the pricing. What we want to do is to focus on the experience – and in light of this fact I like to compare it with bicycles, for instance: you can choose which one you want, if you want to go mountain-biking, you will surely take a catalogue featuring bikes, so you will be able to choose from many models and pick the one suiting you best, like a bike for jumping, or riding, etc. And there is a little difference between that and what we are doing here – if you compare a bicycle for streets and a mountain bike, you will notice that one can easily ride on any of them, the very fundamental and the price are the same for both of them. But you might pay more or less for unique features in different categories. The entire society nowadays is moving in the direction of individualization, everybody wants something special, just look at the watch industry for example. The same goes for mobile devices, multimedia computers – if you want something that will suit you in the particular situation, you will have to pay either more or less for that. If you go back to the basics and compare prices, you can always wonder why this phone is more expensive than that one, but it’s just the same as comparing cars.

EM. It’s a good example, indeed. What issues do you have with promoting the N-series in different markets, what are the problems you face?

МW. I don’t want to say we have any problems here, because we have so many opportunities in Russia -I’ve been here for a couple of days already and talked to retailers and customers. But our biggest challenge world-over is to get the retail to understand that the N-series and multimedia computers are different from any other mobile phone. If you go to any shop today, you will see amazing range of various products with different prices and of course the N90 will have a much higher price than Nokia 1100 over here, and many customers don’t understand what I get from this phone that makes me pay so much. So our biggest challenge is to ensure that at the point of sales they can demonstrate what our products actually can do. And people must experience this, so that if I take a picture and print it out, what quality I will get out of it etc. Or if I want to listen to music, what kind of quality I will hear – the statement that this model has an MP3-player doesn’t give any experience to a consumer. So we are focusing on how we can ensure that the N-series will come and have the right position in retail stores – that’s why I came here. So any consumer can come to a retail store and say, that he wants something with camera, music or video and he will be given the opportunity to try it out. That’s our goal.

EM. As for me, I think that the end-users are quite conservative; they usually see just an ordinary mobile phone in any kind of device. And regarding the multimedia computers, as you call them, do you believe that majority of users will also call these devices not smartphones, but multimedia computers. In fact too little time has passed since the announcement of this term; however in the past we saw Nokia introducing similar things, like media phones, as far as I remember it happened roughly at the millennium shift, but today nobody uses that word, because all handsets are now packing nearly the same capabilities, i.e. MP3-player and so on.

МW. I think if I look into the momentum and into my 15 years of experience in Nokia – I just mean how long it took in the beginning of the 90s, when we talked about wireless and voice calls. We had started that at Nokia and then it’d begun to spread into press and different kinds of exhibitions, so by the mid-90s everybody was talking about that. And when I look into that kind of things today, like media phones or whatever, the momentum we have with the multimedia computers, especially in press, where we have many articles saying that if you want to know mobile phones’ future – look at the PCs’ past, I think we’ve come up with a good metaphor for this kind of devices, so it’s not only Nokia who produces multimedia computers – our part of all this is the N-series. I think we have so great momentum around it also because it makes sense for people – the research we’ve carried out with our target groups, indicates that they fully understand what multimedia computer means, and they actually call them ‘multimedia computers’ themselves. So I think in one-two years time or even sooner we will see that multimedia computers will have their own abbreviation, like PCs – MC.

EM. Do you believe that ordinary people could possibly distinguish the S60-powered smartphones made by Nokia from multimedia computers? For the end-users the difference between functions of these is not always that obvious. If you compare, for example, Nokia 5500 with an N-series device, a low-end one, the N70 – the displays here and there are surely different, but both can playback MP3 files, they have their pros and cons, so the reason why they should call one of them a multimedia computer and the other one a smartphone is somewhat obscure.

МW. We’ve already talked about the price comparison and I think we have something similar here. In fact multimedia computer, as well as a personal computer or a mobile phone is a big thing. So when we start to create clarity and separate out these terms, there will always be a grey area where things are overlapping and where things are not 100% logical. There are some situations when you can argue whether it’s a multimedia computer or not, but to create a general clarity on the market we need to focus on the big thing and that’s what we’re doing. I admit that we can always find some sticking points, which not everybody will agree with. However solving that is not what we want to focus on, at least in the beginning – right now we want to develop it into the mainstream and make people understand what a multimedia computer is, and having done that, having made multimedia computers a part of our life, we will stick to something new, I can’t really say what it will be. In 7, 8, 9 year there will be something completely new on the market.

EM. We have seen Motorola’s successful experience with its ROKR phone, and earlier this year Nokia announced the 5500 and called it “Sport”. Personally I think that for the N-series it would make sense to acquire code names, so that end-users could learn more about its purpose simply by reading the title. Do you have any plans to introduce something like that?

МW. We have names for all our multimedia computers, for the entire N-series in other words. And then we have indexes for differentiating them. I fully understand what you mean; actually it’s always a big topic to discuss: what to use numbers or names – when you’re a global company like Nokia, there are loads of things to take into account, for example in some countries you can’t use specific indexes, because there they mean something different, the same goes for names and so on. We’ve figured out our platform and we believe that if people start to call our device in one of the following ways: Nokia imaging (for example), Nokia music, then we will miss the momentum behind Nokia, so we prefer saying “This is the N-series”. When I started at Nokia in the 90s, we had the first global handheld, which was an NMT device, called Cityman – back then we didn’t want everyone to talk about ‘Cityman’, but rather wanted to hear ‘Nokia’ everywhere, so we removed the unique title and replaced it with an index, I can’t remember which one, though. The same philosophy we have now in the N-series, we want to push Nokia’s N-series. We did the same with Nokia brand – we had a lot of brands in the beginning of the 90s, we skipped them and started using only Nokia, a lot of people were arguing back then. But we did it and nowadays, 10 years after, there is no company on this globe which has managed to develop such a strong brand in only 10-years period, like Nokia has. That’s because we’ve been so consistent in our approach. Then in 2004 it was time to evolve further, take the next step forward and we’ve decided to go into the E-series, enterprise devices and the N-series, multimedia computers, so that’s why we are not changing too much, as now we want to be extremely consistent in the N-series.

EM. When you mention multimedia computers it means that like a PC it must have a lot of accessories for music, entertainment, gaming etc. How do you plan to gather literally a small universe around these products? Are you going to cooperate with other brands, like you previously did with Sennheiser for the N91, or you will try to make accessories of your own?

МW. We will do both. First of all I will agree with you that we don’t have good enough accessories for the N-series, which could enhance it, at the moment, but we’re working on it. But we’d like to have our own enhancement products and only then we will cooperate with other companies, like Sennheiser and other partners which we do some marketing activities with, and we will also deal with other partners, who are developing accessories for our products using our brand. We’re not into that yet, but in six months you will see more of these things coming out.

EM. I have to mention that for the N-series accessories in general is a weak point nowadays, as when you purchase a device for 500-600 Euros and find some plastic headset inside, which is usually included in an ordinary phone’s package, the experience and perception of the brand get damaged. Another thing I would like to ask you are initial firmware versions, which your phones come in equipped with. For example the N80 – its first firmware was crowded with bugs (for example you couldn’t use web browser while listening to music) and it was pretty unstable. It caused a lot of returns; people claimed that the handset wasn’t working properly. What steps are you taking right now in order to improve the initial perception of your phones?

МW. First of all I’d like to say that it is absolutely not our intention to see people having problems with our devices. We are trying to do everything possible to ensure that the software works fine before the handset gets released. But of course sometimes failures happen; like the entire industry, our products are getting more and more complicated – in the past it was a piece of hardware, which was pretty easy to make and test out; but software is extremely difficult even to manage, and what’s more, since it’s the core of all multimedia computers, it’s open, so that you can download various kinds of applications and install them. That’s why sometimes we experience things which we could not calculate or foresee. I can’t say here in detail what we are doing right now, but we are carrying out a lot of different kinds of testing, including the ones involving network operators. And when failures occur after release, we surely have our service system in place, which tries to make software updates as soon as possible; in addition to that we are looking into launching a user-based services, where we will count on our target groups, which make nearly 15-20% - these people know much about software so they can patch the system of multimedia computers themselves, they don’t even need to go to service centers, instead they will go home and download required updates. It will be like the software on the today’s PCs, when you turn it on, the applications can automatically fix themselves using the global net. These are the things we are looking into as well. But it is still to come in the future, it’s not here yet.

EM. Thank you for such a definitive interview, and could I ask you to say some words for our readers?

МW. Well that’s a difficult one… you have one perception when you are not coming to Moscow or Russia in general too often, so I have only one perception of the society here. And I have to say that I was positively surprised with the users here being so advanced, and the retailers being so educated – they really know what they are talking about and of course I’m happy to see how the sales of our multimedia computers, which are very complicated devices, are developing in this area. And I now hope that together with the retailers we can ensure that the N-series experience will come to its best in some of our selected retail chains.

Eldar Murtazin ([email protected])
Translated by Oleg Kononosov ([email protected])

Published - 23 August 2006

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