Nokia continues open channel push in US

“I don’t know if this is Nokia’s attitude, but they are really big, and that must just be more trouble than it’s actually worth,” Chamberlain said. “Instead of saying. ‘We’re going to pry this market open, carrier by carrier,’ we’re going to say, ‘We make pretty exclusive products that are very high-end for discerning users, and if people want them, they’ll pay for them.’ It doesn’t have to be subsidized; you don’t have to pick it up on the kiosk at the mall.”

The price is also a limiting factor, Chamberlain said. The three new devices will range from $500 to $800 when they are released in the fourth quarter, so the market will likely be constrained to the higher income consumers Nokia is targeting. In that sense, using the open channel may be the kind of business model that a lot of handset makers would like for their higher-end devices, he added.

“Rather than have to build this big distribution system and, in a lot of ways, bend to what the carriers specify has to be on their deck, on their [user interface], what it looks like, how it works – if you are going to talk open access, we’re going to sell open access devices,” Chamberlain said of Nokia’s logic.

With the only nationally deployed UMTS network, AT&T would be the obvious Nokia target for a carrier relationship, and there are signs that AT&T is warming to the Finnish vendor’s smartphone line. AT&T lent its weight to the new Symbian Foundation, which Nokia created after buying up Symbian’s remaining shares, creating a non-profit organization that licenses the OS royalty-free to competing handset makers. Further, Nokia was thought to quit offering VoIP capabilities on some of its new handset models, including the N78, causing many in the blogosphere to declare it had abandoned VoIP due to pressure from carriers, which have been losing long-distance calling revenues to VoIP clients like those embedded on Nokia’s handsets. However, according to a Nokia spokesperson, the manufacturer simply updated its operating system with a new VoIP Audio Service API for its third-party standalone applications. VoIP app providers can update their programs to reflect the new service, he said.