OSNews

What about Nokia's feature phones, aka "dumb phones"? There's one thing that Nokia does well, and that's make phones that are just phones - ask any old person who can barely make their digits meet those of the phone. Anecdotally speaking, I've seen a LOT of Nokia smartphones returned on warranty in the past 18 months. A disproportionate number. I'd be stupid to think it started immediately when I started working at the phone shop, so I must assume that their smart phones for at least the past two years have been failures. The N900 was a step in the right direction, too bad they forgot MMS out of the box, but everything else (with the current exception of the N8, though I'm still holding my breath) has had manufacturer's faults piled high as the sky. If they're planning to move to a smartphone only business model, they'd best be prepared to kiss goodbye the only sure thing on their sales figures.

I say this because, if Nokia plans to drop Symbian entirely, this will leave them with no dumbphone OS, unless they plan to start charging up around the AU$500 mark for their feature phones, too. They'll need pretty powerful hardware in their dumbphones to run Windows Phone 7. Unfortunately, there are still people who can't grasp the basics of how to use a mobile phone, like even how to open their damn contacts after I've put a shortcut on their phone's home screen. If Nokia begin to fail in their just-a-phone business, then they have no future as a company. That's the one market they have 100% cornered.