Nokia: Youths are fed up with iPhone, baffled by Android

Nokia has claimed that the youth of today are fed up with the iPhone and baffled by Android.

In an exclusive interview with Pocket-lint, Niels Munksgaard, director of Portfolio, Product Marketing & Sales at Nokia Entertainment Global explained all:

"What we see is that youth are pretty much fed up with iPhones. Everyone has the iPhone," he said. "Also, many are not happy with the complexity of Android and the lack of security. So we do increasing see that the youth that wants to be on the cutting edge and try something new are turning to the Windows phone platform.

Munksgaard agrees though, that even then it is not so easy to impress those walking into a shop looking to sign a new contract:

"The marketplace is extremely crowded. I refer to it as the sea of sameness," he added. "When you walk up to a retail shelf at Phones4U and see the number of black mono-blocks sitting on the shelf, it is very confusing to the consumer. We want to deliver services and phones that are different.

That "different" approach, believes Munksgaard, includes offering services like Nokia Mix Radio, which gives users music out-of-the-box without having to sign up to anything or pay costly fees each month.

It is music, along with mapping and the design of the latest Nokia smartphone, the Nokia Lumia 800, that he feels helps Nokia stand out from the crowd. But will its music services be coming elsewhere; to the desktop or other music devices like Sonos in the future?

Munksgaard won't say. However, he did tell us that it "is in [Nokia's] interest to broaden the coverage of where you can get Nokia Mix Radio".

That could mean letting other Windows Phone 7 users have access to Nokia's new music service, or perhaps a desktop offering.

There's hope too for a broader range of speaker solutions to become available in the future, allowing Nokia owners to listen to the latest music out loud on something other than its 360 Bluetooth speakers. Just don't hold your breath:

"We would prefer a wireless transfer than a docking station," said Munksgaard. "A docking station has limitations because the phone has to be in a certain place. We are extremely pleased with the experience you get with the device in connection with Nokia gear. We don't have a docking station at this point, however we are confident that as the Windows Phone ecosystem grows, third party docking station makers will support us.

Hopefully for Nokia, for those bored with the iPhone and looking for something simpler than Android, those third party manufacturers will start knocking out Nok Docks sooner rather than later.

We hope so, if only for the fact that we may just have invented the term "Nok Dock", and it'd be a shame to see it go to waste. Especially if we're talking royalties.




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