Nokia’s E62 at Cingular: An American resurgence?

Nokia Corp. knows how to get the buzz going.

Today it launched a new productivity and multimedia device—the E62 smart phone—at Cingular Wireless L.L.C., at an eye-opening $150 on the first day of CTIA IT & Entertainment. Certainly Nokia has been working hard to reinvigorate its fortunes in the United States and, at first blush, the E62 appears to aid that quest.

To hear Nokia representatives tell it, the Series 60 platform that it has developed over the years and tweaked for American sensibilities has brought major ease-of-use improvements to the E62’s browser and, indeed, to other E series devices.

“This was born out of a need to serve consumers’ desires,” said Dan Shugrue, who works on Nokia’s Series 60 market development. “We’re building what our market research shows us consumers want.”

In Nokia’s view, Americans want e-mail in their favorite configuration—the E62 offers more than a handful of the most popular options—and they want a Web-browsing experience that mimics if not surpasses what they’re used to on their PCs. They want music, video, style and a do-able price point.

Nokia has endeavored to deliver these qualities, which the company gleaned in part from a software tool it developed that documented device users’ every move during market research as they went about their business with Nokia’s devices. So the E62 has a single button to call up “mini-map” versions of full, HTML-enabled Web pages to help users navigate, and it caches pages to make switching from Web page to Web page simpler.

Naturally, Nokia provided the E62 to its strongest U.S. carrier—Cingular—to maximize this GSM-based effort, its strongest U.S. suit. In fact, according to Nokia, the device was developed in Dallas to provide close cooperation with the carrier’s own team.

“Our relationship with Cingular is critical to our work in the U.S.,” said Laurie Armstrong, a media relations manager at Nokia. “And the E62’s price point drives a whole new category.”

Shugrue said that the E62 is engineered to “go beyond the experience you have on your PC or your laptop.”

“We can do better than that,” Shugrue said, “especially for a device that’s with you all the time.”

Naturally, analysts have their observations and caveats on the E62 and on the recent attempts to crack open the U.S. smart-phone market by combining productivity and multimedia functions.

The E62 certainly delivers on price point and features, according to Kitty Weldon, enterprise analyst with Current Analysis. The E62’s launch press release did not state, however, how the carrier will price its data offerings for the device, which will influence how the enterprise and consumer markets respond, she said.

Weldon noted that the E62 is an EDGE device and that Cingular currently does not offer an HSDPA-speed enterprise handset, which contrasts unfavorably, she said, with Verizon Wireless’ and Sprint Nextel’s enterprise handsets that offer EV-DO speeds.

“So the E62’s pricing may not be a big coup in that regard,” she said.

Despite the buzz that greeted rival Motorola Inc.’s Q device earlier this year and the E62’s apparently warm greeting at CTIA—where drawings at one Smart Phone Summit session rewarded winners with their own E62—combining productivity and multimedia functions to take advantage of the carrier-based retail channel is a “risky strategy,” Bill Hughes, principal analyst at In-Stat, told a Smart Phone Summit audience yesterday. Enterprise device sales were proceeding at a reasonable clip before Motorola, Research In Motion and, now, Nokia began to offer these dual-purpose devices, Hughes said.

Don’t tell that to Nokia. The company has a plan and a story and it’s sticking to them.

“The historical premise in the U.S. is that e-mail is something for white-collar executives,” said Mary McDowell, general manager of Nokia’s global enterprise solutions. “So creating devices with both security and management attributes that an I.T. manager wants, with the style and usability sought by consumers, is a sweet spot we’re heading for.”