Nokia expands in U.S. with ‘imminent’ delivery of N75 to AT&T

Nokia Corp.’s clamshell-style N75 device, announced last September, has finally arrived at AT&T Mobility’s online store for $200 with a two-year contract-at least it was briefly last week, before the carrier removed the offer, due to the product not arriving in its distribution center. Nokia said yesterday that the phone’s arrival at AT&T Mobility is “imminent.” Nokia initially had set its release for the fourth quarter of last year.
The deal between the world’s top handset vendor and the United States’ largest carrier gives Nokia a boost in its channel- and brand-building efforts by addressing the U.S. market with a high-end, 3G device. That is particularly important after its already minimal presence in the U.S. market dropped precipitously between the last quarter of 2006 and the first quarter of 2007.
For AT&T, the N75 represents another device at the high-end of its own portfolio, months before Apple Inc.’s iPhone is set to arrive on its shelves.
The N75 offers UMTS speeds for multimedia downloads, a 2-megapixel camera, quad-band access for international use, an HTML Web browser, Bluetooth and other features.
In an earnings conference call on April 19, Nokia’s CEO Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo said that the delay in the N75’s arrival at AT&T was due to “operator testing.”
“We are investing heavily in upgrading our U.S. position by simply tailoring products to the U.S. operators,” Kallasvuo told analysts on April 19. “Here, AT&T definitely is the most important target.”
As for Nokia’s flagging fortunes in the U.S. versus nearly all other parts of the world, Kallasvuo told analysts that in China, his company has about 1.3 billion potential customers. In the U.S., he said, Nokia has four customers-the four, top-tier network operators-with exacting customization demands.
“The much deeper cooperation with AT&T is ongoing and we will start seeing the impacts already this year from that,” Kallasvuo said, in remarks transcribed by the Web service Seeking Alpha.