Nokia touchscreen device not ready for prime time: But answers iPhone challenge with a 16 GB upgrade to N95

The Mobile World Congress in Barcelona is home turf to Nokia Corp. and it used the platform today to reiterate its pursuit of the converged space by unveiling the N96, a 16 gigabyte refresh to its popular N95.
Despite its 40% global market share – composed of a near-ubiquitous share of entry-tier devices in emerging markets around the world, a strong feature phone play and half the globe’s smartphones – Nokia is competing against smaller, innovative challengers such as Apple Inc., which just released its 16 GB iPhone last week. Nokia’s N96 is not due until the third quarter of this year.
The N96 will sell for about $798 before operator subsidies and will offer a dual-slider design, a larger display and enhanced applications. No word on whether the N96 will reach the United States, but given Nokia’s renewed interest in the U.S. market and competition with Apple, such a move would appear likely.
Nokia must counter Apple’s attempt to rapidly expand to new markets beyond the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany and France. Nokia’s N95 sold about 6 million units worldwide last year, according to American Technology Research, which would place it behind Apple’s 4 million iPhone sales in six months.
Nokia also announced the N78, which refreshes its N73 smartphone that has sold 15 million units to date, according to American Technology Research. The multimedia handset, which includes Wi-Fi, is set to sell in the second quarter for an unsubsidized price of about $508.
The Finnish handset company also announced the launch of a 6220 Classic device with a 5 megapixel camera and assisted-GPS; and a 6210 Navigator with pedestrian navigation.
“Nokia presented a solid overview of its new services businesses and the obvious synergies between content and its product roadmap, with a heavy emphasis on GPS/location-based services,” wrote American Technology Research analyst Mark McKechnie in a note to investors after Nokia’s announcements. “We believe Nokia’s new products are driving strong near-term business amidst economic uncertainty.”
Nokia took the opportunity to provide metric-driven comparisons to major handset market segments to underscore its market-leading position, perhaps out of concern that smaller players had succeeded in capturing more headlines. In 2007, Nokia said, it shipped 200 million camera-equipped phones and 146 million music-enabled phones, which the company claimed made it the leading vendor in both categories. It forecast sales of 35 million GPS-enabled devices this year, close to size of today’s market for personal navigation devices. But those figures completely ignore the success of, for example, Sony Ericsson Mobile Communications, which makes and markets “phone-plus-one” handsets that are dedicated to imaging (the Cybershot brand) and music (the Walkman brand).
Actual competition in those categories is much fiercer than the raw number would indicate, as established by M:Metrics. The content usage monitoring firm said this week that in China, music listeners were almost twice as likely to use a Sony Ericsson handset than any other brand.