I’ve been reading Symbian Guru’s Top xxx of 2009 lists and this one stood out most of all: 2009 Top 5 Nokia Blunders. Obviously this site is dedicated to the Satio, but it’s a Symbian phone, so the Symbian ecosystem as a whole matters.

I agree with the sentiments of the first four – a half finished flagship, absolutely woeful online strategy and not properly marketing your best product. The 5th blunder was an open one. Having pondered over this for the past day, I’m split. I came up with two main blunders, both of which have far wider reaching consequences than buggy firmware on the N97. So here’s both.

#5a: Underpowered Flagship Phones
A 434 MHz ARM11 processor is fine in your low-mid range smartphone like the 5800. It performs well and gives a good bang to buck ratio. If you spent less than £200 on your SIM free handset, you probably won’t care if there’s a split second of lag when you open apps or hit the menu key. You’ve got a fully fledged smartphone for the price of an LG feature phone. That’s a great deal.

However, the N97 has basically the same hardware as the 5800. Sure it has a lot of internal memory, a better camera and a keyboard. And all that’s nice. But it doesn’t have extra grunt. It doesn’t respond faster, it’s not snappier and it just doesn’t do more. And when your flagship costs 2-3x more than your mid-range product, it really should. The N97 really needed to be packing the same hardware as the Satio or the i8910. It was available when Nokia designed the N97, they just got miserly.

#5b: Lack Of Commitment To Symbian/S60
Nokia could have won the smartphone wars in 2009. In fact, they probably should have given that Symbian had something like a 200 million unit headstart on the iPhone and Android. The fact Nokia didn’t shows that they seem to lack direction.

One of the major reasons in the iPhone becoming so wildly successful is that it has a huge selection of apps, which drives sales, which drives further app development, which drives even more sales. Ad infinium. Ignore the fact that 99% of the 100,000 apps are rubbish for a minute and you get left with a solid fact – Nokia needed Symbian to have more apps and a single, or at least integated, on-device, app store. Ovi is too little, too late. Symbian needed something excellent back when the N95 was top dog, but Nokia failed to capitalise.

A related point is that every iPhone is a smartphone. Not every Nokia is a smartphone. Don’t get me wrong, I understand that the 1100 and 1202 et al are not aimed at smartphone users and that they are just too underpowered and cheap to even consider turning the low-end range into smartphones. But it’s the middle ground they screwed up in. Case in point: the 6600. It was announced in April 2009, launched in August 2009. It runs S40. This was a step backward from the 6220, which was announced in February 2008 and released in July 2008, as the 6220 ran S60. The 6220, on the other hand, had been progress from the 6300 running S40 (announced November 2006, released January 2007).

Nokia looked like they’d got it. Their bread and butter was those mid-range devices that sold by the millions. Give the mid-range the full smartphone capabilities, give the masses an easy way of buying stuff on impulse, sit back and rake in the cash. Yet, instead of deciding that every 5, 6 and 7-series phone released from 2008 onwards would be an S60 phone with on-device purchasing – and therefore a good solid platform, if not developer nirvana – Nokia carried on messing about with S40. And the worst part? The X3 shows that they still are.

It is just stupid. Nokia need to give developers a baseline that stands still and they need to sell enough units to make Symbian an attractive platform to invest in. S40 cannibalises S60/Symbian’s marketshare.

To claw back some of the lost ground, Nokia need to flood the mid-range with smartphones. Even if it means the phones have to have beefier hardware and that Nokia subsidise the cost a little, it is the only way. I say that because the money is no longer just in the expensive high-end handsets or the Walmart volume low-end, it’s in the apps. And Ovi ain’t enough.

There are some encouraging signs though. The 5-series touchscreen phones have been great products, bringing smartphone capability to £100 handsets. Nokia just now need to replicate that across all of their midrange and they might just manage to undo 2009.