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Nokia E7

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It’s has been announced today that Nokia, the Finnish mobile phone manufacturer is to cut around 7,000 jobs.

The cuts include removing 4,000 positions held at Nokia whilst moving another 3,000 employees to Accenture to work on developing the Nokia and Windows OS. According to Marketingmagazine.co.uk Nokia employs around 2,400 staff in the UK, and they will be getting rid of around a third of these (700). The reductions in total sum approximately 12% of staff worldwide with the UK being heavily affected together with Denmark and Finland.

Once a giant of the mobile phone industry, the development of smartphones and the release of the iPhone and Google’s Android OS has seen Nokia spiral in the wrong direction over the last few years. Despite still maintaining a significant presence in the lower end mobile market, their recent releases: Nokia N8 and Nokia E7 have failed to make smartphone consumers switch from exisitng devices made by Apple, HTC or Samsung.

The interesting point here is a growing trend within the phone sector of brand collaboration. As with laptops and computers a decade ago, manufacturers are becoming wise to consumer use and ultimately having to use better equipped brands to cope. In the same way that netbooks made by Samsung or Toshiba use Windows 7, are we seeing the start of mobile phones becoming a force in the gadget world.

You can already log into Xbox Live via Windows 7, watch TV on the internet, you can use the internet on your smartphone. So surely this is the start of a long term demise for laptops and games consoles? And indeed a new fight between arguably the ‘big 3’ of the technology world – Microsoft, Apple and Google. For once it appears as though it is the software calling the shots, and how accessible that software is. As we know from PC’s, Microsoft are pretty adept when making their software cross compatible.

Surely then it is the beginning of the end for all other media devices – the DVD player, Sky Box, Mp3 Dock Station.

Mike Jeffs

Author Mike Jeffs

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