Alex Kidman02 May 2008, 1:02 PM
Nokia is cutting out middlemen ("users") and will sell mobiles directly to other mobiles.
Helsinki, Finland: Nokia CEO Klamshel Kamrafon today announced a new and somewhat surprising change of strategy for the world’s most popular mobile phone vendor. From June 1st, the company will produce mobile phones designed to sell exclusively to other mobile phones.
Citing recent figures that showed that there were
more mobile phones in Australia than there were people, along with a spreading saturation of the mobile phone market worldwide, Kamrafon released the following statement:
“There’s no doubt that times have been tough in the mobile market in recent times. Nokia’s energetic strategy involves cutting out the middleman, or “user”, by directly marketing your next mobile phone to your existing model. We anticipate a 435% rise in sales due to this strategy, owing to joint synergies between our existing mobile fleet and the fact that most users are, frankly, too stupid to notice extra charges coming up on their mobile bills anyway.”The new strategy relies on an upgrade to Nokia’s software suite that will be rolled out by carriers in May, with the promise of free tickets to the Big Brother finale up for the first thousand customers to sign up. The second thousand customers will get two free tickets, and so on, until the Big Brother organisers have filled the studio audience or run out of cash to pay Nokia.
The strategy isn’t limited to only Nokia phones, however, with a cross-compatible Java version of the suite also being rolled out by the end of June, according to Nokia’s press release. Our initial testing with a beta version of the Java software suite revealed that it worked flawlessly well on Motorola and Sagem handsets, which seemed to be crying out to replace themselves.
Sony Ericsson handsets failed to work with it, but appeared to have their own, incompatible custom phone-selling software (with a terrific, colourful user interface) already installed in the background. Windows Mobile devices crashed the Java application and redirected back to a half-working Windows Live service, but that was no great surprise anyway, and the iPhone failed to update owing to a lack of Flash compatibility.
With teenagers making up a large proportion of the multiple-phone selling market, we headed out to interview some teenagers as to their opinion, only to be told by someone calling themselves “Phon3G1RL” that “
OH MY GD. YOUR LKE OVR 30. DO U EVN KNW WHT A MBL IS. ANYWY I LST MY MBL PHN IN TH GTTR LST STRDY. I HP THY DNT DLVR TH NW 1 THR.”
Nokia shares rose 149% on news of Phon3G1RL’s statement.
Alex Kidman satirises developments in the tech industry on an almost twice-weekly basis.