Will Nokia Sustain

Mobile phones when first came into India had a big munch of the customer pockets. However the prices as we now see are coming down slowly.

When Nokia, Motorola, Samsung and other Cos entered the Indian markets, they sold handsets at a price not affordable to the common man. In 2003, I remember having bought a Motorola C131 for Rs1700 when they introduced the handset as a TaTa Indicom CDMA model. The phone had many problems which as a customer I did not know. The battery would go down in no time and If I happened to have a long call for about 40 minutes, I would surely have to put it for charging and besides the battery problems, the phone would get heated up in no time. This model does not support external ringtones, or message tones. It was not polyphonic, It would not at all ring at times when there is actually a call coming in. Adding to these problems, the service network provider had some problems. I would lose money from my account for unknown reasons and when I call up their customer service station, they would talk Jargon which was not cool at all.

I had the worst experience with this mobile phone and the service provider.

In 2005, I wanted to buy another phone. I wanted to see how Nokia works. My friend had a spare Nokia which I wanted to try on. Trust me, it was bad. Pretty bad. Finally with the knowledge I had about phones, I bought a SonyEricsson mobile phone with an Airtel Sim card. This was a mistake too. I did not know that Sony joysticks were bad and would not last more than a year and that is perhaps why they give a warranty of One year only. Soon in 7 or 8 months, the joystick stopped working.

Ads show Airtel Atoot Network working miracles with signals covering mountains and all sorts of terrain. I was in the MMTS, in Hyderabad and my Airtel gave up on a very important call. That was not the first time it gave up. I found that the Ad was a total lie. Back then, Hutch also had a similar kind of an ad. Hutch.. Where ever you go, our network follows. I knew Airtel did not, I was sure Hutch can not. Slowly, but sure enough, I realized that ads are never meant to be taken literally especially when coming to the Truelies of Phones and Networks.

Now coming back to the issue at hand. A friend of mine bought this model from Nokia. He accidentally dropped the phone into a bucket of water on a Sunday morning. He noticed that after 5 or 10 minutes and then he was worried. He took out the Mobile, opened it up and kept it in the Sun for an hour.

Guess what..! The phone was working.

It was a basic model and trust me. It was tough. After that incident, He accidentally dropped the first floor balcony.

Guess again..! It worked.

This phone had not much of technology involved like it is in case of mobiles these days.
Perhaps as technology improved, the quality of the phone is being deprived slowly.

Nokia launched many models after this model.

This was very popular among the student community. "Cellular", a movie released during the time of its release was a sensation. This phone had Bluetooth. The model was handy and could support many multimedia software applications.

Having the success of Nokia 6600, Nokia launched the N Series. Which I think was not taken very well by many customers. They loved the previous models from Nokia more than the N series.

Reason: the only difference between the N Series and the previous model like the 6600 was that N series looked more cool but 6600 proved to be more handy and easy to use.




After many successful models, Nokia was in News for their bad batteries. There were reports on the News and the Web that Nokia phones are going down with their standards on quality.

Nokia models have a similar technology when compared to other phones of the product range but their models are priced high.

 Nokia had many models. But, when Dual Sim technology was introduced in the market, Nokia could not keep up with the pace. According to ET, Nokia had a market share of 54.1% in 2009 which had fallen to 36.3% in 2010. Indian companies like Micromax had improved in their market share from 2003 to 2010 along with companies like Samsung and G'Five (0-7.3% of Market share from 2009-2010). But Nokia witnessed a fall in its sales.

Micromax is working hard to establish a stand in the market while, Beetel of Bharti has announced that they are entering the Mobile handsets market with many extraordinary models. They are for the first time introducing mobile phones with triple Sim Technology. Now, I ask. Do people really think Nokia is going to stand in the Indian Markets?

Let us Discuss.