RIM and Nokia to Join Ranks with Motorola and iPhone

Nokia’s Joint Venture with New Alliance
Nokia Corp., the Finnish Mobile Phone company announced yesterday the makings of a 50-50 joint venture with Shanghai Alliance’s investment and services provider, New Alliance. The joint venture, creating a company to be based in China, Nokia Alliance Internet Services Company Ltd, will open its doors in January and will involve about 80 people, according to The Wall Street Journal Online.

Nokia’s Executive Vice President of Services, Niklas Salvander stated the joint venture was a natural next step for the company to “…bring locally relevant mobile services to Chinese consumers.” He also added that in doing so, they would have “…right platform and expertise to offer a suite of selected Nokia Ovi services–as well as work with local content developers to help bring their applications to market.” Ovi is the platform Nokia uses to bring the internet to their customers.

The Chinese mobile market is the largest in the world and in taking these steps with the joint venture, Nokia could very well outshine all other mobile companies in the area.

RIM to Customize their BlackBerry In Direct Competition with Apple
Taking after Motorola with the customization of the MT710, a necessary evil to offer and use WiFi and 3G services in China, as all other forms are banned, RIMs now offering to customize their BlackBerry i and conform it to China Mobile’s proprietary TD-SCDMA 3G technology to step up competition between them and Apple. Apple started selling their best selling iPhone in China through China Mobile on October 30th. Granted, sales have not been what they predicted, but that is because iPhone refused to compromise and conform to china Mobile’s 3G and WiFi technology standards, leaving the iPhone WiFi and 3Gless because the use of anything but China’s native technology is barred in the country.

According to Bloomberg.com, even though in September, China’s mobile phone users in China totaled over 719.8M, including the addition of 9.3M in September alone, RIM only accounts for 1% of China’s mobile phone market. According to Sandy Shen, “…RIM is needs to appeal to the average consumer as well as the corporates” is they want to get ahead.

The Chairman of China Mobile, Wang Jianzhou, stated the newly customized Blackberry will release “very soon” although no price has been set as of yet because they need to adjust prices based on current offerings and sales. Prices and plans are “quite high” already with the current Blackberry 8700, which runs only on 2G. Sales are not what they should be and the new 3G phones are bound to be more expensive than the 2Gs so prices will need to come down on the current devices before offering the new ones in order to increase sales all around.

And the Verdict Is?
What I don’t understand, if China is such a huge market, why haven’t more companies compromised with them before to get their 3G phones on the market and sold before this? It just makes sense to do so and, as we all saw with the iPhone, not doing so can cause sales to plummet. We also can see this with Blackberry owning only 1% of the market that this holds true.

Maybe if Apple would give in and allow the iPhone to conform, their sales would pick up. Besides, who wants an iPhone that doesn’t have 3G anymore? That is what makes it better than the others in the first place! at least it was until Motorola Droid topped it… Maybe when iPhone first came out it was ok without the 3G, but now, with all the Droid mobile phones out there, an iPhone without 3G is just about as useful as a paperweight, IMHO.

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