Nokia switching up strategy to boost US market share
Despite shockingly strong sales worldwide, Nokia has kept a fairly low profile in the US as of late -- not Sony Ericsson low, but still pretty stealth. Espoo wants to take a bigger bite out of the American pie, though, and as BusinessWeek notes, it pretty much has to play nice with the US megacarriers in order to do that. Historically, that has run counter to Nokia's corporate culture of rampant innovation with a general disregard for carriers' specific needs -- think Ovi, for example -- and that's where the winds of change start to blow. In the States, Nokia has now assigned a whopping 300 product development folks to AT&T and Verizon each, and it turns out that the 6555 is one fruit of that labor; in fact, AT&T specifically requested that the 6555's PTT button be moved to the top, and Nokia complied. That's a whole new level of cooperation that American carriers aren't used to when dealing with the Finnish giant that likes to throw its weight around, and if it keeps up, it sounds like we should start to see plenty more models available on contract in the not-too-distant future.
[Via PHONE Magazine and GadgeTell]
