Stephen Elop almost bounded into the room, a picture of enthusiasm. "Well, let me start with a question!" the Nokia chief executive said to the small group of journalists. "You were all in the audience. Did you see things that surprised you?"
The journalists looked blank. They had just seen Elop take the stage in Manhattan to show off a new Lumia smartphone with a 41 megapixel camera that records as much detail as a professional SLR – three times more than the best smartphone rivals. It will allow you to zoom in on detail after you've taken the picture and capture perfect still images in near-darkness – but it wasn't a surprise.
Nokia had been using the number "41" for months leading up to the announcement at Pier 82 in New York, and Elop had shown off a phone in March 2012 with the same 41-megapixel capability – although that ran on Nokia's now-dead Symbian operating system, whereas the new one uses Microsoft's Windows Phone. What is more, hours before Elop unveiled the device to journalists and analysts, all the phone's specifications had been leaked and written up online.
For some the only surprise is that Nokia itself, former darling of the mobile industry, is still alive. Revenues at its mobile business peaked more than four years ago in the first quarter of 2008 at €9.2bn. Since then they have slumped to just €2.9bn (£2.5bn) in the first three months of this year.
The company reveals second-quarter results on Thursday and analysts reckon the mobile division might squeak a 1% operating profit, while it could make a 7% margin on the half of mobile broadband joint venture Nokia Siemens Networks (NSN) that it already owned (it has since paid €1.7bn for the other half).
Source: The Guardian
