Nokia falls short of wireless goals

The San Diego Union-Tribune writes about Nokia's long-time testy relationship with Qualcomm, and how "Nokia might finally capitulate and become a Qualcomm customer – sort of." The article notes Nokia's recent announcement with Sanyo "to establish a separate company that would focus exclusively on CDMA phones."

Regarding Nokia's stance toward Qualcomm, Michael King at Gartner Group said, “I do think this is them sort of going uncle." According to Strategy Analytics, currently, Nokia has about 12.9 percent of the CDMA phone business.

Albert Lin at American Technology "capturing more of the CDMA phone business." He said "Nokia had expected Texas Instruments to come through with CDMA chips that could match Qualcomm's products. The problem, in part, was that Texas Instruments focused on a different variation of Qualcomm's next-generation technology, called CDMA2000 EV-DV, but wireless companies like Sprint eventually went with the technology Qualcomm was pushing, CDMA2000 EV-DO."

Lin said, “They just skipped over that technology,” of the wireless phone companies. Lin thought "the rise in popularity of those next-generation services and CDMA2000 EV-DO is part of the reason Nokia had to figure a different way to tackle the market." He added, “When you are looking at 15 percent of the market is EV-DO, it's sort of hard to stay No. 1 when you have zero percent of that market."

Ed Snyder at Charter Equity Partners beleived "Nokia's decision to join up with Sanyo for CDMA phones is both a tacit admission of defeat in the CDMA business as well as an acknowledgement that the market has fundamentally changed." He said, “They are saying that CDMA is not as important as it was three or four years ago."