Lady Geek

Consider two siblings: One of them is beautiful and receives lavish affection. She is universally adored. The other left with only her wits and natural abilities to survive in a tough competitive world.

Nokia N95 and E65

The first child is artistic and is encouraged from an early age. She is famous for her talent and ability to entertain. Meanwhile the second finds it difficult to compete. She struggles to live up with to her more successful sister’s fame and reputation.

The first receives constant acclaim from a legion of adoring fans, while the other is dismissed as a cynical copycat, or worse an impostor riding on the coat-tails of the more talented and interesting older sibling. Such is the relationship between Nokia’s popular N-Series phones and it’s relatively unknown sibling the E-Series.

Nokia N95 and E65

Nokia sent me the E65 to review. It’s positioned as an alternative to the Blackberry (which I use as my main business phone). It’s Nokia’s attempt to capture a slice of the ‘Business Professional’ market place.

I was anticipating something sleek, beautiful and stylish. Something as classy as the forthcoming N96. What I got was a wannabe phone: sturdy, ugly and quite plasticly. It came in a standard cardboard package, and the un-boxing was free of drama or excitement. It’s almost impossible to believe that this product is an offspring of the same family that bore the N95 and it’s glamorous successor the N96.

Compared to the Nokia N95, the interface is small with buttons placed ever so slightly too close together for hurried fingers. It’s saving grace is the navigation – its intuitive and simple and you don’t have to read the manual to do basic things such as send messages, take pictures and videos and access the web. Nokia have evolved their phone interface over almost a decade and anybody who has used a Nokia phone during that time will find it instantly familiar and comfortable.

Underneath the serious packaging the E65 is essentially the same sort of thing as the N95 – they both run exact same Symbian operating system however Nokia have decided to distinguish the two product lines by having slightly different initial configurations. For example, the N95 comes with a podcasting application, a selection of games and a great media player. The E65 comes with… well I’m not sure what. There seemed to be a bunch of links to download ‘business software’ but there was nothing actually loaded onto the phone that the similarly priced N95 didn’t have.

The operating system may be virtually indistinguishable, but the hardware is dramatically different. The E65 is like a cut-down N95. Take away the N95′s GPS, the 2-way slider (with extra media buttons), the stereo speakers and the dual-cameras, the support for advanced Bluethooth Profiles and the handy Stereo Headphone socket and you would be left with something with approximately the same feature-set as the E65…

… Almost because the N95 has the uncanny ability to connect to almost anything while no amount of network-trickery and calls to tech support enabled me to make a reliable WiFi connection on the E65.

The model’s position is ‘Style with Substance.’ I showed some of my Lady Geek friends and interestingly before they even spoke about the functions of the phone, the conventional design had put them off. One Lady Geek felt it was very masculine. She wanted her phone to be something she could show off – the E65 is not a phone that Lady Geeks will want to show off.

If Nokia want to capture the female audience, the first thing they need to do is not think of them as ‘business professionals.’ Women’s personal and corporate lives are merging -most people use their mobile phones to stay in touch with family and friends while at work. Instead of letting work into their private life, people seem to bring their private life to work. See previous post by Elisabeth for more detail.

Nokia need to find insights about their audience; they must see beyond “business user” cliche and get to the truth of how women feel about their mobile phones.

The second thing they need to think about is packaging. The packaging should feel like a box of delights. A luxurious item. If you are asking women to choose between a pair of Jimmy Choos or the E65, you need to think about every aspect of the experience: right from the product through to the packaging. The choice of the E65 or a pair of Jimmy Choos- I know which one I would choose!

The E65 is not a bad phone, it’s merely disappointing compared with Nokia’s flagship products. All it takes is some imagination to show how the N series is probably a more appropriate business communicator than anything in E-Series (with the notable exception of the E61i).

I think Nokia are also making the big mistake of under-selling the business potential of their more well-received N-series phones. While primarily designed for fun and entertainment these more powerful phones have all the processing clout required to accomplish mundane business tasks. Why not mention this fact in their advertising?