stratēchery by Ben Thompson | Asha to Asha
If this is news to you, you are probably like me reading very specific tech blogs who see Nokia tumbling to death without looking at the whole picture (or the wrong tech blogs to at least grasp a glimpse of the whole picture).
Ben Thompson on stratechery:
The Asha 501 blows this away: the battery life is amazing – 48 days on standby – and that color screen is looking much more impressive.
Nokia is particularly well-suited to this market; their phones have always been the most durable, with the best battery life, and their distribution channel is still unmatched. If the company returns to prominence the headliner will likely be Asha, thanks to a strategy predicated on identifying a new axis of competition4 instead of simply trying to be a little bit better.
As always, some other very smart guy to read+listen is Horace Dediu from asymco and his podcast “The Critical Path” as he sees such patterns and things, too.