Nokia Corp. (NOK) is still finding the United States a very hard nut to crack, with reports T-Mobile USA Inc. has cancelled yet another of the Finnish phonemaker’s launches, this time for the C5-03 smart phone, which would have been dubbed the Nuron 2 says Pocketnow.
One failed launch does not a total flop make, but sadly for Nokia, T-Mobile USA’s launch cancellation comes less than a week after rival carrier AT&T Mobility scratched its plans to launch yet another Nokia flagship device, the X7. Rumor has it, Nokia may have had a little more to do with the AT&T Mobility annulment, when the phonemaker reportedly felt a lack of commitment from its carrier partner.
As with most other Nokia smart phones, the Nuron – a remodeled Nokia 5230 – had nothing very special about it. Sporting a 3.2-inch touchscreen, a 5-megapixel camera, 40 megabytes of internal memory with a 16 gigabyte card slot and the antiquated S60 5th Edition instead of Symbian^3, the phone was not exactly at the cutting edge.
Nokia has long struggled in the Unites States, especially in the burgeoning smart phone market where it has failed time and again to hit the mark. Even the firm’s hardware spectacular N8 failed to generate any buzz, and indeed, according to Nokia’s Q3 2010 results, it shipped just 3.2 million devices over those three months in the Unites States.
Recently, Nokia even closed its U.S. Symbian offices owing to the severely limited interest in the operating system in the region. AT&T Mobility, for instance, has no Symbian phones on offer, while T-Mobile USA has just the one.
Nokia announced last fall a new emphasis on the U.S. market, following a number of previous such attempts.
Luckily for Nokia, while it can’t seem to find its footing in North America, the firm is doing rather better in South America where it sold 11.6 million units in the third quarter of last year.
