Elop Wants The Nokia Tablet To Be Fabulous

The more CEOs try to defend their products in the public arena, the sadder they sound. For example, Stephen Elop’s discussion of an upcoming (as in not ever shipping) Nokia tablet smacks of careful CEO talk and whiff of BS. When describing Nokia’s future plans for the device, he hedges his bets, saying that they may go Microsoft or they may go somewhere else (Ubuntu?) and that they don’t want to be another me-to tablet and instead they want to create something amazing and special. The last time Nokia created something amazing and special was probably 1999 when Neo talked to Morpheus on a modified Nokia 8110.

Elop said:

“We could take advantage of Microsoft technology and software, and build a Windows-oriented tablet, or we could do things with some of the other software assets that we have. Our team right now is assessing what’s the right tablet strategy for Nokia.”

“there are now over 200 different tablets on the marketplace, only one of them is doing really well. And, my challenge to the team is I don’t wanna be the 201st tablet on the market that you can’t tell from all of the others. We have to take a uniquely Nokia prospective.”

Q. So you’re not in a hurry?

We’re always in a hurry to do the right things, but we’re mostly in a hurry to do the right thing.

To be clear, by the time Nokia releases their tablet there will be 300 tablet PCs on the market and probably a few generations of iPad. Android and iOS will be neck and neck for the foreseeable future so unless Nokia gets on board at some point they’re going to be lagging behind along with the other also rans, WebOS and Blackberry’s QNX. But, then again, that is the Nokia way. They should probably stick with phones in general anyway.

via YLE