Poor Nokia. It seems like just yesterday that everyone around me was sporting some form of a Nokia handset. Now, I literally don’t know one person who owns a Nokia phone, at least not as a primary handset. The company that once ruled the world, or at least the mobile world, has now fallen to third place behind Samsung and Apple, and it looks as though things are only getting worse.
Apparently, the Finnish company is closing the doors of its online stores in the UK, Spain, and France. Nokia pledges that the shuttering sites have nothing to do with slow sales, but rather that the manufacturer would like to start selling handsets to carriers instead of selling to end users directly.
Overall, it’s not a bad idea, seeing how carriers can offer subsidies that lock users into contracts. Although, it probably won’t make much of a difference unless Nokia has some better phones to sell in the first place, which won’t happen until the company slaps Mango onto one of its handsets and gets the ball rolling.
[via Phone Arena]