I agree with you on that. Although at some point regular people will ask themselves "why should I buy a phone with a crappy display when I can buy an iPhone which also has smooth scrolling and good battery life?
But if Nokia can't have a say in what display resolution or camera to ship, how can they ever hope to produce _anything_ that differentiates them from other WP7 licensees?
Value-added services such as Comes with Music and Free Maps Forever doesn't help here (or at leat it hasn't in the past). It'll be interesting to see how this plays out.
So compete by doing something innovative on the phone hardware. Who was the first to have a self-portrait mirror on the back of the phone? (Palm I think.) Who had the first forward-facing camera on a phone? (Not sure.) Things like that sell a lot of phones to Joe and Jill Sixpack. Put a dedicated flashlight LED and button on the phone. Make it waterproof and/or drop-proof.
But the number one way to sell more Nokia Windows Phones? Get on the other U.S. networks besides AT&T. AT&T is still the king for iPhone but Sprint and Verizon combined sell about as many iPhones as AT&T does, so Windows Phone is missing half the market by only really being on AT&T. (Yes, there are other Windows Phones, but no serious handsets outside of AT&T.)
But if Nokia can't have a say in what display resolution or camera to ship, how can they ever hope to produce _anything_ that differentiates them from other WP7 licensees?
Value-added services such as Comes with Music and Free Maps Forever doesn't help here (or at leat it hasn't in the past). It'll be interesting to see how this plays out.