While newer and faster smartphones are being released on almost a weekly basis, Nokia would appear to be lagging to the rear of the smartphone market in terms of CPU power and touchscreen technology, claims a new study from the analyst firm Ovum.
The report maintains that Nokia is struggling to keep pace with its rivals in terms of using the latest ARM Cortex A8 chipsets that have been available since mid-2009, with only the niche Nokia N900 handset sporting a next-generation chipset.
With many of its rivals already using the ARM Cortex A8 or Qualcomm's competing Snapdragon platform, Nokia's current smartphones--including the flagship N97 and N97 mini--run on ARM11 at below 500MHz, with an anaemic 128Mb of RAM: a point that most other platforms have abandoned.
According to Ovum, while other smartphone vendors are queuing up to announce handsets with equivalent specifications to HTC's HD2 (a Snapdragon chipset at 1GHz with 448Mb of RAM), Nokia's lack of recent product announcements has given little cause to think the hardware specification gap will improve in the short term.
The company is also criticised for still having only one smartphone (the N900) in the top 20 handsets with highest screen resolution. Its touchscreen handsets typically use resistive screens rather than the capacitive type favoured by most consumers. Nokia also remains the only major manufacturer still producing multiple smartphones in the candy bar/numeric keypad form factor.
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Digitimes
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