Nokia is fast losing Marketshare,Brand appeal and Pricing Power in the smartphone market.Despite a nearly 40% marketshare in the worldwide mobile market and an almost equal share in the Smartphone segment,Nokia has lost control.Apple and Google are driving the Smartphone segment with Nokia trying unsuccessfully to play catch-up .Other smaller players like Motorola,HTC,Samsung etc are partnering the Two majors in a fight for survival in this hypercompetitive Technology sector.Apple’s iPhone 4G promises to unleash another major battle as the user experience and functionality is taken to another level.

Now even Developers are abandoning Nokia’s Smartphone Symbian platform and migrating towards Google’s Android and Apple’s iPhone platform.This is a huge loss for Nokia as developers are crucial for the success of a platform.Microsoft won the PC Wars in the 90s as independent software developers migrated wholesale towards the Windows platform leaving competitors such Novell’s Netware and other Operating Systems.Developers have also been an essential component in making iPhone a huge success as Apple’s Application Store provides a huge number of innovative applications.Nokia needs to make major structural changes to change the course of its downward trends though it looks like an impossible task.Nokia has made changes to its Management and Divisions but a bigger surgery is needed rather than piecemeal changes.

Nokia Loses Battle for Apps as IPhone, Android Snare Developers – Bloomberg

As Nokia Oyj prepares to introduce its latest flagship smartphone, developer Jan Ole Suhr says he knows why the brains behind addictive applications are shunning the Finnish company.

“It’s difficult for small developers to invest in the smartphone segment of Nokia when nobody knows its future,” said Suhr, creator of Twitter application “Gravity,” which was showcased by Nokia when it opened its Ovi applications store last year. “The new shiny things aren’t available and there’s only the old-fashioned stuff, where it takes a lot of work to make the software look good.”Nokia’s 41 percent share of the smartphone market, the fastest-growing piece of the mobile-phone industry, has failed to make it the platform of choice for software writers. It is instead at the bottom of the pile, behind Apple Inc.’s iPhone and devices based on Google Inc.’s Android.

Developers of games, music, videos, media and other apps want to see if the N8, Nokia’s first device running the Symbian 3 system for touchscreen phones, delivers on promises of improved look and feel, an easier interface and operability across devices — in short, if it’s more like an iPhone. For many, the device scheduled to be released in the third quarter has been too slow in the making and may still disappoint.