Apple's Infringement of Nokia

AS A FREQUENT USER of new technology (including the iPhone at left), I'm interested in how Apple intends to resolve the patent infringement action brought against it by Nokia since I know most other companies pay Nokia for the rights to use its intellectual property in aspects of 2G and 3G wireless connectivity, WiFi integration, and related baseband technology. When Nokia asked Apple for the same respect, Apple opted to play hardball in the hopes that a better rate card will be offered on the steps of the courthouse. This is normal Apple business strategy. But behind the scenes, there are some big shifts in market share at the upper end of the smartphone market. Actually, it's a shift in the power balance in flagship phones. It's way cooler to own an iPhone 3GS than to have a Nokia N97, a SonyEricsson Satio or a Palm Pre. Once you've used an iPhone for several weeks, you get accustomed to many very cool applications and those apps alone are probably going to keep you hooked. I've years of legacy add-ons, chargers, and carkits that work with Nokia so I'm not going to walk away from the brand because a sweet new thing full of clever apps saunters by. Moreover, from field tests I know that I cannot get a day's use out of an Apple iPhone, much less a year's durability. That's all down to my personal use case--I think the iPhone is a sweet piece of technology and I really like how the App Store has shifted people's attention to phones as a data point. Competition is good. Big players have a long way to fall. New players have a lot to learn. I'll be surprised to see Nokia stumble with mobile telephony and enjoy watching the quarterly results ebb and flow between Finland and California.

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