This is not good for Nokia (NYSE: NOK), which is increasingly going head-to-head with companies, like Apple (NSDQ: AAPL), when it comes to having the coolest devices on the market. According to a survey by Habbo Hotel, an online virtual hangout for teens, Nokia’s popularity is fading fast among their demographic. The survey asked 112,000 teenagers in 30 countries, what their favorite cellphone brand was, and 21 percent of respondents chose Nokia, which is down from 29 percent last year.
Reuters reports that the one important caveat with the Habbo survey is that the numbers exclude some key emerging markets, including India and China, where Nokia is the market leader. However, two analysts Reuters interviewed found the results to be a sign that Nokia has some image-repairing to do.
Strategy Analytics’ Neil Mawston said in the last year, the competition has obviously intensified. “Younger users are important because they can be opinion-leaders and trend-leaders. Nokia will need to discover why its heartshare has been slipping, and take actions to ensure it does not translate into lost market share.” Likewise, Gartner analyst Carolina Milanesi said the drop reflects the fact that Nokia doesn’t have any cool phones at the moment. Its upcoming N97 flagship device, which tightly integrates social networking features, is due out this month, but no U.S. carrier has yet to pick it up. To be sure, the demand is there for a “cooler” device. One of Nokia’s first touchscreen phones, the 5800 XpressMusic device which is being termed “the poor man’s iPhone,” is selling at a clip of about 1 million a month. Milanesi said winning back the teenagers’ “is key at different levels: safeguarding replacement cycles opportunity as well as attracting possible consumers of content.”
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