(or: why Nokia gets trounced in the U.S.)

I have a healthy amount of respect for Nokia.  Before the iPhone they were the only devicemaker offering half of what Apple now offers with the 3GS.  Indeed, I toted a Nokia N95 for a while, and an N81 8GB for a while.  Both were excellent phones, but I’m convinced now that Apple’s iPhone, even as it arrives as a better all-around phone than Nokia’s current flagship (the obviously Blackberry-inspired N97), is more appealing to American consumers because it is made by an American company.

That’s right.  Nokia’s brand is obscurely perceived in North America, particularly the U.S., as an upscale European oddity not unlike Fiat or Porsche, to use an automotive analogy.  So while it may be the number one brand globally, Nokia has failed to make an impression on American consumers precisely for the reason that they’re a non-American company.

Apple owes a helping of its iPhone success to that fact.  The product is American; the company is American; the marketing is overwhelmingly American, with sitcom-style television commercials, extremely stable revision control (how many models of phone does Apple have on the market compared to Nokia?), and a least-common-denominator hardware engineering approach that appeals to the maximum number of simultaneous consumers instead of offering a specific style or feature set to five or six different niches.  Fewer buttons, more software.

The other American-friendly thing about the iPhone is the nature of its name.  Nokia is some Scandinavian meme as Sony is some Japanese one.  The difference is that Nokia’s name hasn’t been overcome with a mass-market product the way Sony’s cross-cultural name has been with the Playstation, and earlier, the Walkman. Same with Nintendo.  Who didn’t have a Nintendo Entertainment System in 1990?  And for that matter, who doesn’t have a Wii today? Far fewer carry a Nokia product than own a Wii in the United States.

But there’s more to it that the brand name. Say what you like about Nokia’s lack of good carrier support in the United States (Apple still has only one official carrier), or their botched execution of an application store model (Apple a lot to harm themselves on the appstore anyway), the real problem with Nokia’s phones isn’t the name on them.  It’s the way they look and feel.  While the majority of American consumers still haven’t obtained a smartphone, the daunting physique of a Nokia N81, for example, could give a buyer pause.  The lack of fluidity of form in Nokia’s products means that the user is exposed to as many features as possible, whether or not they want to use them, and perception is that there’s a long learning curve.

But then, I believe most iPhone sales occured at Blackberry’s expense, not Nokia’s–and that, of itself, does not bode well for the European giant.