Nokia is struggling against application-rich competitors such as Apple as customers increasingly want their handsets to be catch-all devices, according to Bloomberg. Nokia’s share of the USD50 billion market for smartphones, the industry’s fastest-growing segment, is shrinking: smartphones accounted for about 13 percent of Nokia’s total sales of 468 million handsets in 2008.  Nokia’s share of worldwide smartphone sales fell to 41.2 percent in the Q1 2009, from 45.1 percent a year earlier, according to Gartner. In the same period, Apple’s doubled to 10.8 percent.

Nokia should have been ahead of rivals on software. It had the first Internet-enabled mobile device in 1996, the Nokia Communicator, before mobile broadband was available and it launched its own app store, Ovi in 2007, but has made little impact on the market. Bloomberg commented, “Nokia’s weakness has been one of execution rather than of technology. It courted software developers for years, registering more than four million of them on its Forum Nokia service in the last decade. It hasn’t done as well at getting software add-ons to customers.”.