The debate of one box or two box solutions (should you carry a fully featured smartphone with all the connectivity, or a phone to act as a connection for a PDA, MID or netbook) seems to have been won quite comfortably by the one-box brigade; although there is s a stiff pocket of resistance.
Most of this battle has been at the high end device market, and the plan has always been that knowledge gained from there would trickle down through Nokia's portfolio as costs decreased and economies of scale started to apply. Whoever holds the high ground wins the war – and now Nokia have come down in force to the masses.
There's no other way to pitch the 5630 other than “all the shiny things consumers expect in a device” but at a fantastic price. The price point for Nokia's 5800, their first touch based S60 device, was already an amazingly low price of 250 Euros. For the 5630 to come in at under 200 Euros puts this well into the scope of the impulse buying pay as you go market, but also I'd expect this to be the phone that gets offered as the media phone that is free on a modest contract.
While power users are going to look at the increased speed in the processor, fret over the changes to the camera that could reduce the quality of the pictures, and wondering how much difference the HSUPA (high speed uploading) will make to their live streaming, regular users are going to look at this phone in a store and hopefully think “I like this.”
The music player, with dedicated music buttons and standard 3.5mm jack plug, is an obvious point that will attract end users; a 3 megapixel camera; and the bundled 4GB memory card will all be on the bullet points in stores around the world. They won't worry about the lack of GPS, or the screen being a relatively small 2.2 inches. They will love the slimness of the device (a scant 12mm of depth); and with some good point of sale literature, the addition of N-Gage gaming on the device should be a winner.
The 5630 is the right phone, at the right time – and that time is recession. Consumers are going to want as much bang for their budget as possible. Given the choice between a device that does one thing really well, or a device that does a lot of things to about 80-90%; I think the latter is going to win out during 2009. We're going to see contracts of 18-24 months as standard, and consumers could well demand free (or almost free) handsets with lots of functionality.
And functionality is flowing into this price point. This is the first non Nseries device to feature UPnP, which allows the music capabilities of the device and a home network to be exploited. N-Gage, as mentioned, is included, and features like built in FM and Internet Radio, the podcasting client, video recording, mapping and web browsing are going to make this a very attractive phone to everyone.
In summary, many features that S60 users are au fait with, but which are not common at the 200 euro price point.
Power users sitting with N95's looking for a device to upgrade to will know this is not the one for them (and they'll probably come up with a laundry list of 'why haven't Nokia added a GPS, metal casing, xenon flash, dual stereo speakers, a touch screen, etc'). That's missing the point. There will have been sac rifices to get to this price point, but I think most people will put up with the last missing bits of functionality, because the 5630 is clearly a step up from the majority of phones out there. The networks are going to want to get as many people as they can onto this device, if for no other reason than the cross selling opportunities it offers (e.g. revenue through data and through the billing arrangements for the N-Gage system via premium SMS purchase).
I suspect more by luck than good planning, Nokia's drive into the mid and low end market with S60 is happening at exactly the right time in the economic cycle. Expect the 5630 to be the first of a new wave of capable budget S60 smartphones.
-- Ewan Spence, Feb 2009.