Newkia can thrive by filling the business feature void on smartphones and tablets

Newkia, the new Singapore-based endeavor with plans to siphon Nokia’s Finnish talent to build Android devices, has its heart in the right place. Had Nokia heeded popular advice and supported Android OS, they would probably still be around as a company that builds phones. They chose to become the near-exclusive manufacturer of Windows Phone, a decision that earned Nokia’s C-brass a fortune in the Microsoft acquisition while thousands of employees and avid followers were stranded. Not to mention the hit on the economy in Finland (here’s another great article on that topic).

Smartphones are remarkably dumb with business functionality

CompanionLink has long championed the message for the need for a smartphone with business features. We even built our own business-focused mobile app because we saw this gap. Android and iPhone operate exceedingly well with video, social media, and web browsing. But they lack advanced functionality that business users relied on with legacy Palm Treo devices. For example: an address book that shows more than 8 contacts per screen; a notes app that intelligently links to people in the address book; a task manager that fits productivity philosophies like Getting Things Done and Franklin Covey; and full integration with PC apps like Microsoft Office and Lotus Notes where business people spend 50% of their day.

OPPORTUNITY ALERT FOR NEWKIA: build business productivity into the fabric of your product roadmap. If you need help with this when building your PIM applications, please call us. We’d love to help.

Business users held tremendous hope that Palm webOS would fill this void. The first Palm organization defined mobile productivity. When that failed, business people refocused their hopes on BlackBerry 10. Q3/2013 sales showed BlackBerry sold more legacy devices than phones running on the new OS 10 platform. Yikes!  The Address Book, Calendar and Apple-inspired Remember apps weren’t anything like what business users expected from their BlackBerry.

Newkia appears to have taken a giant leap in the right direction by acquiring a CEO,  Urpo Karjalainen, who understands the business of mobile business.  Mr. Karjalainen served as BlackBerry’s head of business operations for Asia and worked another 20 years at Nokia.