Analyst casts doubt over Nokia's hopes for the N8

Nokia is betting the farm on a successful launch of the N8

Nokia's embattled chief executive has a lot riding on the company's next smartphone launch, according to a leading mobile device analyst.

The reaction is in response to news that the Finnish mobile firm posted a 40 per cent slump in its second-quarter profits compared to the same period last year.

Nokia chief executive Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo was quick to point to the upcoming N8 smartphone, the first Nokia handset to run on the Symbian S^3 operating system, as a reason to be positive, despite the company's worsening fortunes and speculation over his leadership.

"We are confident that this is the end of the painful transition of our high-end product portfolio. The launch of the N8 will mark its renewal," Kallasvuo said during an investor conference this afternoon.

However, Carolina Milanesi, a research vice president in Gartner's mobile devices team, suggested that today's results and Kallasvuo's remarks have done little to increase optimism about Nokia.

"My sentiment about Nokia's future has not changed [after this conference]," she told V3.co.uk.

Mobile analysts have recently pointed out that Nokia lags behind its smartphone rivals in the performance curve, and that the firm has lost two-thirds of the market value of its share since Apple launched the iPhone in 2007.

In response to today's results announcement, Kallasvuo claimed that the complete rewriting of the Symbian code using a software-based approach will reinvigorate the Nokia brand among apps developers.

He also asserted that Nokia will sell 50 million N8 handsets over the full lifespan of the S^3 platform.

This forecast was of particular interest to Milanesi, who agreed that Nokia had a lot riding on the N8.

"The fact that Nokia is making a point of how many handsets it expects to ship with S^3 is important," she said.

"Bearing in mind that S^4 is expected in June 2011, it is definitely a message to developers that the S^3 market share will be big enough to be worth investing in."