HELSINKI/LONDON (Reuters) - At next week's mobile trade show in Barcelona you can find a programme that measures how high you can throw a Nokia smartphone, an apt metaphor for Nokia's efforts to raise its game.
But gravity might not favour the world's biggest maker of cellphones, as the focus of the $169 billion industry shifts to software and services, the "mindshare" that is lifting nimble competitors such as iPhone maker Apple and Google.
For the first time, Nokia has opted out of the Mobile World Congress this year, another trend set by Apple, which eschews industry get-togethers in favour of its own, carefully choreographed events.
Nokia will host some meetings nearby, but is reported not to be planning any new phone launches.
At the same time the fair will be flooded with new phones using Google's Android platform.
The other big names in the industry, Microsoft, Samsung and Sony Ericsson, have also been struggling with the pace set by Apple and Google, ever since the first iPhone took the world by storm in mid-2007.
Nokia is seen among the best positioned to cope with the onslaught thanks to its own operating system, investments in services, and huge scale benefits in phone production, but Apple already makes more profit from phones than Nokia.
Trying to replicate Apple's success in selling mobile software through its App Store, Nokia, Microsoft and others have opened their own online stores, but with little success.
"Everybody is struggling. There is a lot of hype, but there is not a lot of dollars," said Dana Porter, vice president for strategy at phone-billing and customer-management software maker Amdocs
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