Apple does it their way or the highway, HTC offers you a few more choices and Nokia USED to be the company with plenty of selection to suit everybody's taste. As long as you preferred variations on candy bar styled phones that is.

Then finally Nokia branched out on their design side ad started adding smartphones with keyboards and even a few clam shell styled phones. They basically offered even more choice. In the US market alone Nokia presently has on their online site 24 phones ranging in price from USD 35 to 450.

In the wake of Nokia and Microsoft's announcement last week Nokia has essentially dumped their OS efforts and become a hardware only shop. Although using Win Phone 7 will have some hardware limitations and won't be on all of their phone offerings I can't see Nokia emulating Apple and just paring their product line down to only 1 or 2 designs. It's more likely they'll follow the HTC medium amount of choice model.

If they decide to continue to be the huge selection brand they compete head on with the shanzhai...in markets that the shanzai operate successfully and where the shanzai are already responsible for taking Nokia market share. Markets where the shanzai are increasingly using Android which has OS development and a developer mind-share lead over Win Phone 7.

You might argue that Nokia has a competitive advantage in the quality department, but shanzai phones are becoming increasingly better quality and the growth of the shanzai market seemed to pretty much ignore that issue in its early stages. So in a market which already sees Nokia as a bit of a loser... their brand value might not have so much leverage either. Especially in a market already crowded with Aple, Samsing and Soby products.

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