Nokia frustratingly shrinks Nokia World event, changes date

Finnish phone maker Nokia has shrunk the size of its usually huge Nokia World event into several small events and moved up the date of the first event by a few weeks, the company announced today in a blog post.

This is a major make-or-break year for Nokia, with its Windows Phone handsets rolling out across the world and trying to break through the iPhone-and-Android landscape. So it’s frustrating that the company would not go big or go home like Apple, Google, and Microsoft have chosen to do. A big Nokia event each year held the promise of new headsets and could keep Nokia fans intrigued. Now it will be a much more subdued affair.

“Instead of a single, large-scale event as we have had in years past, we will run a number of smaller, more intimate events with specific audiences in mind,” Nokia blogger Heidi Lemmetyinen wrote. “Think less CES, more SXSW.”

The Nokia World event was originally scheduled for September 25-26, but now the first “small” event will be held September 5-6. This will be an invitation-only event that “will cater primarily to our operator and retail partners.”

Not only is it disheartening that this is a strict invite-only event over a big affair that attracts Nokia fans the world over, but it also causes a headache for anyone who already bought plane tickets for its previously scheduled times. Nokia, we expect better.

Photo credit: Nokia