Several years ago Nokia seemed to have the mobile phone market sewn up. No well-heeled gal would dream of leaving home without making handbag space for the 8210. While the boys who loved their toys drooled over the Communicator - the only phone at the time that could successfully send and receive email.
In the intervening years, in the UK at least, the company seems to have lost its way with rivals Samsung wooing erstwhile 8210 users with its clamshell models and the David Beckham-approved Sharp GX10 cleaning up in the camera phone market.
So, perhaps in a bid to restate its market-leading credentials, last week Nokia invited a gaggle of journalists to the offices of its PR company and offered a hands-on introduction to its line-up of phones for this year.
Nokia's candid approach was reflected in the presence of the company's head of product marketing, Ray Haddow, who quite happily fielded all kind of queries; from the old chestnuts (will Nokia launch a clamshell phone? It hasn't ruled it out) to crystal ball gazing (in five years will the company still be seen as purely a phone manufacturer? Probably not given its range of devices).
Taking a look at the phones strewn across the desk it was clear that this year Nokia is determined to offer a phone to suit every kind of user. Whether you want business applications such as email and the internet or entertainment facilities like cameras, MP3 or games, there is a phone for you. The days when you chose a Nokia phone because it was small and had a simple-to-use interface have gone forever.
Whether users want - or will use - all these fancy features is a moot point. The one handset the journalists agreed was sure to be a smash is the 3100 - a small, slight phone with a glow-in-the-dark casing that apart from an MMS facility (though no camera) is largely bereft of the company's high profile applications.
Nokia, along with Sony Ericsson, is taking a huge gamble on the belief that within a few years, the only gadget people will leave the home with is a phone - albeit one loaded with entertainment and business applications. This might be the case when 3G establishes itself and delivers simple music downloads/streaming, online gaming and the option of shooting and sending large photo and video files. Given 3G's awkward genesis I wouldn't bet on it.
For the moment, however, the handsets that Nokia is parading offer only a poor substitute to the range of vastly superior gadgets currently on sale. Take its just-launched MP3-playing 3300. It may look innovative and stylish and boast an integrated FM tuner and Wap browser, yet it only comes with a 64MB storage card; enough for around an hour and half of music. Punters are hardly going to ditch their 30 gigabyte tiny Apple iPods for it just yet.
The same is true of the N-Gage. Why would anyone swap a Nintendo Gameboy Advance for an N-Gage when the latter will have fewer, less sophisticated games? The N-Gage also lags on battery life coming in at 3-6 hours (without phone calls) compared to the Gameboy Advance's 10 hours (18 with the light off). There's also the small matter of Sony's PSP waiting in the wings.
To be fair, both phones will be much cheaper than the iPod or the Gameboy Advance and are aimed at younger users. Their older, wider and richer brothers and sisters are less likely to take to them. Phone companies are almost obliged to issue these phones as they try to develop them into propositions that harness the best 3G has to offer. Yet until the phones offer a comparable performance to their rival gadgets (and who is to say this will ever happen) people will probably be happy filling their pockets with two devices.
Perhaps the best phone Nokia has scheduled for this year is the 6600. The company has shoehorned all the best features from its 7650 and 3250 camera phones into a small and light handset that's perfect for the corporate market.
The handset, which runs on the Symbian operating system, delivers email, full web browsing, VGA standard pictures and basic video. However it is not due until at least October. In the meantime, many would-be buyers may have had their heads turned by the similarly equipped and sized smartphone from Siemens (the SX1), to say nothing of Orange's new SPV E-100 or Handspring's promising Treo 600.
Perhaps I am being a little harsh. After all, there's no denying that Nokia will have the most comprehensive selection of handsets from any manufacturer available this year. But there are some great phones on the horizon, including Sharp's update of the GX10, the GX20, Samsung's very clever camera phone the SGH-P410 and Motorola's 3G A835 (the handset that Three is desperately waiting for). Whether Nokia's new range is strong enough maintain the company's enviable market share remains to be seen.
