At the World Mobile Congress 2009, the Finnish mobile giant made quite a few major announcements. I blogged about a few of them, but I really couldn’t help but sit back for a second with this one, Nokia now ships with Skype!

Now, while I have the greatest of respect and love for Nokia, I can’t help but think that this is just a good ol fashion “Stupid mistake!”. You see, Nokia’s largest distribution channels are of course the voice networks that bundle the handsets with their voice offerings, think Vodafone, O2, VirginMobile, MTN, etc. These companies, subsidize handsets for its subscribers under a standard subscription model and their voice pricing model has been built using the basis an average user makes x amount of calls for y amount of minutes, etc.

Anyway, the point is that these companies make money from the calls, not from the handsets, so why would they allow their phones to be sold with services like Skype that uses Voip technology and NOT their GSM or CDMA networks?

As a result of this blatant poor judgement, some mobile operators have come out threatening to remove Nokia devices from their product catalogues if they come pre-installed with Skype. One would think that this is a small problem for a giant like Nokia, but the effect that it could have in a recessive market with more bad time ahead is certainly not something that should be left unmanaged!

That still doesn’t stop the users of installing the Voip application on the device themselves, but c’mon, its the concept of Nokia thinking that it would get away with this move!