Nokia re-enters CDMA market

After settling its licensing dispute with Qualcomm, Nokia has re-entered the North American CDMA market with its new phone, the Nokia 6205 being sold by Verizon. The phone was actually introduced in June as a Batman movie tie in.

Because Nokia doesn’t know how to make CDMA phones any more, it outsourced design of the Nokia 6205 to an offshore ODM. PhoneNews.com speculates the phone was made by TechFaith, a Qualcomm- and Intel-backed startup that also makes phones for Kyocera and NEC.

It seems like a small scale entry by Nokia, which forecast declining market share in 2008 as it seeks to preserve margins in the face of brutal price cutting by rivals. The risk is that Nokia — which is a premium brand in Europe — will signify a low-quality, low-end product in the US, as it did 20 years ago when it was the Radio Schak house brand.