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Imagine that you are the largest producer of mobile telephones in the world, by massive margins. Of every two mobile phones being used right now, you made one of them. Your company more or less accounts for most of the GNP of your home country. You have an interesting new Operating System just trying out it’s legs, and iron clad deals with most of the world’s carriers.

Now, imagine that in the highest margin, biggest bang side of the industry, smartphones…you announce that you are halving your  production due to “really fierce competition” and only releasing a single device with your new OS in 2010. Nokia released 20 smartphones in 2009, but will only bring 10 new models to market in 2010.

That leaves lots of mid and low end feature phones, where Nokia continues to dominate through out the world. However, Nokia’s head of Smartphones, Jo Harlow, citing increasing competition in those markets too as a cause for concern.

The vast number of models that Nokia releases has always been viewed as a primary strength of the company, but maybe they are on to something by limiting the number of high end devices they are putting out. After all, for all of their market majesty, very few people can name more then a few Nokia models. The wide variety, plus the boring names (E72, N97…not terribly sexy) can lead to consumer apathy. Perhaps fewer phones will mean more excitement.

Who knows, some companies have done pretty well with only one smartphone model…yes, I am looking at you Mr. Jobs.