I'm writing this on the eve of what looks to be the announcement of three more Nokia Nseries phones, the smart money is on the N73, N93 and possibly the N72, but I wouldn't bet my house on any of these.

By my reckoning this makes Nokia's range of smart phones look pretty extensive, a veritable glut compared to Motorola's apparent reliance on one comfy old slipper of a feature phone.

Counting through the current range I see ten in the shops today, namely the 3230, 3250, 6630, 6670, 6680, 6681, 6682, 7610, N70, and N90. Coming soon (some sooner than others), we have four Eseries phones in the E60, E61, E62 and E70, and also four Nseries phones in the N71, N80, N91, and N92. Add in the 7710 and the S80 communicators 9300, 9300i, and 9500 you have twenty-two different smartphones, is this too big a range?

Sure, you can almost half the above list by removing the phones that are being sold alongside their effective successor (6630 -> 6680 -> N70, or 3230 -> 3250), but still it's a big range. I've wondered before whether people don't buy Nokia models, because they don't do a kitchen-sink style one-phone-that-does-everything and perhaps their model diversification is even bigger now than it was in the past.

Following this thinking, what would be an ideal range? Perhaps a barebones line up of a candybar, a slider, a flip, a blackberry/palm style qwerty pad (is there a generic name for this form factor?), and a communicator; all well-equipped, i.e. wifi, 3g, megapixel camera, fm radio etc etc. Sounds simple and straight-forward no? A simple clean range of perhaps five phones.

But, hang on a minute, what about the corporate customer who won't tolerate a camera? What about the need for cheaper models without wcdma and wifi for the third world? What about a music phone with lots of expensive memory and/or a hard disk? What about a DVB-H capable phone? What about a specialist camera phone for video recording and quality photos? Oops, there's at least another five phones, perhaps more if you apply these feature demands across the range.

It's starting to look like the number of models in a range is a game that Nokia can't win. If they provide a simple range of phones they get criticised, if they provide an extensive range they also get slated. However, to me it looks like Nokia are listening to the market - three years ago a Nokia flip was a rare beast - and judging by Nokia's market share it's a successful strategy, slightly wiser I suspect than putting all your eggs in one thin basket...