Will Nokia join the bandwagon and make its own phablet? Old rumours that have been started a few months back, partly backed by a remark of Nokia Chief Executive Officer Stephen Elop that he is studying the tablet market, may resurface as one strategy for the Finnish tech firm to recover lost ground.

Despite the release of its Lumia line, Nokia could apparently not grab back the crown of best-selling mobile phone manufacturer that South Korean tech giant grabbed with its smartphone devices.

Proof of Nokia still limping is the report that for the first three months of 2013, the company's sales dipped 20 per cent to $7.6 billion while mobile phone volumes declined 25 per cent.

As demand for Nokia phones continued to dip, logging the company's smallest quarterly revenues in 13 years, the value of its shares also decreased by up to 13 per cent.

Nokia sold 61.9 million units in Q1, below analysts' forecast of 73 million units, including 5.7 million Lumias.

Analysts recommended that Nokia consider cutting the prices of its Lumia units to improve sales in emerging markets.

Mr Elop admitted that its mobile phones business is struggling with a difficult competitive environment and Nokia is initiating tactical actions and bringing new innovations to the market to address these challenges.

These actions include cutting over 20,000 jobs and closing production and research sites since Mr Elop took over Nokia in 2010.

Speculations said that the upcoming phablet would be the most innovative of Nokia phones, although there are no details to begin with except by common definition of a phablet it would likely have a bigger screen than the 4.5-inch display of current flagship, the Nokia 920.

Techcrunch said that beyond coming up with a phone with a new hardware, Nokia must be feature focused by adding new functionalities such as image editing software.

However, like Apple and Samsung, Nokia declined to discuss the alleged plans for a phablet since it does not comment on rumours or speculations.

RELATED STORIES