Nokia said today it had delayed the introduction of its Linux-powered 770 Internet Tablet until the fourth quarter — not a big surprise as Q3 ended a few days ago and it hadn’t come out, as it was supposed to. It’s also not a huge deal on its own, but this is the second delay of a big Nokia product in two weeks and the third in about three months.

Back at the end of June, Nokia said the N90 high-end cameraphone would be late, while a couple weeks ago, it said the N91 hard-disk music phone wouldn’t be on time, either.

The reasons given each time are strangely similar, too. For the 770: “”The finalization of the software took us a bit longer than we had expected.” For the N90: “”We want to make sure customers get the right experience.” And the N91 had the bonus doublespeak-laden explanation: “What we basically decided is that we will postpone it a few weeks, push it out to Q1 and do this Microsoft DRM implementation solidly.” The multiple delays are a bit troublesome — it sounds like each time Nokia’s saying they basically did a poor job of estimating how long the products would take to get to market, which seems odd, given their experience in, you know, making phones.

The other, more dire alternative is that Nokia’s lost some of its engineering edge. They continue to crank out low-end models, but these are three high-end devices they’ve failed to deliver as promised. I suspect, though, it’s more about allocation of resources rather than loss of them. At nearly every opportunity, Nokia talks up the importance of emerging markets. And Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo, the man slated to replace CEO Jorma Ollila next June, has been the head of the company’s Mobile Phones unit, which makes mass-market, low-end phones, primarily for developing markets.

So is Nokia ceding the high end to focus on the low end? The speed with which they move (or lack thereof) would indicate they are. Like I said about Motorola recently, Nokia is moving too slowly — something Ollila said was a reason for its significant problems in the first half of 2004.

This is particularly true in the US, where Nokia seems to be losing some of its brand cachet. Its low-end GSM phones look like they’re doing well (judging by the number of them I see around), but their lack of a cohesive CDMA portfolio doesn’t help here, nor does the strategy of rolling out high-end phones like the 9300 and 6682 months after equivalent models have gone on sale in Europe. By the time they’re out here, most of the early adopters have new handsets of desire — and at $300 to $500 per handset, you’re not going to get a lot of Joe Off-The-Streets buying them when they’re selling alongside free Samsungs. So the Nokia models that are selling well aren’t exactly showcases of the company’s best technology.

Motorola and Samsung have both said in the past they wanted to focus on selling high-end phones with high margins, while Nokia’s average selling prices have been slipping for some time. But its economies of scale and low production costs let it make cheap handsets profitably, and it can sell them in huge volumes. While the high end of the market may be more exciting, for Nokia, the low end is a cash cow. The company’s got a lot invested in the high end, not the least of which its ownership of Symbian. But while it’s a market leader there, it’s vulnerable — exactly like it was in the overall market when it got knocked back in 2004.