Three Ms dominate Nokia's Ovi expansion
Published: 3 December, 2008
The launch of the N97 superphone stole most of the headlines at the Nokia World conference in Barcelona, Spain this week, but the Finnish giant was also setting out its stall for its broader strategic plans - notably its Ovi family of web services, now firmly focused on Nokia's 'three Ms' of software growth, "mail, messaging and maps".
Nokia also completed the acquisition of Symbian, which it will proceed to place into an open source Foundation that could challenge Google's Android ambitions - but also hinted at a two-pronged attack on that Linux-based system. It said it might extend its use of Linux in some high end devices - currently this is confined to the N810 Internet Tablets, but these are set to be the first products in a far wider future move into mobile internet devices. While some of these may run Linux instead of Symbian, to appeal to the enterprise space, Nokia made it clear it would not adopt Android, but would stick with its current maemo-based platform. "I don't see anything in Android which would make it better than Linux maemo," said VP of Nokia Markets, Ukko Lappalainen, in a Reuters interview.
The expansion of Ovi was the highlight of the keynote address from CEO Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo, who claims much personal credit for the vision of transforming Nokia into a mobile web services company over the coming years. He said his goal is "transforming the way we connect", pointing to the huge untapped potential, with 75% of the world's population not yet on email, many of these in territories where the mobile device is likely to be more available than a PC.
In line with its announcement of a suite of Ovi services for developing market applications such as support for farmers, Nokia has announced Mail on Ovi, a simple service, running on Nokia's low end Series 40 platform, that provides an internet identity for those who don't otherwise have one and "removes barriers between web, PC and mobile devices". Mail on Ovi also provides an online portal with 1Gb of storage space and spam filters, and it will be rolled out in beta release before year end in 12 languages, with a full web version due in February.
Another new service, Nokia Messaging, will allow instant messaging users to access services such as AOL Mail, Google Talk, Gmail, Windows Live Hotmail and Yahoo Mail and Messenger. Its free beta trial will take place in the first quarter of next year, in Australia, Singapore, Venezuela and five European countries.
On the 'maps' front, as well as enhancing 'social location' capabilities in the N97, tightly integrating social networking and GPS, Nokia has upgraded its navigation service, adding features such as high resolution aerial images, 3D landmarks and a route overview. The combination of Nokia Maps and Ovi enables users to plan journeys at home on PCs and sync them with handsets.
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