Nokia has struck its second major deal to open up a swathe of handsets to be freely allowed to use its Ovi internet services. By agreeing to promote Telecom Italia Mobile’s own service on Ovi, Nokia now has access to over 80% of the Italian cellular market and large chunks of Europe. In a previous deal Nokia got Vodafone to agree to allow Ovi to be enabled on its handsets, and between Vodafone Italy and TIM, they hold more than an 80% market share in Italy.
As part of the collaboration, Nokia will customize the new Nokia handsets to provide easy access to TIM services. Similarly, TIM customers can access all Nokia services through the customized Multimedia Menu embedded into their Nokia device. The collaboration also includes areas such as technology and billing co-operation.
Back in Early November Vodafone was the first major cellular operator to respond to the Ovi announcements by agreeing to give its own services and the Nokia services parity on devices it bought from Nokia, including access to both Vodafone’s new music service and the Nokia Music Store on the N95 and N81. This was seen as something of a glasnost between the two companies, which have been at loggerheads in the past.
Nokia already has strong European relationships with one or two other major cellcos, and is clearly selling the availability of its Music Store as at least a partial antidote to the recently arrived iPhone, to those operators that did not get access to it.
In the meantime Nokia says that it has acquired US private start up Avvenu, in a deal which is already complete. Avvenu allows access to PC files on a handset, over the internet. Nokia says that easy access to existing PC content will fuel mobile computing convenience and productivity, so this is clearly aimed at the enterprise user right now, although its is likely that access to PC held entertainment data will be next on the agenda, in a form of ‘placeshifting.’ In fact the acquisition may be a big sidestep around placeshifting patents, since Avvenu has patents of is own.