Nokia held its annual Nokia World conference this week in Barcelona, Spain, and reinforced its key messages for growth in the next decade – rapid expansion of the Ovi family of web services; pushing mobile internet capabilities into emerging markets; tapping into the handset segments with the greatest potential to weather the downturn, superphones and low end webphones.
It unleashed a headline grabbing device – the heavyweight touchscreen N97 – and some catchy slogans – ‘mail, messaging and maps’, ‘social location’ – to put a gloss on its attempt to turn itself into a web services giant. And behind the headlines, it was making moves to fend off the new challengers that have come with that shift into the mobile internet, planning an anti-Android Linux strategy to complement the open sourcing of Symbian; throwing the N97 at the troublesome iPhone; and contemplating non-handset products such as home control centers and even netbooks, that would help it compete with Microsoft and others to be the controlling hub of the wireless home.
As usual with Nokia these days, the handsets grab the most attention, even while the software moves are more significant in indicating long term strategies. The N97 is Nokia’s second touchscreen smartphone, and its mission is to breathe new life into the N Series of media-intensive high end handsets, once the gold standard of the sector, but increasingly under pressure from Apple in terms of market profile, and the Koreans in features.
The N97 tops up the N Series, whose original N95 model was upgraded earlier this year to the N96. The new addition features a touchscreen and full Qwerty keyboard and was described by Jonas Geust, VP of Nokia Devices, as ‘the start of the new N Series… really kicking off the next wave’. The Finnish giant has already said that its 2009 line-up will feature far more touchscreens, having entered this market late, when it unveiled the ‘Tube’ XpressMusic phone.
As well as seeking to move the goalposts in the high end mediaphone sector, the phone is positioned to combine the appeal of business focused devices like the Nokia E Series and N810 tablet, with the mobile web and multimedia wizardry of the new breed of touchscreen handsets such as iPhone and LG Renoir. This puts the N97 firmly up against Windows phones like Sony Ericsson Xperia X1 or HTC Touch Pro, which also seek to bridge that divide. It means it is as fully featured as any smartphone on the market (and far more than the iPhone) – but also that it is rather bulky.
However, it will be about six months before the N97 ships – likely timing is June 2009 for Europe – and by that time rivals will have unveiled their own new units. The likely price for N97 will be about €550 ($660) before subsidies. It does not yet support US 3G bands and is unlikely to see the light of day in the US before late 2009, especially in the absence of a carrier deal.
The new top end for the N Series has a slide-out Qwerty keyboard and tilting 3.5-inch touchscreen reminiscent of the Xperia X1’s. It features a music and video player, a 5-megapixel camera with Carl Zeiss optics, and supports quad-band GSM and tri-band HSPA, with integrated Wi-Fi and Bluetooth.
On the software side, Nokia is tapping into the craze for phones that are optimized for social networking and location awareness, coining the hybrid term ‘social location’. It promises easy access to a number of social networking sites and also uses the capabilities of the integrated A-GPS sensors and electronic compass to automatically update social networks, or share your location with friends via photos or videos.
Having blazed a trail in mobile widgets with its Widsets platform, Nokia was rather slow to exploit user customizable widgets on its devices, but the N97’s homescreen can be personalized in this way. Of course, the Symbian-based phone is fully compatible with Nokia’s Ovi family of internet services, such as MusicStore and N-Gage.
The N95 has been a major success for Nokia. It started selling in early 2007 and was head and shoulders above the market at that time in key functionality such as camera/optics and memory. Although overtaken by others since then, it has sold over 15 million units. Few expect the N97 to make such a splash, because it is in a crowded field, and is considerably heavier than many smartphones in its class, because of trying to pack in so many different technologies.
While the N97 stole the limelight in Barcelona, Nokia 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’.
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.
While social location and advanced mapping are mainly associated with mature mobile economies, Nokia is well aware that newer markets will represent the greatest medium term potential for adoption of internet services, and is staking its claim earlier. It is already transferring some of the applications and expertise developed in its traditional territories to platforms geared to emerging nations, well ahead of most rivals making similar moves. This is not just about creating Ovi services specifically for developing nations, or working with carriers like Orascom in these regions, but adapting its existing software to be workable on simple, low cost devices.
Nokia pointed out that, of the six billion-plus people on the planet, about four billion will be using mobile devices by the first quarter of next year, and currently, one billion are using Nokia phones. This is the largest consumer base for any consumer durable item, but only 1.5 billion have ever accessed email. ‘Nokia seeks to give the power of the internet to more people in more places, and to transform the internet into your internet,’ said Kallasvuo.
This push into mass markets will see Series 60 shrunk down into more basic products, as well as a new focus on lower end operating systems, but while Symbian remains the flagship OS, there are indications that Nokia will extend its support for Linux. There are two logical places for it in the Finn’s strategy. One is in mobile internet devices geared to the enterprise, where Linux is gaining strong favor, and where Nokia should soon step up its claim to the hybrid smartphone/notebook sector, where Intel, Qualcomm and the PC makers all aim to play. The other is in low end webphones, where Linux should provide a low cost platform that will take basic handsets a step up from proprietary embedded OSs, and that should be popular in key markets like China.
In Nokia’s ideal world, Symbian would extend its reach into all these areas, but it knows the mobile internet will be a multi-platform world, and should eventually port S60 and S40 to non-Nokia operating systems. It has already embarked on turning its promises to be a cross-platform software vendor into reality, with the acquisition of cross-OS tools supplier Trolltech last year, and the port of its Linux-based Qt toolkit to S60.
However, Linux support will definitively not equate to a truce with Google Android, if executives at Barcelona are to be believed. In the week that Nokia completed the acquisition of Symbian – which it will proceed to place into an open source Foundation that could challenge Google’s ambitions it also hinted at a two-pronged attack on Android. 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. But Nokia made it clear it would not adopt Android, but would stick with its current maemo-based platform and even seek to make its preferred Linux implementation dominant in the mobile market. ‘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. Nokia has funded and supported Maemo.org, an open source operating system, for some years, and uses the GTK toolkit from the influential Gnome open source movement, though it is likely to focus more heavily on Qt as a means of bridging Symbian and maemo.
As well as mobile internet devices, the other emerging battleground is the netbook, or low end, wireless optimized notebook another platform where Linux is gaining ground on Windows. With Google expected to work with PC makers on an Android netbook next year, it is also widely anticipated that Nokia will step up its efforts in the PC world, by increasing its focus on dongles and even creating its own netbook (perhaps the long awaited opportunity for Qualcomm to storm the Finnish fortress with its well respected chips for these markets, and even the multi-radio Gobi?)
So rumors are swirling that Nokia will soon unveil a netbook architecture, as part of its drive to control any device that contains a mobile interface and drives mobile internet usage, not just handsets. It could adopt a Symbian platform, though it could also adapt its Internet Tablet architecture and choose a Linux/Wi-Fi/WiMAX design. In a research note, UBS analyst Maynard Um wrote: ‘We believe the likelihood of this occurring has increased, although commercial availability is unlikely for 6-9 months. We think it is only a matter of time before Nokia launches notebook type devices.’