Nokia will use three events this week in San Francisco, Cannes and Las Vegas to launch multiple initiatives in media, the Green movement and various technical initiatives ‘ all of them adding to its lead in consumer services. The announcements were made at Web 2.0, CTIA Wireless and MIPTV in Cannes, France.
The Finnish phone giant also announced a tie up with AT&T aimed at smashing the Blackberry blockade in the US, as well as one to harness the power of the TV visionary who created the Heroes TV series.
We always had the feeling that there was more to come from Nokia this season, despite 8 handsets being launched at the Barcelona Mobile World Congress, and the move with Heroes creator Tim Kring is perhaps the most original, while the AT&T deal is perhaps the first of many, as the two finally learn to work together on new top end devices ‘ having been least best friends for some years.
The idea is that Tim Kring will create some kind of global epic similar to Heroes that will work on multiple media. Let’s assume there is a TV show, a web based gaming environment which extends to mobile with a strong location based element ‘ almost out of the global treasure hunt genre. Why would we assume that? Because we have been expecting location based services to harness gaming for about five years. Naturally you will be able to buy things for this game/entertainment ‘ code named TEVA
Nokia says it has signed on as a strategic partner and technology enabler for the project which will have an ‘immersive’ narrative and elements of individual action and group participation. So a story, a game and a social network. Those words say it all we think. Let’s just pretend for a second that this is an extension of Heroes and that the entire world is on the look out for special phones, people or places where one of these mutant beings lives. Location services might be used to tell you when you are warm, and then you might have to battle them with weapons bought from Ovi. The results might be broadcast, and have some bearing on the plot of a TV series as it was produced. We are NOT saying that this is what it is, but by imagining for a second or two, you get the idea of how engaging all those elements might become with someone like Kring at the helm.
These types of original partnerships could lead to a shift of MMORPG style encounters moving from the PC to the handset ‘ which is long overdue.
Nokia took the opportunity to launch its Point and Find service, which is an infrastructure play to promote products and services. It uses real time image processing and recognition technologies from a handset camera and checks the images against any company that has cut a deal with Nokia. You point your camera at virtually anything and Nokia looks it up in its data base and tells you what it is. If you point your camera at something like the Eiffel Tower, it also checks your GPS co-ordinates to make sure that’s where you are.
Point and Find also recognizes bar codes and supports category-specific text-entry search. Once Nokia has identified the item the customer gets a set of links to associated content and services ‘ presumably from companies that have paid Nokia for promotion. Nokia has talked about this for a few years, now it has a service name, companies can sign for it, and there are two betas, one in the US and one in the UK.
Nokia says that since Ovi Store was announced at Mobile World Congress, it has signed thousands of content providers with the majority coming from the US, UK, China and India including new signings from The Associated Press, Netflix, Paramount Pictures and Shazam. At launch time it mentioned companies like EA Games and deals with Facebook and such and all of this is triggered in May when Ovi Store unifies all of the Nokia web services into one, working initially with a number of Series 40 and Series 60 phones and especially the Nokia N97, which is delivered in June, the first phones with the built-in store front.
But many Nokia watchers will be more intrigued by the arrival in the AT&T line up of a Nokia phone, the ER71x, a local US variation of the E71 Blackberry killer style phone, which is doing so well in the rest of the world. It has a full qwerty keyboard, is exceptionally thin and offers Mail for Exchange (so it works with Microsoft Exchange servers) as well as Gmail, Yahoo! mail and Hotmail.
“The E71x is a lean, mean multimedia machine for busy people who want Internet-on-the-go capabilities in the palm of their hands,” said Mark Louison, President, Nokia Inc. “Together with our carrier and industry partners in North America, Nokia continues to enhance the consumer mobile experience through a growing range of Qwerty, music, messaging and feature rich devices.”
Nokia is claiming that it’s the thinnest Qwerty smartphone on the market, running with both 3G and WiFi, has a built-in music player, a 3.2 megapixel auto-focus camera and runs on Nokia Series 60 Symbian and comes with Quickoffice.
This looks to us like the thaw in relations between AT&T and Nokia, brought about in part by Qualcomm becoming a Nokia development partner on LTE 3G swing devices (announced at Mobile World Congress), means that AT&T is more inclined to source existing lines from Nokia. The Nokia E71x will be available in the coming weeks in AT&T stores and costing $99.99 with an AT&T contract.
Nokia also tipped its hat to the ‘Green’ revolution, not just in its phones, but in the process of acquiring ‘green’ goods when travelling ‘ in effect it is adding a Green element to its local search with Green Explorer. This is a new service which provides information on green issues while travelling, including tips on the most sustainable methods of transport, eco-friendly places to visit, and a way to offset the CO2 emissions when flying.