Sitting in the Nokia Press Conference here at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona this morning, I ran into ex Skype Developer program lead, Lenn Pryor who moved over to Nokia's new OVI group. Lenn's group is part of the transformation becoming product and service reality that has been happening within Nokia for the past three years or so.
Nokia's showed a whole new direction in mobility, making significant moves with Navigation, GPS and personalization all tied together. The whole idea is about "Mobilizing the Web 2.0" using a combination of devices (both Symbian Series 60 and Series 40) by marrying services and devices together. As a client of my agency, it is most rewarding to see how a game plan that we've seen coming for a while, become reality.
Nokia has basically entered the word of "It." If you want it, can shoot it, share it, send it, stream it, map it, find it, etc., the complete experience will be Ovi powered. Under Ovi, Nokia has brought together a platform that includes Web, Mobile and PC/Mac allowing people to access their content they way they want to. It is most importantly an open platform that lets people use Ovi the way they want. Its both a platform and a service. New services like SHARE with Ovi are coming out. But Ovi will be a living service. In the UK music is live on Ovi. N-Gage in beta. The key is as each new service is added, the experience has to be really solid.
The Nokia Music Store goes live in 10 countries in the next few months.
Personal Media Sharing is based on the Twango acquisition. Share.Ovi.Com is a personal media sharing and storage service, that works from desktop or mobile. The smart thing here is you don't have to be using a Nokia device. It is based on open standards so any net connected device works. It supports over 100 different file formats. This allows the user to really mix between different file types. Multiple ways to upload are being offered. N Series phones will have a specific client that makes the upload process easy. All the effort has been geared around saving time, and eliminating the hassle. To make it easy, Nokia has taken the very successful N73 and come up with the new N78 that will have 3G, WiFi, 3.5g, HSDPA and GPS. It does Geo tagging, has a built in FM transmitter so you can play music on your car radio or home stereo. The GPS makes it a personal navigation platform which means you can get maps, real time directions and lay over context sensitive content so you can really see where you're going. The maps work for both cars and walking.
The new N96 is the N95 on steroids. Bigger display. More memory. Better for video. More applications. It comes out later this year. Video and Live TV. It stores 16+ gigs which means you can store over 24 Hollywood movies. It has Flash video, supporting real Flash video, not simply mobile mobile Flash.
Key points:
Nokia is about the integrated experience combining the device and the service.
Nokia introduced 4 device that support Maps 2.0
The Ovi Share service is supported by the four new devices, as well as any device that supports a standard web browser.
Nokia looks at 2008 as the year of the complete (i.e. Integrated) experience.
Pal and client with iotum, Alec Saunders has a very good summary as well on his blog too.
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