There’s lots of interesting stuff at the Nokia Mobility Conference web site. As well as more detailed information on the announced devices and services, there are some videos of the keynotes and Q & A sessions.

Nokia are stressing the convergence of devices, services and networks. They expect (want?) music, camera and game devices to become one. Services such as messaging and image sharing will also be implemented across multiple device types. Mobile, landline, WiFi and broadband will become transparent to the user as devices roam across these networks.

Despite all this, Nokia are adopting a strategy of divergence of devices. Next year there will be a diversity of new phones targeted at various market segments. There will be phones for photography, music, business and gaming. In actual fact, most of the new (Series 60) devices will be capable of all these things. It’s just that the physical design, internal software and marketing will change slightly for each market variant.

The announced (Series 60) devices are still high end devices. They will initially be costly. Hopefully, cheaper mass-market Symbian OS devices will appear in 2007/8 which will help Symbian achieve its projected 200 million devices/year by 2008.

Unfortunately, as Jorma Ollila commented in one of the presentations, there will be "No mature market" . For software developers there will be an even greater multitude of continually evolving (Nokia) phones to develop and test on. While this creates opportunities it also creates uncertainty and increases development (and testing) costs.

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 6th, 2005 at 11:59 am and is filed under Mobile, Phones. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.