What Nokia is attempting to do is second guess the changes that the convergence of mobility and internet access will bring to the industry, and make sure that they have everything in place to be the leading innovator over the next five years. To that end, they are placing Ovi ("It’s not a portal", they stressed from the stage) at the heart of a connected strategy to encompass social networks, location and contextually aware devices, with user-generated content and mass multimedia, messaging, communication and productivity.
And the message of that approach was both reinforced and expanded on in today’s keynote session.
While the numbers rather dryly back up the future view of Nokia (50 million Nseries devices in circulation, 31% of connections are made over Wi-Fi, 37% of mobile usage is for messaging and only 12% for voice calls), what was more intriguing is where Ovi, and therefore the cutting edge of Nokia, is going during 2008.
Nokia Maps is already established in the suite of applications, and the recently launched Music Store forms part of the 'music suite', which is going to being built upon – currently 1 in 5 Nokia (compatible) smartphone users are registered with the store, and of those, around 25% have downloaded a track to the handset. Of course there’s no breakdown on how many of those are the free tracks of the week, but the fact that a high percentage know this is possible and are making use of the service is promising.
Buried quietly within the talk was the announcement of Nokia’s "Comes With Music" subscription service. With launch partners Universal Music Group, this is a yearly subscription for downloadable (not streamed) music that does not ‘time out’ at the end of the year. I.e. you download it, it’s yours, forever (on that device). It also appears the subscription is factored into the cost of the handset! This has huge implications across multiple industries, and I’m going to take some time to write my thoughts on that later.
The next Ovi component to launch is the slightly delayed (you make it sound like a train!... - Ed) N-Gage gaming service, due before the end of 2007. This will be followed by the web-based portion of Ovi. This is currently undergoing internal testing inside Espoo, and should be open for beta testers at the start of the year (which I read as late Q1 2008). This looks remarkably like other online social services, with bookmarks, friend lists, links out to other services, bringing in media streams such as Flickr and YouTube, but the consistency with the devices could bring this service the edge it needs.
The final element, Ovi PC, to all intents looks like a massive update to the Nokia Lifeblog PC (archive and exploration) tool. Alongside screenshots of the Ovi web site, the 3D representation of your media looked incredibly like an operating system from Japanese anime, but of course we’re not going to see that in the wild for some time yet.
Can the sum of the parts be greater than the whole? Will Ovi be a success for Nokia? The management team certainly think so, and the new ideas presented here, on top of the increased detail about earlier Ovi product announcements, certainly has me confident Nokia can deliver their end of the argument. Whether the rest of the Web 2.0 world will follow remains to be seen, but this is one of the most joined up presentations I’ve seen in a long time.
Ewan Spence, AllAboutSymbian Dec 2007