Nokia MWC 2010 event focusses on milestones
Published by Steve Litchfield at 12:41 GMT, February 15th 2010
As expected by many, Nokia chose to concentrate on their services for their second event this morning at Mobile World Congress (the first was the Moblin/Maemo merger), announcing a barrage of stats, covering the Symbian-relevant Ovi Maps and Ovi Store, plus numbers for Life Tools, all summarised below. Nokia also announced a live pilot of their Nokia Money, designed to allow mobile payments throughout developing countries.
s easy for milestones to blur into the scenery as Nokia services continue to pick up pace and leapfrog landmarks. So today we want to hit the pause button for a moment to help bring it all into focus and look at what has been achieved. With one chameleon-like eye always pointed at the horizon, of course.
Join us after the jump as we take a look at the accomplishments of Nokia services in recent times, including its acceleration in the apps realm via Ovi Store, along with milestones in location, music and messaging. Plus, we take stock of services tailored for growth economies such as Nokia Money mobile banking and Life Tools. Read on to get the full lowdown, and hear what Nokia’s head of services, Niklas Savander, has to say about today’s list of landmark achievements.
Ovi Store success
In a recent poll here on Conversations many of you told us that apps and services are in your top three when it comes to scope for innovation, so what better place to begin on our milestone march that with Ovi Store and apps. It’s been less than ten months since Ovi Store launched, yet it has already established fully localized stores in 18 countries and 30 languages, and is now host to over one million downloads a day. This is supported by smart integrated mobile billing from 60 operators, and throughout 2010 more will be added, along with further improvements and an ongoing avalanche of new apps. An exciting prospect.
Ovi Maps landmarks and free navigation
We were stoked to be able to break news back in January of Nokia offering free global voice-guided navigation for GPS-enabled smartphones via a new version of Ovi Maps. This coupled with an announcement of gratis premium location-based services to support free navigation. Milestones-wise, there have been over 3 million downloads of Ovi Maps, now clocking more than one download a second, 24 hours a day, totaling around 100,000 downloads a day.
Music milestones
The launch of Comes With Music has enabled folk to download and keep limitless DRM-free tunes from Ovi Music in 27 territories across the globe, including last week’s addition of the Middle East. But perhaps most interesting is that the average person downloads 500 free tunes in the first few weeks, which would cost around 450 Euros from Apple’s iTunes service. Plus, the catalogue of songs available continues to grow, and has now hit the nine million mark.
Nokia’s head of services, Niklas Savander, gave his thoughts on the milestones:
“Our recipe for success has some pretty simple ingredients: delighting consumers. Yes, we are in more places, serving more people, with more great content and services. True, more than a million apps are being downloaded a day from our store; Comes with Music is now available in over 25 markets; and every second of the day, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, another person downloads our new Ovi Maps app. These are great achievements, but our goal is to delight hundreds of millions of consumers around the world – and we are well on our way… Our global footprint means we have scaled fast, reaching a really significant number of people using a variety of different phones and smartphones. We started the year with a bang with our free Ovi Maps navigation launch and we have just announced the pilot of Nokia Money running in one of India’s largest metropolitan areas. Going forward, we are increasing the speed and concentrating on developing a magic experience for the people that use our services.”
Millions on Ovi Mail
Back at CES 2010, OPK mentioned in his keynote speech a surprising stat that 75 per cent of the world’s population don’t have access to email. So it’s hugely encouraging to see that Ovi Mail continues to grow in popularity, enabling people to get email on their device where they mightn’t have access to a computer. Now one million people a month open an Ovi Mail account, this often being their first online identity. This takes the total to six million Ovi Mail accounts created in a little over a year.
Nokia Money pilot
Nokia has partnered with YES BANK to launch a pilot of Nokia Money mobile banking in Pune, one of the largest metropolitan areas in India, dubbed Mobile Money Services by YES BANK. The pilot scheme will let people transfer money to another person simply by using the person’s mobile phone number. They’ll also be able to pay utility bills and top up SIM cards. Looking ahead, there will also be the facility to pay for goods and services.
Watch our Nokia Money interview to find out more >>
Nokia Life Tools takes off
Here on Conversations we’ve closely tracked the emergence of Nokia Life Tools with keen interest, so we’re delighted to be able to report that now around one million people have subscribed to Life Tools. It’s availability in India and Indonesia will be joined by other territories throughout 2010.
As always, let us know what you think in the comments section directly below.
- Still not a year old, Ovi Store already has fully localized stores in 18 countries and 30 languages
- Ovi Store now sees over one million downloads a day across the world
- Smart integrated mobile billing for the Ovi Store is provided by over 60 network operators
- There have been over 3 million downloads of the new (free navigation) Ovi Maps, now clocking more than one download a second, around 100,000 downloads a day
- Comes with Music has now been rolled out to retail handsets in 27 territories, including last week’s addition of the Middle East. The average person downloads 500 free tunes in the first fortnight
- The Comes with Music catalogue of songs available continues to grow, and has now hit the nine million mark
- One million people a month open an Ovi Mail account, this often being their first online identity. This takes the total to six million Ovi Mail accounts created in just over a year
- Nokia has partnered with YES BANK to launch a pilot of Nokia Money mobile banking in Pune, one of the largest metropolitan areas in India, dubbed Mobile Money Services.
- There are now around one million people who have subscribed to Life Tools in India and Indonesia. More countries to follow.
Although some will be disappointed by a lack of announcements of new hardware, it seems that manufacturers across the world are tending more towards using their own, separate events for launching shiny new phones (witness Apple's behaviour over the last year or so, for example), so that the entire news cycle can be controlled, away from dilution from other companies - we're expecting a dedicated Nokia event in March or April to play host to new devices. (I could guess at what will be announced then but Rafe would get very cross....)
Comments welcome on any of these stats or on Nokia's news strategy(!)
Steve Litchfield
Categories: Links of Interest, Events
Platforms: General, S60 3rd Edition, S60 5th Edition
News Discussion
Seft
I'm very underwhelmed. I can understand wanting to keep an announcement or two on their own terms and that Symbian are now doing their own thing, but Nokia might as well have not shown up if all they wanted to announce was a pilot program in a couple of cities in India. I could barely keep focused on that terribly dull presentation and by the amount of empty seats in the Q&A it seems that most of the attendees agreed. It's an awfully long way to go just to publish a report card on the Ovi division. I'm not expecting to see an N98, but an E64 or something would have been welcome.
On the plus side, 3m Ovi Maps downloads is genuinely impressive.
On the plus side, 3m Ovi Maps downloads is genuinely impressive.
Unregistered
Very disappointing and incredibly boring presentation about nothing.
Unregistered
"Comes with Music catalogue of songs available continues to grow" - Wow! :-)
Unregistered
are there really no new phones to be announced by nokia?
i was expecting a decent camera flagship phone successor to the n86. i'm hanging in here with a n82. what's happening?
aidan
i was expecting a decent camera flagship phone successor to the n86. i'm hanging in here with a n82. what's happening?
aidan
Unregistered
Ha ha, gotta love all the negative comments from the iPhone/Android fanboys above :)
The amount of ignorance and negativity here is just incredible. Nokia have deliberately not announced any handsets here because they'll be doing that in a separate event where they can get a lot more attention and make more noise, OK?!
And as for the lame, lame, criticism of the above announcements. Well, what do you want Nokia to announce? They've just created world peace, ended poverty and solved AIDS? Come on. To put this into the correct light, I am seeing seasoned industry experts on other sites, who are normally very willing to be critical of Nokia, saying these stats are really impressive and even fantastic. Esp the 3 million downloads of Ovi Maps with free nav.
The real story here is that the illusion of the iPhone being the all encompassing wonderphone to beat all phones, and of Android being the next big thing (Ha!) is being slowly and forcibly shattered. The industry is correcting itself after a bit of a shakeup that has woken Nokia from it's brief snooze. If I was Apple, I'd be very worried about recent announcements from Nokia (oh, and Nokia's growth was 5% up in smartphones last quarter, Apple's static in what is normally their main growth quarter, which is very worrying for them). If I was an investor in Android in any capacity I'd be getting the heck out of there now...
The amount of ignorance and negativity here is just incredible. Nokia have deliberately not announced any handsets here because they'll be doing that in a separate event where they can get a lot more attention and make more noise, OK?!
And as for the lame, lame, criticism of the above announcements. Well, what do you want Nokia to announce? They've just created world peace, ended poverty and solved AIDS? Come on. To put this into the correct light, I am seeing seasoned industry experts on other sites, who are normally very willing to be critical of Nokia, saying these stats are really impressive and even fantastic. Esp the 3 million downloads of Ovi Maps with free nav.
The real story here is that the illusion of the iPhone being the all encompassing wonderphone to beat all phones, and of Android being the next big thing (Ha!) is being slowly and forcibly shattered. The industry is correcting itself after a bit of a shakeup that has woken Nokia from it's brief snooze. If I was Apple, I'd be very worried about recent announcements from Nokia (oh, and Nokia's growth was 5% up in smartphones last quarter, Apple's static in what is normally their main growth quarter, which is very worrying for them). If I was an investor in Android in any capacity I'd be getting the heck out of there now...
rvirga
According to Bloomberg, Nokia is not announcing any new phone at MWC 2010.
Olli-Pekka
@rvirga.
Bloomberg is right - Nokia is not announcing anything at MWC. They have a separate event.
Bloomberg is right - Nokia is not announcing anything at MWC. They have a separate event.
Unregistered
Quote:
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Originally Posted by Unregistered
Apple's static in what is normally their main growth quarter, which is very worrying for them). If I was an investor in Android in any capacity I'd be getting the heck out of there now...
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Android is looking a bit poorly though, especially Nexus one. This whole Google controlling the world thing, cloud lock-in etc can't be all to blame as most people don't really appreciate that is going on. I think that Android wasn't enough of a step up to make any impact.