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Nokia Preaches To The Symbian Choir At Madrid Summit
New Devices Drive Mobile Internet Movement
by Michael Alexander
The Internet is going mobile and the handheld smartphone is the vehicle that will enable consumers to make the trip. At least that’s the big idea at Nokia’s S60 Summit 07 in Madrid this week.
The summit, held April 24-25, brought together mobile device app developers and service providers to discuss the growing acceptance of Nokia’s S60 Symbian OS and the potential opportunities they expect will follow.
With more than 100 million S60 devices shipped so far, the platform’s ubiquity, flexibility and neutrality all add up to a big payday, Nokia says. S60 sits on about 54 percent of all smartphones sold, which is mainly everywhere in the world except the U.S., where Nokia has made little effort to push the OS.
The latest iteration of Symbian brings more of a desktop-like browsing experience—one that is derived from Apple’s Safari Mac browser--to handhelds. A couple of weeks back, Nokia introduced widgets for news, weather, photo albums and others, similar to the ones common on desktops and which are created using HTML, AJAX and other Web technologies.
The point is to enable service providers to easily offer Web 2.0 and other Internet services to their customers. In turn, customers will be able to personalize their browsing experience, build communities, use location-based services and so on, Nokia’s top execs say.
Nokia Finds a Receptive Audience
Not surprising, Nokia’s execs were preaching to a choir that is desperately looking for new ways to grow the data side of the mobile market. The voice business is already tapped out and “SMS is no longer the unique relevant data bearer,” says Jose Antonia Moujadami, head of applications and open OS devices for Telefonica Moviles Espana. What he really means is SMS as a share of the business is headed south. An agnostic platform like the S60 helps eliminate barriers for service providers because a collaborative environment is more likely to produce innovative products than a competitive one, Moujadami says.
Having a common platform also enables service providers to focus on what really matters, and that is differentiating themselves to their customers and reducing time to market, Moujadami says.
“A platform approach is a key step to addressing the challenges facing operators,” Kamran Kordi, head of next-generation terminal platforms at T-Mobile. “The opportunities for operators are standardization, innovation, the ability to differentiate themselves and [device] manageability,” Kordi says. “The application development environment is already complex enough.”
“Text and talk are not longer enough for them,” says Shaun Collins of the service providers. Collins is managing director of CCS Insight, a market research firm that tracks the mobile market out of Solihull in the UK.
“If they are going to go forward, they must absolutely engage their customers in new ways,” Collins says.
Mobile Operators Can No Longer Do Business as Usual
Despite the potential opportunity, service providers are nervous about broadening their services into the Internet space, Collins adds. It’s a new business model, for one, and moving into this brave new world will require service providers to forge new partnerships rather than go it alone, as they traditionally have done.
Still, the large service providers are becoming more vested in the notion of the smartphone as a small computer that plugs into the Internet and are looking to partner with Google and other large Internet players, Collins says. “It’s fair to say that some providers are understanding more now than they did a year ago. I’ve seen them more engaged in just the last 6 months than ever before.”
The Symbian platform moves service providers in the direction they wish to go, Kordi notes, but the OS still needs work. Smartphones are still too expensive for most consumers, and prices must fall into the midrange, he says. Also, the platform lacks modularity, he says. That is, it’s not possible to add or remove components of the OS and turn them on or off at will, he says. The S60 browser has “parts that are standardized and parts that are not, we want the ability to turn off the S60 browser and turn on our own,” Kordi explains.
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