Reuters reports that Nokia has just launched the N97 in Barcelona today. The new machine is Nokia’s answer to the iPhone, Sony Ericsson’s X1 and HTC’s Touch Pro and every other touchscreen smart phone that beat them to the market.
It would be easy to dismiss the whole thing but Nokia did sell 15 million N95s so you never know.
Size: 117.2 x 55.3 x 15.9 mm* *18.25 mm at camera area
Weight: Approx. 150 g
Memory: Up to 48GB (32 GB on-board memory, plus 16GB expansion via microSD memory card slot)
Display: 3.5 inch TFT with up to 16 million colors nHD 16:9 widescreen (640×360 pixels)
Talk time: Up to 320 min (3G), 400 min (GSM)
Standby time: Up to 400 hrs (3G), 430 hrs (GSM)
Video playback: Up to 4.5 hours (offline mode)
Music playback: Up to 37 hours (offline mode)
Image capture: Up to 5 megapixels (2584 x 1938) JPEG/EXIF (16.7 million/24-bit color)
…and Engadget has just posted what apears to be the first ‘hands-on’ video of the N97:
Will this really become an iPhone killer? I think we can rule the Blackberry Storm out by now and Android is cool but too techy for most. Maybe Nokia stands a chance? What do you think? Anyone considering buying one of these?
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Written on October 14, 2008 – 3:08 pm Toivo Tänavsuu, Next Web Estonian Web Tipr & founder of TigerPrises.com
I was glad to be invited to Finland recently, where mobile giant Nokia gave some hints about “the way we live next”. They introduced their visions for 2015 and allowed to test some upcoming cool services, fresh from the labs.
An idea Nokia researchers are exited about is what they call “sensing and aggregating data” to have “a world of highly tailored and proactive information”.
Bob Iannucci, Head of Nokia Research Center predicts that in about seven years time the world is full of sensors. For each mobile phone, there’ll be ten wireless connected private sensors - one in your car, one in your clothes, one in your house etc - all “bridged” with your mobile phone. The sensors cost almost nothing, because the technology already exists.
What are the consequences?
Iannucci explains that Nokia is able to take your location data and aggregate it with your diary, your calendar and your user history, since your phone learns from your behavior.
Imagine sitting in a meeting, having subscribed to a traffic feed. Your phone recognizes that the route you are about to take is congested and “says” to you: “I see that you got to be on Mark’s birthday at 15:00. But the route that you usually take is congested, so you better leave early! And how would you like me to plan another route?”
Disease control
Or another example: disease control. Iannucci says that the granularity of US disease control system, for example, is so poor, that it is even hard to say how many people are infected in particular county. So why can’t our phones be able to recognize our health conditions or body temperature?
Weather sensors
Our Nokias could also be our personal “weather sensors”. Iannucci talks about thousands of existing weather sensors located in places like mountain tops and airports, where no one really lives. How about using our phones and their wireless data delivery capabilities to sense weather and with the help of hundreds of millions of weather sensors like that provide climate data, with maximum possible accuracy.
Cool new services of Nokia
Here’s an overview of some of the new services Nokia is “baking”:
Indoor Positioning. Provides a positioning and location-based service inside a building. Users can add new buildings and can contribute measurement data and context information. Indoor maps are enhanced by user-created Point-of-Interests. The indoor positioning platform respects privacy. There’s a demo project going on in Helsingi Kamppi Center.
Local Interaction takes social-networking and location-based services indoors: find your friends based on indoor positioning, browse nearby places on indoor maps, add media and comments to indoor places. All of this is easy to access on your web-enabled phone.
Point & Find enables people on the move to access information and services on the Internet, simply by pointing a camera phone at real-world objects. In the first beta version of Point & Find to be released in the near future in US and UK, users can instantly watch the film trailer, read the review, or find the closest cinema to buy tickets, simply by pointing a camera phone at a poster for a new movie.
The Morph concept device, launched alongside The Museum of Modern Art “Design and The Elastic Mind” exhibition, showcases some revolutionary leaps being explored by Nokia Research Center in collaboration with the Cambridge Nanoscience Centre in United Kingdom. The nanoscale technologies that will potentially create a world of radically different devices open up an entirely new spectrum of possibilities.
Written on September 4, 2008 – 10:53 am Robin Wauters, Next web enthusiast & Plugg organizer
I genuinely believe there will be a lot of interesting developments in the mobile industry during the next 5 years that will come from a number of innovative startups, but it’s hard not to get equally excited about the power play between the main vendors and mobile OS distributors.
I’m looking forward to the competition between Apple / iPhone / App Store, Google with the massively potential Android (and “Chrome for Mobile”?), Microsoft with its large Windows Mobile market share and its upcoming Skymarket application store, and not to mention Nokia with its huge bet on Symbian.
Nokia announced about two months ago that it intended to fully acquire Symbian for €264 million (or $410 million) and turn the software over to the Symbian Foundation. This is a group of nearly 30 companies including AT&T, LG, Motorola, NTT DOCOMO, Sony Ericsson, STMicroelectronics, Texas Instruments, and Vodafone that seeks to turn Symbian into a royalty-free mobile software platform focused on converged communications.
The Nokia / Symbian acquisition has now come (almost) full circle with Samsung backing out and selling its stake to the Finnish mobile giant.
And the numbers are looking good for Symbian too: during the second quarter, Symbian launched on 19.6 million devices, up just 5 percent from 18.7 million for the same period the year before. Symbian also reported that it had 92 phone models in development (the highest ever achieved), an increase of 48 percent on the 62 models in development during Q2 2007.
Written on August 22, 2008 – 7:39 pm Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Cnet reports that Nokia has announced a deal with travel guide empire Lonely Planet to sell mobile versions of their books to Nokia Maps 2.0 users. Traveling Nokia users will be able to download information for than 100 cities - and that’s just the first shipment.
This perfectly fits into Nokia’s plans to become a service company. To honor this strategy, the Finnish company earlier acquired Navteq ($8.1 billion) and geo localization social network Plazes (undisclosed)
What struck me about the partnership, is the price for each download. Nokia users will have to pay €7.99 to download the maps and background info to their mobile. I’m pretty sure people would be willing to pay this if there were no free alternatives. Isn’t it about time for some travel sites to offer some?
Of course there are services like Tripsay (review here) and Wikitude, which are accessible via mobile phone. Wikitude even works like a location based service, offering you Wikipedia pages based on your GPS position. But the problem is, mobile Internet in other countries than your own is way too expensive.
As long as international data plans aren’t mainstream, mobile travel guides are not so interesting when traveling abroad. What we really need, is a service that offers travel guides of great quality which can be installed as apps. Maybe they are around already, but not really salient. But as soon these guides become more popular, Nokia and Lonely Planet will only reach the hardcore fans and those afraid of new ideas. The rest will be savvy enough to look it up for free. So Tripsay, Wikitude, and competitors.., wake up!
Written on August 19, 2008 – 1:20 pm Robin Wauters, Next web enthusiast & Plugg organizer
Research agency Canalys has thoroughly analyzed the smart phone market in the EMEA region, and has come to a number of conclusions worth sharing.
First and foremost, it’s a growth market. Smart phone shipments reached 12.6 million units in Q2 2008, up 28% on the figure one year ago. Even though that’s actually a slowed growth compared to the figure put forward for the first quarter (year-over-year growth of 44%), this makes Q2 the second biggest quarter in terms of volume ever. Canalys estimates that smart phones represented 13% of all mobile phone shipments.
Nokia is still leading the market with over 71% market share, even if their competitors in this segment are taking up market share at a much faster pace. The other vendors in the top five posted much higher than average year-on-year growth, with second-placed RIM closing the market share gap by several points, and HTC, Motorola and Samsung more than doubling their shipments. Canalys cites Apple as an upcoming competitor with the launch of the iPhone 3G in several European countries.
According to Canalys’ estimates, 58% of the smart phones shipped in EMEA in Q2 had integrated Wi-Fi, 13% had touch screens and 38% had integrated GPS.
But are these high-end features being used?
“Today, many owners are not making full use of their smart phone’s features,” said Canalys senior analyst Pete Cunningham. “Concern over usage costs is still a big barrier, though wider availability of flat rate data plans will help, and usability still needs to improve for certain applications on many devices. People are also wary of draining their battery and not being able to make calls. Battery life isn’t helped by having GPS and Wi-Fi turned on, nor by having a large, bright screen for navigation or web browsing. But there is clear demand for those features and applications, and advances in battery technology would enable quite substantial changes in usage patterns, with all the service revenue benefits that would bring.”
In a previous survey of 4,000 mobile phone users in March, Canalys found that battery life was the aspect of their phone people were least satisfied with.
Written on July 24, 2008 – 5:18 pm Robin Wauters, Next web enthusiast & Plugg organizer
Microsoft, Yahoo, Google and Facebook are not the only high-profile businesses losing key executives these days. Mike Baker, who became VP and head of Nokia Interactive Advertising after the acquisition of mobile advertising company Enpocket (where he was CEO), has decided to leave the Finnish mobile giant to get his kicks elsewhere.
August 8 will be his final day with the global handset manufacturer. Baker had been busy expanding Nokia Media Network’s reach from parts of Europe and Asia to a more global audience extending to the United States, South America, and more of Europe. The network brought in marquee publishers such as Hearst, Reuters, Discovery, and AccuWeather. Nokia has named a new head of its ad unit: longtime Nokia exec Tom Henricksson will most probably replace Baker.
Baker says he learned a lot during his year at Nokia, but that deep down he’s an entrepreneur who loves building companies from scratch.
“There’s so much going on in the digital advertising space, and it’s a great time to be doing that,” he said. “I’ve long been a personal investor in companies in the space. I’m going to do a little bit of consulting, and do some investing. That will keep me busy for a bit anyhow,” Baker told ClickZ.
On a sidenote: Venturebeat will be less thrilled with the news. The blog recently added Baker to its speaker list for its first MobileBeat conference, which is about to kick off as I’m writing this.
Written on June 23, 2008 – 4:02 pm Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
TechCrunch broke the news today: Nokia has acquired Berlin-based Plazes for an undisclosed amount. The service - founded by Felix Petersen - allows its users to track the places, activities and people in their lives. Sounds like Twitter and Jaiku right? But it isn’t completely the same, as the location is Plazes core feature. You don’t have to mention you’re in Berlin, it shows up in a Google map. Updates can be send by SMS or a mobile app (soon also on the iPhone).
Felix Petersen
There’s one other important difference though, while Twitter is U.S.-based and Finnish Jaiku was sucked up by Google, Plazes however, will remain European. Their first financial backing came from European private equity firm Doughty Hanson, which invested €2.7 million. The second round of funding DOES have an American touch to it, as Plazes received €1 million in total from Marc Andreessen (US), Esther Dyson (US), and Martin Varsavsky (Argentina). But that’s all there is. Plazes will stay in Berlin and remain member of the European tech family. And that is good for Europe. Just so you know, Loic Le Meur feels the same about it.
So what will happen next? Most likely, Plazes will become a standard Nokia app - installed on all its phones. Here’s what Felix himself (or his ghost blogger) writes:
The team is very excited to be able to further develop the Plazes service that is online today together with Nokia. If all goes well, in the near future plazes will be made available to millions of Nokia customers both online and on millions of mobile devices.
I hope geo localization is ready for its big break-through.
Wanna know how the Plazes office and Felix’ home looks like? Check the MTV Cribs-like video we shot in January.
Written on April 8, 2008 – 5:56 pm Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
In a discussion on TechCrunch about where Europe’s own Silicon Valley would emerge, some interesting suggestions were made (warning: many links to specific comments follow). From Moscow to Lisbon and from Estonia to London.
The latter was the most mentioned location, followed by Finland and Switzerland. Finland has an USP that is their biggest pro and con at the same time: Nokia. On the one hand, it’s THE European tech company, on the other: it sucks up all the talent.
Switzerland would be a fair option, since it’s an innovative country and home of some important venture capitalists like Index Ventures. Yet a new development makes the question even more complicated: Nokia has just announced that it would establish a research center in Lausanne. It will be a joint lab with two Swiss federal institutes of technology. It will open its doors in June. According to All About Symbian, the research agenda will focus on persuasive communications:
Exploring new interaction experiences and technologies utilizing all the human senses;
Services and applications based on the user’s context, such as location, and personal preferences, e.g.,
information provided by sensors within a mobile device or in the surrounding world;
Internet services and technologies - enriching the Internet experience on mobile devices.
Nokia’s Chief Technology Officer Bob Iannucci said to Reuters that Nokia ’sees the fusing of the digital and physical worlds as a key objective in mobility.’
So, will this cause some sort of local brain drain? Kai Lemmetty from Floobs told me during The Next Conference that this is the case in Finland. Nokia just picks out the talent and makes them an offer they can’t refuse. As you can imagine, this is deadly for local start-up action. And a good start-up atmosphere is one of the most important conditions for a Silicon Valley-like area. So all you European start-up experts, please lend me your thought on this matter.
Written on December 2, 2008 – 4:20 pm
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Written on October 14, 2008 – 3:08 pm
Written on September 4, 2008 – 10:53 am
Written on August 22, 2008 – 7:39 pm
Research agency 
Microsoft, Yahoo, Google and Facebook are not the only high-profile businesses losing key executives these days. 
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