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Following Nokia’s last weeks’ thrilling N97 launch, I’d like to share some of my thoughts on other – less mediatised – announcements, and some other insights I learned about during the Nokia World event.

Most attention went obviously to the Nokia N97 (read an overview of reactions at Nokia Conversations) and its positioning in the competitive smartphone market, that besides the iPhone include rivals such as Research in Motion’s just-introduced BlackBerry Storm, two Windows Mobile smartphones, the Sony Ericsson X1, the HTC Touch Pro and Samsung’s Touchscreen Series; the race towards the coming netbook trend has started, led by the Netbook Apple rumours.

In this post I want to focus on Nokia’s  ongoing effort to bridge the digital divide, introducing affordable mobile devices and innovative new services for people in emerging markets and the huge opportunity that includes for Nokia, hence the title of my post (read as in North-South Divide).

 © Image Wikipedia

Nokia 1202

I had the chance to play with Nokia’s lowest cost mobile device to date, the Nokia 1202, currently offered at only 25 Euro (!) Developed specifically for people in rural areas, the Nokia 1202 includes a large dust resistant keypad and standard features like a flashlight and loud ringtones. What really stands out is the battery life – it has a standby time of up to 26 days and talk time of up to 9 hours, which is extremely valuable to people living in areas where they have to travel a long way (an often into towns) to get their devices charged.

Equally as significant is that this is a phone designed to be shared, by up to five individuals or families – the 1202 has multiple phone books and time and pre-paid tracker, meaning that each user can separate and manage their individual usage.
In addition to Nokia’s lowest cost handset to date, as well as its first handset for emerging markets with an integrated digital music player – the Nokia 1661 (estimated retail price of 30 EUR), the mobile phone manufacturer unveiled a range of services that leverage the power of the Internet.

S40 web browser based on webkit

One of things that I believe really important is the now integrated web browser support to access most web content through the service provider’s XHTML/HTML gateway. The latest version of Series 40, called Series 40 6th Edition, introduced a new browser based on the WebKit open source components WebCore and JavaScriptCore. The new browser delivers support for HTML 4.01, CSS2, JavaScript 1.5, and Ajax.

The Series 40 software platform is the world’s most widely used mobile device platform and found in hundreds of millions of devices. It provides communication applications such as telephone, messaging, email client with POP3 and IMAP4 capabilities and Internet browser; media applications such as camera, video recorder, music/video player and FM radio; and phonebook and other personal information management (PIM) applications such as calendar and tasks. S40 also supports Flash Lite applications. Digg? Check here to learn more about Nokia Web Technologies projects.

Nokia Messaging

Nokia also announced the launch of Nokia Messaging, which mobilizes consumer email and consumer instant messaging (IM) solutions on Nokia devices. Nokia also introduced the online portal for Mail on Ovi, which will enable PC users to create and access Ovi email accounts as well as gain cross access to other Ovi services with just a single sign-on account.

Nokia Messaging will launch commercially in the first quarter of 2009 in Australia, Finland, Germany, the Netherlands, Singapore, Spain, the United Kingdom and Venezuela, and in select countries later in the year. Agreements with key operators will establish Nokia Messaging as an operator supported service so that users who purchase a data plan that includes Nokia Messaging will be able to take full access of the built-in push email and IM access without additional service charges.

Nokia has a big advantage to its competitors knowing that it can give millions of consumers access to email and IM accounts from Yahoo! Mail® and Yahoo! Messenger®, Windows Live Hotmail, Gmail and Google Talk, and AOL Mail as well as email solutions from thousands of ISPs around the world on the majority of Nokia devices. This is a major strategic move from Nokia and starts the real ‘battle of the titans’ (read Russell Buckley’s post on this topic) with Nokia starting to challenge Google on some of its core products.

Will Google be faster getting its products on mobile phones or will Nokia be faster offering its new mobile & web connected products on the device? That is still the only real question of the game in mobile. To date, Nokia has shipped about 200 million devices that immediately enable the launch of its messaging solutions, including Nokia Messaging, Mail on Ovi and corporate mobile email.

Considering this, follow what this means for other startup IM client aggregators like Meebo, Nimbuzz, eBuddy… With Trutap, a leading UK mobile startup, to let go almost 80% of its staff last week after failing to hit its window for a second round of funding.

Mobile Innovation in Developing Countries

Needles to point out the number of opportunities that lie ahead for Nokia – and other players in the mobile ecosystem in developing countries and an emerging continent such as Africa. The last 2 years, some African countries have known a tremendous growth in mobile. Check the World Cellular Information Service for latest statistics.

Check also the W3C Mobile Web in Developing Countries Wiki if you’re planning projects in this area. This wiki gathers information about successful stories (or failures) about deployment of ICT in Developing Countries in general, and more specifically using mobile phones. Those stories and use cases are essential to understand what are the most useful (type of) applications and content for rural communities and under-privileged populations. Other sites like mobileactive.org and Now Public – crowd powered media – have a lot resources on development challenges and South-South solutions.

An example including GreenTech effort is the strong movement by groups such as Safaricom in Kenia to reduce diesel usage by integrating wind turbines or solar panels into the systems powering cellular sites. Check the Africa Cell Phone Provider’s Ingenuity Turns to Wind and Solar article written by Sam Aola Ooko:

(…) Currently, remote cell sites across Africa are typically powered by diesel generators with lead acid batteries providing back-up power should the diesel generators fail. With increasing costs of diesel fuel, concerns over diesel emissions and high maintenance requirements of the diesel generators and lead acid batteries, (…) Supplying fuel in areas where the roads are very poor and armed escorts are sometimes required is very expensive. Local technology firms have come to the rescue of these cell phone providers to design and supply pilot wind/diesel hybrid systems at very remote base stations, the systems consisting mainly of a turbine on a tower, sealed batteries, and an inverter, with remarkable results. (…) One such firm is Winafrique Technologies, an integrated renewable energy resource company in Nairobi whose directors believe Africa’s wind and solar potential is far from tapped. (…)

Read also Ericsson’s recent Wind-Powered Cell Tower announcement.

Knowing that Solar Powered Battery Charger technology is becoming mature and more widespread, this opens more possibilities for locals to start using mobile devices anywhere they go. Check the SOLIO Universal Portable Solar Charger (image right) that delivers currently one hour of sun = 15 mins talk time or 40 mins of MP3 music.

There is a real revenue generating strategy behind Nokia Maps, focused on service deployment on a global scale, including emerging markets – btw I saw a really great and interesting Location-Based session at Nokia World. A seperate blogpost is needed to explain my thoughts on this. But here’s a teaser…

Ever heard of integrating A-GPS receiver on regular SIM cards?

BlueSky Positioning is approaching the established mobile positioning market from a very different perspective: by addressing the key barriers of poor accuracy and high cost, the company is developing solutions to enable mobile operators to deliver both mandatory and commercial location-based services (LBS) applications. BlueSky Positioning is incorporating satellite positioning capability into the SIM card. Their goal is to be the catalyst for the mass market uptake of location-enabled mobile communications.

Open-Source
With the Symbian Foundation aquisition now completed and more announcements made regarding more use of open-source technology, shows that also Nokia is embracing ‘open’ as a keyword for more growth offering consumer Internet services, as well as enterprise solutions and software. “In the longer perspective, Linux will become a serious alternative for our high-end phones,” Ukko Lappalainen, vice president at Nokia’s markets unit, told Reuters in an interview. “I don’t see anything in Android which would make it better than Linux maemo,” Lappalainen said.

Widgets vs. Apps?

Apple with its App Store has paved the way for the use of mobile applications, providing a truely great experience on the iPhone due to its ease-of-use and by creating a revenue model for iPhone application developers. Apple announced 300 million iPhone apps have been downloaded from its App Store since it opened in July. That is equal in 6 months what Getjar -  the world’s most popular mobile application distribution and developer community – needed in 2 years with Java, Symbian, Windows Mobile, BlackBerry, Palm and Flash Lite mobile games and applications downloads.

Nokia is betting on the use of Personalized Web Widgets. Widgets are powered by Nokia’s Web runtime. Today, Web runtime is an integral component of Nokia’s S60 smartphone software platform. S60 enables developers to build widgets using its Web runtime application development framework allowing developers to access device services including contacts, calendar, GPS, and multimedia. To find out more about developing widgets on S60 visit Forum Nokia.

Read also Mobile 2.0 pal, Dan Appelquist’s interview on W3C, the Mobile Web, Widgets and Content Transformation here for further exploration.

Apple is focusing on delivering supreme user experience, gaining a considerable market share in the mobile high-end device market; Nokia forecasts the mobile phone market in 2009 to contract by 5 % compared to 2008, while increasing its market share… Nokia is, apart from battling on the high-end device market, also focusing on very different market opportunities, the emerging markets are definately a key area for Nokia’s development in the future… Nokia will stay market leader for a while still, for sure.