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What I like most in Nokia’s strategy is its constant ability to look forward and move ahead with the changes. Nokia Flagship Store announcements already positioned Nokia with an independant retail strategy, it’s obvious that once there, there’s a different world on top of selling devices…

There has been a lot of fingertip heating since Nokia launched its Ovi Internet Services, a predictable, but smart move by Nokia for regular mTrends readers The idea is to pull the Nokia Music Store, N-Gage, Nokia Maps, and all future Nokia services into a single gateway of integrated service offerings. You can view yesterdays’ webcast anouncements here.

Nokia has been very active in the convergent area’s of internet and mobility services. With a solid 38% marketshare (some 900 million active customers!), the company has always played a leading role in the mobile value chain and knows a lot about its consumer habits. Nokia also has been releasing some really great N-Series devices since last year, the experiences gathered from those popular high-end devices are now finetuned and sharpened resulting in 4 new mobile devices (to be released before year-end).

I have been lucky to be able to experiment with Nokia Maps and I like the service a lot, it’s actually an awesome experience available on a mobile phone. The N95 with its build-in GPS makes geographical search really context relevant and opens the path for a lot of new kinds of services linked to locations. Personally I believe more in a user-driven community services and tools build model for the future such as Plazes and Dopplr build on Google Maps api’s but time will tell which services consumers will finally choose for and use.

The N-Gage portal is all about Nokia’s next-gen games (reserve your player name now!) where game fans will have more and more options to play multiplayer games in a constantly connected world - Instant Media Now! Web 2.0 has had a huge influence on the game development with regards to user-generated content, social networking and general connectivity. Watch Digital Chocolate in this next-gen game content space, not to underestimate the - also yesterday anounced - Sony-Ericsson Playstation Phone, yes… real device convergence is happening!

Another great move into internet service offerings is that Nokia and Microsoft have joined forces to provide customers with a new suite of Windows Live services specifically designed for Nokia devices. Starting today Nokia customers in eleven countries with compatible S60 devices can download the new suite enabling access to Windows Live Hotmail, Windows Live Messenger, Windows Live Contacts and Windows Live Spaces. Smart move knowing there’s some 465 million Microsoft Messenger clients today!

The downside of that deal (and biggest surprise to me yesterday) was not the anouncement of the Nokia Music Store itself but the decision that Nokia will use Microsoft PlayReady technology for “flexible access to digital entertainment“. Flexible? How flexible is the next question to me then, while Apple unveiled a higher quality DRM-Free Music with EMI on iTunes in April, Nokia goes the opposite direction with Microsoft?

I tried to find more detailed information on how restrictive the DRM will be but couldn’t find anything relevant but this Microsoft PlayReady White Paper, despite the many anouncements yesterday. BoingBoing reported the new music store will allow for over-the-air downloads,

“currently priced at 1 Euro a song and 10 Euro-a-month all-you-can-eat subscriptions that will work on your PC. (It’s not entirely clear if you’ll be able to download songs to your PC on the all-you-can-eat and also sync them to your Ovi-compatible phone. The verbiage I’m seeing is “streaming,” so it seems unlikely.)”

Most probably Nokia will decide on a country-per-country basis, depending on the distributor. Now, don’t get me wrong, I don’t want to sound as a pirate protecter but I’m just worried as a consumer. mTrends readers know about my rants and experiences with this topic (for an overview check my DRM Free At Last! post).

I’m completely in favour of the OPEN DRM model (buy once, use everywhere!): I buy the digital content once but I am able to carry and transfer the song/video/movie everywhere on my different devices and pc’s and share it with my family and friends. Companies really need to learn to TRUST the consumers, illegal downloading always existed and will always exist in a minor form but as a consumer I can only urge to give us a fair DRM, especially for those consumers who want to buy digital content.

One more example here below of how DRM-restrictive content works for the consumer - and then I really hope I don’t have to write on this anymore

On my summer holidays, besides my fully stored N95, I took a 2GB USB-stick with me with full of music (legally bought CD’s imported as mp3’s) to be played wherever the occasion appeared. Now when compiling my summer music collection, I mixed up with some songs I bought on iTunes… At a certain moment, at a party, someone was asking for some kind of artist I had on my music-stick, we copied it to the iBook available connected to the speakers, when everybody around the pool was excited to hear that song, the machine responded “need permission to play this song, please fill-in your password” - hell, we weren’t even connected to the internet. Now, you think this is fair? Flexible? Helping the artists? Create more business? Come on (big) guys, please get real!

NOTE: it would be great if any Nokia or Microsoft rep could provide some details on the DRM restrictions that will be used (or not) using PlayReady

5310, 5610, Analysis, convergence, Cool Devices, devices, Entertainment, Games, Internet services, location, maps, mobile cell, Mobile Games, Mobile Lifestyle, mobile music, mobile web, Music, music phone, N Series, N81, n95, nokia, Nokia Music Store, Operators, ovi, phones, s60, series, social media, Trends, usability, XpressMusic

I had the pleasure to test some of the Nokia Nseries phones: the N80i (Internet Edition), the N73, the N91 and the N93. This post as a resume of my experiences the last weeks using the phones on various occasions, trying out different functionalities on all of them.

Nokia announced in 2005 a new sub-brand called Nokia Nseries. It is a product family consisting mobile, multimedia computers. These devices support digital media services from the area of music, video, photography, games and Internet. They all connect to internet using high-speed wireless technologies being ideal for people who spend lot of time on the Internet.

What makes Nokia Nseries different from many other devices is the fact they all are multi-functional. Every device brings quite advanced features like high-resolution camera sensors, powerful music codec’s, FM radio and 3D graphic support for games. To differentiate products within the product family, devices can carry unique experiences like digital TV reception to device, optical zoom for camera, or hard disk drive to store large number of songs on device.

I am not going to focus on the technical specifications and capabilities of the phones, there have been a lot of other sites and blogs doing that before, instead I’m going to focus how I use the phones and which functionalities I particularly like about the Nseries phones. In general, believe me, the overal capabilities and quality of the phones is just remarkable and impressive; Nokia is without a doubt the undisputed leader of the next generation of phones to come; in any case I haven’t seen anyone coming closer lately.

The basic Nokia functionalities I use daily on all 4 devices are:

• Contacts/Calendar
• Messaging/Email
• Web Browsing
• RSS Feed Reader
• Podcasting tool
• Camera for Pictures and/or Video
• Music Player
• FM Radio

The Symbian OS on all S60 phones is now regularly updated and can be easily downloaded and installed OTA directly to your phone or using a USB connection to your PC. A lot of additional and functional software is available too. I have been playing around with various 3rd party mobile apps, tools and software without problems.

I haven’t been going into details on the office tools available like Quick Office but I have been playing beaming PDF documents to the phones and use them as on-the-spot mini presentations to show something quickly while on the road, always handy I must say… There’s definitely a lot more to check and tryout in this area but I’ll focus on this later.

Richard just published an article I wrote on the N80 (Internet Edition) and Nokia’s Gizmo Project: Phone-to-Phone VoIP. You can read about my latest experiences making international internet calls with the Nokia N80i at Read/WriteWeb.

Since my holidays in August, I use the N91 as my all-in-one multimedia machine carrying my favourite music everywhere and plug it into whatever sound system available; I was sceptical at first (I was one of those iPod die-hards!) but the N91 has become much more than just an iPod replacement for me. Some might found the phone heavy and big (it is!) but for me as of now, it is my favourite phone - I like when them toys are solid I can do anything I want to do with it and I can easily do it. You can read more about my N91 holiday experiences here.

For the Nokia music and podcasting fans, check out the Nokia Podcasting blog with lots of useful tips and fresh info on the podcasting application for your mobile phone.

Mobile Magazine elected the Nokia N73 Phone of the Year in France. The phone has a lot of the same capabilities as the other phones in this post but it is lighter, thinner and has a big TFT screen (256K colours, 240 x 320 pixels, 36 x 48 mm) and a 3.2-mega-pixel camera. The quality of the pictures is quite impressive for a camera phone, even if you’re used taking pictures with a 5-mega-pixel Canon digital camera. I like this phone a lot, it’s has a very easy and simple way to flip the phone to take one-click pictures.

If you want to see the quality of the pictures I shot the last weeks, check here at my Flickr account - Flickr recently added a new feature to select pictures by device but unfortunately I could not select or organise my pictures yet taken by device, would have been great to have that possibility for this post

So this brings us last but not the least to the N93, the all-in-one video camera and viewer. I like the interface of this phone a lot too - the 4-ways to flip and use the phone - it’s heavy and big but the keypad and its keys are very easy to use, after all it’s a video camera. Only the side navigation joystick is a bit too small for my fingers to use easily the extra functions. The quality of the video is exceptional and unique for a camera phone - try to plug and watch your video footage on your TV monitor. Check for yourself the quality of this daylight short here below taken yesterday in Barcelona.

More video footage I took with the N93 can be viewed in my Under The Radar - Mobility Rules! post and at vpod.tv portal (use tag mtrends).

Some minor points I want to mention:

• low battery life of the N80 (couldn’t figure out why yet?)
• flash or quality of the evening and night pictures is not really acceptable enough
• the ticker noise the N93 camera makes when zooming in or out

But hey, these are still phones, aren’t they?

Nokia released some interesting statistics recently on how people really use new services on their S60 phones. On the predictable success of new tech objects, I’d like to close here and quote Steve Jobs in a Newsweek article from last year ‘Good for the Soul‘:

The way you can tell that you’re onto something interesting is if everybody who knows about the project wants one themselves, if they can’t wait to go out and open up their own wallets to buy one. That was clearly the case with the iPod. Everybody on the team wanted one.

During the weeks I tested and carried the phones, anyone who saw one of the Nokia Nseries phones I used, wanted one, that’s a very good sign…

I wonder how many of them were sold during the christmas holidays… and what Nokia is going to show next at 3GSM World Congress… at least the N95 looks very promising yet!

Analysis, Bluetooth, Cool Devices, Mobile Apps, Mobile Lifestyle, mobile music, Mobile OS, Mobile RSS, mobile video, mobile web, Moblog, n73, n80i, n91, n93, n95, nokia, nseries, podcasts, s60, usability, user experience, wi fi

Happy New Year to all my readers! 2007 starts with a link to another post I wrote for Read/WriteWeb. After the incredible repsonse and feedback on the “Understanding Mobile 2.0” post I wrote early in December, here’s another one in the series of mobile disruptive technologies.

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about my first Gizmo VoIP call I made from my computer to a mobile phone but now you can read about my latest experiences making international internet calls with a Nokia N80i to another one, perfect quality, for a couple of callout cents only. Can you dig?

Head over to read the complete story at Read/WriteWeb.

3G, Analysis, Cool Devices, Mobile Apps, Mobile Lifestyle, Mobile OS, nokia, Nokia N80i, Predictions, Read/WriteWeb, s60, startups, Trends, usability, user experience, voip, web 2.0, wi fi

Nokia to unveil the Nserie Music Collection. From Darla’s blog:

As you can see, the N73 and N70’s have been made over in a new color… black is back! The N91 gets an external and internal make-over. Also dressed in black, the new N91 has upgraded its HD from 4gb to 8gb, hence the device name… Nokia N91 8GB. Just when you thought you couldn’t have any more music. That should keep someone musically entertained for a long time!

Nokia is definately serious in challenging the ipod right in it’s heart, the music (& video) player, while offering all those extra and excellent mobile phone features.

I have been writing on the Nokia N91 is (busy) killing the ipod before here. The story got picked up at geek.com - Is the N91 really an iPod killer? where an interesting debate is brewing amongst readers.

Related to Nokia’s music phones and one of my favourite apps I use, the Nokia podcasting application: Apple is now trying to claim the term podcast. Read more about it on Robert Scoble’s blog, Wired News, and The Guardian. I think Apple is not applying a good strategy here, maybe because competitors, such as Nokia, are using podcasting-named applications on their phones or devices? And now with Microsofts’ Zune coming in, it won’t get better, more and more podcasts will be created and listened to… for sure!

As an Apple fan at heart, I think they don’t have a right to claim the term “podcast”, the term submerged on the internet - inspired on the ipod - and was used before Apple introduced it into iTunes, trying to claim it will not help their excellent credibility market status they have amongs consumers nowadays. Some common sense cannot hurt these days in business… On this regard, I would like to point you to the famous Marx Brothers and Warner Brothers quarrel:

Note: The following is an excerpt from pages 159-165 of the PDF version (pages 147-153 of the print version) of the book Free Culture by Lawrence Lessig, published under a Creative Commons License. A free, legal copy of the entire PDF of this book can be found here. The content of the original Groucho Marx letter can be found here.

“There’s a famous story about a battle between the Marx Brothers and Warner Brothers. The Marxes intended to make a parody of Casablanca. Warner Brothers objected. They wrote a nasty letter to the Marxes, warning them that there would be serious legal consequences if they went forward with their plan.This led the Marx Brothers to respond in kind. They warned Warner Brothers that the Marx Brothers “were brothers long before you were.”The Marx Brothers therefore owned the word brothers, and if Warner Brothers insisted on trying to control Casablanca, then the Marx Brothers would insist on control over brothers.An absurd and hollow threat, of course, because Warner Brothers, like the Marx Brothers, knew that no court would ever enforce such a silly claim. This extremism was irrelevant to the real freedoms anyone (including Warner Brothers) enjoyed. ”

However, Nokia might be better introducing “Ncasting” for their Nseries podcasting

3G, Analysis, Announcements, apple, audiocasting, audiofeed, Cool Devices, creative commons, Free Culture, ipod, lawrence lessig, marx brothers, Mobile Lifestyle, mobile music, n70, n73, n91, n91 8gb, ncasting, nokia, Nokia N91, podcast, podcasts, s60, user experience, warner brothers

(*) sub-title: “Connected Holidays (with the N91)”

Back from a 2-week holiday… time flies… just realizing it’s the end of the week… and I haven’t blogged yet (!) … while there are so many interesting things happening to write about…

Before I left with my family and some friends to enjoy The Emporada Triangle I managed to buy the Nokia N91, the phone David Williams from Nokia demonstrated to me in November last year in London and which has been described in the blogosphere as the iPod killer.

Regulars of m-trends know about my passion for music-on-the-move and I had the pleasure to experience the Apple iPod 40Gb for over a year until it crashed unluckily and unreparable, too bad for such a solid music device. I decided to wait for the first real music-phone, it came later then expected but it has been worth the wait.

Apart from some adress book sync problems I managed to counter quickly thanks to Justin’s post and some Mac hacks here, my whole experience with the N91 has been just brilliant!

The first thing that impressed me was the quality of the sound watching a Real Player video… impressive. I added some 500 of my favourite tunes to the 4Gb harddrive, synchronised from my iTunes library and created new playlists on the fly while I connected the device to a hi-fi stereo… this is the first phone I know of with whom you can create instant parties everywhere, anytime I have been writing before on my doubts how to scroll big music libraries without a scroll wheel (as the ipod) but this doubt vanished completely after the first use.

The rest of the HD space I used mainly to download some podcasts with the Nokia Podcasting Application, I also installed Shozu (probably one of the best mobile apps around!) to upload some holiday pics with a click to Flickr.

Our host had a wi-fi connection in the house so I could browse the mobile web the first time for free (!) The latest Nokia Web Browser for S60 is probably the best I have experienced on a phone, with it’s zooming capabilities you can ‘browse’ a webpage the way you want it. The same browser lets you subscribe and store your favourite feeds; I can tell you I haven’t missed a thing on the news side though I had planned to disconnect completely for at least a couple of days

I could perfectly browse my MyStrands Mobile account, I had some problems though listening to the Real Player audio previews due to some tough operator proxy settings. I read Justin Oberman selected my Connecting Cultures through Music article as Post of the Week of his Carnival of the Mobilists #41 hosting. I’ll accept the invitation for the brownies, Paula! I also installed the Free Mobilists’ Mobile RSS Reader package so I stayed tuned on my mobilists friends’ feeds, nicely bundled.

I wouldn’t type loads of email with that phone - there are other models for that, like the BlackBerry killer, but I could easily configure my regular email account and check my mails once in a while. I read Caroline launched the Wireless Industry Partnership and she informed me the 2nd CTIA Gathering of the Mobilists was fully booked for the 2nd time, great!

Well, this is basically a sum-up of the apps I used the most upto now, there’s still lots to discover - oh that SIP Client - and Visual Radio, no stations avilable yet in Catalonia… but too much to mention in one post, so I will have to update you on more experiences I guess…

So, what has this article to do with my title? Simply, it looks much more obvious that Nokia can add now easily more music features and storage to it’s phones than seeing Apple creating all those phone features to the iPod…

And oh btw: one of the features I appreciate the most is the ‘one touch button’ to switch from music listening to an incoming call and the ability to create a ringtone from any song in my library. You won’t get bored with this phone, Nokia is listening to it’s users… Mobile 2.0 is definately here… Driewerf hoera!

… Then he came home and did a Phone Software Update… better get used to it!

3G, Analysis, apple, Cool Devices, ethnographics, Fun, iphone, ipod, mobile 2.0, Mobile Apps, Mobile Content, Mobile Lifestyle, mobile music, Mobile OS, Mobile RSS, mobile web, Moblog, n91, nokia, Nokia N91, podcasts, s60, social media, usability, user experience, wi fi

Nokia takes the lead in bringing podcasts to mobile and I think that’s great news!

I wrote a couple of weeks ago about the Nokia Podcasting Application for S60 at gotomobile.com, now the beta application for the Nokia N91 is available for download here. Thanks for the tip, Steven!

Steven at Nokia informs me that this version is compatible with other S60 3rd edition devices, but not optimized for them yet. The beta is English only with the multilanguage version expected late Fall 2006. So for the ones out there with an N91, go out there and try it. For the ones who don’t know me yet, mobile podcasting (also called mobcasting) is one of my favourite mobile applications.

The Nokia Podcasting application allows you to find, subscribe to and download podcasts over the air with your Nokia N91. After downloading a podcast, you can listen to or watch it when you want.

You can choose whether the Podcasting application uses Wireless LAN (requires WLAN network access) or GPRS/WCDMA packet data (requires a packet data plan) to download podcasts to your Nokia N91.

These are the kind of applications that make the difference as to which phone I’m going to buy next, especially since my iPod broke (yes they do!) some time ago.

Now some music recognition and recommendation service (Musicstrands?) build around those radio podcasts and I’m all set to buy mobile music as I would like to… Actually not really, I still need that flat rate data plan from my operator - guys, what are you waiting for?

3G, Announcements, mobcasting, mobcasts, mobile 2.0, Mobile Apps, Mobile Content, Mobile Lifestyle, mobile music, mobile podcast, Music, nokia, Operators, podcasting, podcasts, s60, web 2.0, wi fi

I got this one from Fabien Girardin who’s currently writing his Ph.D. thesis on collaborative work in the context of mobile and ubiquitous environments. Check his 7.5th Floor blog, loads of interesting stuff in there… makes you wonder quite often - shouldn’t we all do this a bit more?

Fabien pointed me out to a presentation he saw at reboot8, one of the interesting conferences out there “for the practical visionaries who are at the intersection of digital technology and change.” The presentation is from Chris Heathcote, a user experience manager who got inspired on the Nokia Mobile Web Server project.

If you hadn’t heard from the project yet, this is where mobile is heading soon, just consider:

“For quite some time it has been possible to access the Internet using mobile phones, although the role of the phone has strictly been that of a client. Considering that modern phones have processing power and memory on par with and even exceeding that of servers of the early web, there really is no reason anymore why webservers could not reside on mobile phones and why people could not create and maintain their own personal mobile websites.”

The presentation called “Mobile 2.0, A Mobile Internet Manifesto - A provocative vision of mobile phones and other portable devices as true connected members of the Internet.” is definately original and interesting but need probably some more (speaking) input to understand all logic behind but it reveals different thinking, the one I have been waiting to see more of it. You can download a copy of the presentation at his anti-mega blog here.

Man, this is going to occupy my brain cells for some days at least… Keep rockin’ Chris!

3G, Analysis, collaborative systems, Mashup, mobile 2.0, Mobile Apps, mobile internet, Mobile Lifestyle, Mobile OS, mobile server, mobile web, Mobile Web Server, reboot, s60, user experience, web 2.0, wi fi, Wimax

It took me a couple of days to be able to digest the whole event with it’s many cocktails and parties surrounding. The best part for me were the many wonderfull people I met behind the companies, projects and blogs.

Apart from the fact that (finally) more people start noticing that there are nearly NO women working in mobile - just check for yourself here, there weren’t nearly NO American carriers or European operators present at 3GSM. Does this mean they will concentrate again on their core business or wasn’t there anything interesting to hype-up as mobile music did last year?

I haven’t seen any mindblowing stuff during the show, neither Yahoo or Google, but I noticed some interesting smaller projects and developments and there was some interesting news sometimes overlooked or who didn’t make it to the headlines…

Despite the enormous advertising effort of Motorola in the city (nearly no advertising boards were overlooked) not to be neglected as a mobile brand, none of their phones were mentioned in the Infosync’s Top Ten phones of the 3GSM Congress, the winner went to to the Sony Ericsson W950i, definately promising and mini-revolutionary design-wise but we’ll have to wait until Q3 of 2006 to see it on the market.

We could notice that (obviously) Microsoft is putting all its efforts to keep track with the pace of other mobile OS but to me the real leap ahead comes from Symbian. Last year still in a somehow hesitating position, it becomes clear that Symbian is the way to go to operate smart mobile devices. The anouncement of Nokia and Vodafone to work together to increase the use of S60 as a standard software platform is very significant.

Next to DoCoMo’s stand, S60 stand was one of my favourites. David showed me one of the most compelling prototype demo’s I have seen during the event: Music Guru, a conceptual prototype of a next generation 3G/PC music player, developed jointly by Vodafone Group R&D, MusicStrands and Adobe, promises anything you could ever imagine of social music projects such as last.fm or Pandora going mobile.

One of my personal favourites stays Minfizz who now created their Minifizz Popp’s, a beautifully designed avatar & looks builder for teenage girls to create their own avatars (mobile) online and save it as a wallpaper on their phone; on top including the possibility to create small blog-diaries to add emotional value to their avatars. The wet dream business model for operators?

But the demo I have been expecting for months now came from Berliner connection Markus Angermeier who showed me how powerfull Plazes will be on the mobile. For the insiders, some screenshots can be found on Felix Petersen’s Flickr stream.

And then the people! Mobile Sunday was so much fun and a perfect aperitif to what was yet to come. Some pictures can be found at Martin’s blog. The Mobilists gathering was too short for me to talk to everybody I would have liked to, so I suggest next time we’ll make it a longer event There seem to be quite some pictures of the evening circulating online, if you have some please suggest your link here so we can all share them. A nice photoshoot session of the evening has been uploaded to Flickr by Josep Ganyet. Thanks to all the mobilists and invitees for coming, I had a great time, I hope you had one too. And thanks also to Kelly Goto, Lisa and the people from Gotomedia for supporting this event. Many thanks to Russell Buckley for his continuous support of the gathering idea.

And final note to the best moblogger in town: without no doubt Kosmar, just check for yourself his impressive and most original collection of his 3GSM impressions here.

TAGS: 3GSM gotomobile mobile sunday barcelona mobilists plazes m-trends.org

3GSM, Cool Devices, Gathering Of The Mobilists, last.fm, minifizz, Mobile Apps, Mobile Events, Mobile Lifestyle, mobile music, musicguru, musicstrands, plazes, s60, symbian, Women in Mobile