Nokia Comes with Applications
Nokia offers a range of services that are very interesting to its community. There is the award-winning
Nokia Sports Tracker, a GPS-based activity tracker (cycling, running etc.) that runs on Nokia's
S60-powered smartphones and simplyfies to track training-relevant information such as speed, distance and time - with the appropriate
Polar wearlink transmitter even a new dimension monitoring one's heart-rate. It visualizes workouts and routes and makes this information sharable over the
Web and on
Facebook - even live!
And there is
Nokia Photo Browser that offers a picture viewing experience on the move wherever and whenever featuring visual 3D effects like an intuitive touch UI, a magnifying glass and face browsing. And there is even more apps available on
Nokia Beta Labs.
Nokia is the world's largest handset manufacturer and still holds a marketshare of 40% in both, traditional cellphones and modern smartphones, however its share in smartphones dropped rapidly more than 10% over the recent time. Nokia lost big to its competitors.
The ongoing success of
Apple (IPhone,
ITunes App Store) and other wireless products and services provider like the
Blackberry manufacturer
Research In Motion (
AppWorld) have set the current trend in the telecommunications sector and deliver a world-class mobile and internet experience featuring a triple play of hardware, software and service while a global series of
Googl's Android-powered smartphones (
HTC) distributed by the members of the
Open Handset Alliance has accelerated innovation in mobile and has given third-party developers a platform to sell their applications and on which they can build the next wave of killer applications (
Android Market).
What a surprise now! After introducing a couple of new strategies like '
Ovi' and '
Comes with Music', Nokia announced a giant AppStore called
Ovi Store.
A few quots from the
Forbes article:
'it will debut with a catalog of 20,000 items'
'it will ship pre-loaded on the company's new flagship handset, the N97 in June'
'has a custom-built "recommendation engine" that will recommend content based on users' preferences and those of their friends and family'
'thanks to the GPS chip in most Nokia phones, the store will also find content based on users' locations'
'Nokia also plans to use it as a distribution platform for other services, such as pushing software updates to users'
'won't block services that compete with its own products'
So Ovi Store is open to registered third-party developers, comes with active selling features, which underline the commercial character and a push mechanism for software updates, that the user is notified once an update is available. Excited whether it can compete with Apple's ITunes App Store and how mobile oprators think about it!
Labels: apple, bizdev, markets, mobility, nokia, strategy