BARCELONA
// Nokia’s chief executive envisions a future
where the company competes as much with Google
as it does with traditional handset makers,
selling its internet-based services to users of
rival devices.
The Finnish company’s chief executive, Olli-Pekka
Kallasvuo, spoke to The National on the
sidelines of Nokia World, a two-day global
briefing event for partners, analysts and the
media.
He said it was simply “a question of evolution”
that would determine when Nokia services, like
maps and instant messaging, become available on
competing handsets.
“The mobile industry has been very good at
capturing value from adjacent industries,” he
said. “We have become the biggest camera
manufacturer, the biggest music player
manufacturer, and this will continue. In online
services, the mobile industry is again capturing
value, adding mobility to the -internet.”
Mr Kallasvuo, who has been at Nokia for almost
30 years and was named chief executive in 2006,
said a cultural transformation is underway at
the company, known historically as a research
and engineering powerhouse.
“We need to become more like an internet company
– but I’m not saying we want to become an
internet company, because that would mean saying
goodbye to what we are, and that’s not the
point,” he said. “We need to combine the new and
the old, and old is not a negative word here.”
In two keynote addresses today, Mr Kallasvuo and
his colleague, Anssi Vanjoki, the executive vice
president for markets at Nokia, laid out the
company’s ambitious strategy to redefine the
internet as a platform centred around the mobile
phone.
By allowing users to share their location and
movements with friends and create electronic
“tags” attached to physical locations, Nokia
hopes its phones will become the central devices
of an interconnected world.
“Instead of one internet, we will talk about
billions of internets,” Mr Kallasvuo said.
But the company is not the only major player
moving into the internet services business.
Mobile network operators, keen to diversify
their revenue streams, are also hoping to sell
value-added services like music downloads and
data storage to their customers.
Internet giants like Microsoft and Google are
looking increasingly to the mobile phone to
power the next boom in online advertising and
spending.
“I look at the list of people who are active in
our industry,” Mr Kallasvuo said, “and I am
saying to myself ‘you can compete with some of
them some of the time, but not all of them all
the time’. The right partnering is obviously
very important.”
Nokia has forged partnerships with network
operators in Europe to resell its web services,
branded as Ovi, to their customers.
In the Middle East, it has partnered with the
Cairo-based regional operator Orascom Telecom;
Mr Kallasvuo said the company is looking to
build more relationships with such networks. To
emphasise the company’s new direction, Nokia
today launched its new flagship device, the N97,
promising that it will be more closely
integrated with the internet than anything else
on the market.
The N97 uses a full touch-screen interface, like
the Apple iPhone, its hugely successful
competitor. But the screen slides upwards to
reveal a full keyboard, similar to that of
Nokia’s other high-end competitor, the
BlackBerry.
The company did not give specific details
regarding when the device will be available in
the Middle East. Many phones currently hitting
the market, like the Sony Ericsson Xperia and
the HTC G1, use a similar design.
But Nokia hopes that what will truly
differentiate the device is the way internet
services, like mapping and social networks, will
integrate into the phone.
Users will be able to perform a “physical
search” by pointing the camera phone at a nearby
landmark. Using a combination of global
positioning system location data and
picture-matching technology, Nokia’s
point-and-find service will identify the
landmark and provide information from the
internet.
The N97 is also designed as a primary storage
device for personal media like music and films,
coming with a 32 gigabyte hard drive, larger
than anything currently
available on the market.
Nokia plans to release the new phone in the
first half of next year, at an estimated price
of €550 (Dh2,560).
BARCELONA
// Nokia’s chief executive envisions a future
where the company competes as much with Google
as it does with traditional handset makers,
selling its internet-based services to users of
rival devices. 
