Summary
Nokia needs to make this play work to ensure their 500million sales keep going as phones mutate into mini-laptops and voice is a small part of the offering.
Analysis
Nokia must be one of the best placed manufacturers to help make mobile web+cloud computing ubiquitous.
Making the web more accessible and constantly by your side will lead to
new markets and more sales for Nokia. To win, the access needs to be
instant and immediate (ie no 4 minute boot times before you
can actually launch the browser) and mobile phones can do this,
virtually anywhere. If the access is right, then Nokia can sell more equipment...
We seem to be entering a sweet spot where the processing power and storage of a cellphone rivals that of a laptop and the
operators are offering simpler, easily digestible tariffs. The consumer
fear of a USD1,000 bill is easing as the operators realise its better
for people to use the network than let it go unused: The UK operator
3's success with USB 3G modem shows 3G can work if the price is
controllable.
Nokia's doing lots of interesting things in this space. For me, the
more exciting product is the Nokia Internet table (currently available as
the n810, which is the third model in a 5 model experiment in a
non-cellphone, linux based portable computer). A community of early
adopters use open source to create meaningful applications for this
device. Nokia's learnings in this space are significant and must be
filtering down into their cellphone offerings. Imagine Nokia as
portable computer manufacturer - that's their route to be Number 1 on
the Mobile Web.
So a decent device and good value internet access will create a
platform that more people will use, without the headaches of carting a
laptop around. But what will they use it for?
Twitter or Facebook methinks. The need to be permanently connected to
your friends, email (Blackberry was just the beginning) and location
based services is almost mandatory for future generations. The
trade-off is your privacy, which gives advertisers the ability to
behaviourally target you. But that's not Nokia's concern, they can just
make more handsets...
