Services, such as maps and music downloads, will dictate how consumers select their mobile phones, and hardware will adapt to meet this trend, said Tero Ojanper
“The consumer expects more. What can your phone do for me?” Ojanper
To answer the mobile market’s demand for services, Nokia is preparing to launch the Ovi mobile application store later this month. The store, announced in April, will feature software programs as well as games and videos, said Ojanper
The mobile application market will develop as the industry shapes it, he said. Sharing software sales revenue with developers must be handled in a way that benefits developers and businesses. Companies that retain too great of a cut from app sales will deter developers from a mobile OS.
“If the industry takes too much, there will be no interest. It will hurt our platform,” he said.
While Nokia plans to monitor applications submitted to Ovi, the company wants the store to be as open as possible, Ojanper
“Working with carriers, there may be some apps that are too bandwidth intensive,” Ojanper
Nokia’s version of openness includes allowing its Symbian mobile OS to enable downloads from other mobile application stores, Ojanper
Ultimately, Ojanper
This application “will show where friends are, what they are listening to and use messaging to reach them. It is connecting these functions.”
Ojanper
Ovi Share will be integrated with Nokia phones and some Web sites, he said. To Nokia, this means that a user takes a photo with a phone’s camera and simultaneously uploads the image to social-media sites like Facebook and Flickr.
Elevating the role of services also means that hardware will be designed around software, he said. While this mentality did not always exist at Nokia, “that is about to change and is part of this overall transformation” to emphasize services on top of a device, Ojanper
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