Nokia's new strategy poses a lot of questions

I've just completed two days in Singapore as a guest of Nokia, hearing about its vision for internet services on mobile devices, which the company has dubbed Ovi (apparently a Finnish word meaning 'gateway'). The presentations were big on vision but unfortunately short on detail - I suspect because much of that detail is yet to be determined. What does seem clear is that Nokia has grown tired of waiting for partners to create the models to grow services such as down-loadable music, maps, games and internet services, and is setting out to build them itself.

What remains to be seen however is whether Nokia can wrestle together enough of the component parts to make its vision a reality. Providing mobile services means untangling the different motivations of groups as diverse as application developers, handset makers, infrastructure companies and telcos. While they will usually point at growth in data traffic as being their mutual goal, they often differ in their view as to how that goal can be reached - and who will make the money once they all get there.

Nokia is starting with music and games as its cornerstone services. The music service will be up and running in the first half of 2008, in direct competition with Apple's iTunes. It's a somewhat belated effort from a company that prides itself on having sold more music-capable devices than any other - around 200 million multimedia phones - and was no doubt prompted by Apple's success with iTunes and the iPhone.

The second offering - games - sees the evolution of Nokia's failed N:Gage dedicated games handsets, by reinventing N:Gage as a platform for games development that will provide commonality across new phones. Hopefully this will mean fewer porting issues for developers (up to 40% of the development effort of a mobile game goes into porting it to the different multimedia settings on hundreds of different handsets), but then we have heard that promise before also.

At its best, Nokia's Ovi strategy may kickstart the otherwise slow progress of the mobile content industry. At the very least, it is a step in the right direction from a company that has previously been reticent to take a leading position in the industry's development.