03 October 2008

Nokia CEO Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo
Talks About Services and Symbian Foundation

Nokia is the world's largest cell phone and smartphone manufacturer by far, but the company will not be resting on its laurels, sad Nokia's CEO Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo In an interview with Information Week!

Despite its worldwide leadership in the handset market, the company's chief executive describes how Nokia is building its U.S. business beyond cell phones.

"The industry as whole is in the middle of a transformation, and it's a very exciting time," he added. "It's moving from a device industry to an experience industry, and we're making a conscious long-term effort to capitalize on that."

The company is in the midst of branching out to offers additional services and applications like multimedia, navigation, gaming, and location-based services. Nokia's CEO said he sees this as a way to not only draw more customers to Nokia handsets, but as an additional revenue generator.

Using music as an example, Kallasvuo said some Nokia handsets have long been capable of playing music. But the process for getting tunes on the handset could be frustrating, or mobile music services weren't living up to expectations. With this in mind, Nokia has recently launched its ambitious Comes With Music service gives people a year of unlimited access to the entire Nokia Music Store catalog with the ability to keep all downloaded tracks even after the year is over.

The company will be using its Ovi platform as a main door for its increased offerings of services and applications. But as handsets become convergence devices, Nokia knows this means industries will collide. For example, in the United States, Nokia's music service could be seen as a competitor with Verizon's and Sprint's own over-the-air music services. Nokia, which focuses on GSM wireless standard devices, does not offer phones for Verizon and Sprint because they use CDMA technology.

Additionally, companies like Apple and Google are putting a strong emphasis on mobile applications with the Apple App Store and the Android Market. Nokia said it's in a unique position to implement these services because of its broad base of consumers and large portfolio of handsets.

"In our case, we've got 1 billion people using Nokia devices as we speak," Kallasvuo said. "This is clearly a strong foundation to extend these services, and no one else has this kind of foundation."