Nokia talks up services push

NOKIA IS EVOLVING into a software firm if yesterday's press conference is anything to go by, with a lot of talk about software and services, but not a chip, screen or keypad in sight.

Following its joint presentation with Intel on the launch of Meego, the Finnish mobile phone giant continued to talk to the assembled journalists about the latest news from the company. However throughout both presentations hardware wasn't mentioned once, which struck us a a little odd.

During his part of the press conference, Nokia's CEO Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo, spoke about how, since the free addition of full turn by turn navigation to Ovi Maps last month, the application has seen more then 3 million downloads.

Apparently even the Ovi Store and Comes with Music aren't tanking as badly as most of us think.

Comes With Music has been expanded into the Middle East and is now available in 27 markets, while the related a-la-carte Ovi Music service is now available in 33 markets and is completely DRM-free.

The Ovi Store now has around a million downloads a day, still pretty slow going given the number of handsets out there, but according to Nokia the number of people shopping on the store doubles every month.

Over the course of the year, Nokia says it will continue refining the interface and hopes to include more languages, billing support, improvements and a few more apps to the collection as well.

As well as extolling the apparent success of its existing services, Kallasvuo mentioned two new schemes aimed predominately as the emerging markets.

The first is a pilot scheme called Nokia Money which aims to bring mobile banking and payments to emerging markets where millions of people now have mobile phones but still don't have access to banking services.

"There are four and a half billion phones in the world, but only 1.8 billion bank accounts," explained Kallasvuo.

The service is initially being trialled in partnership with Yes Bank in Pune, India, a city with a population of 6.5 million.

The first phase will allow consumers to transfer money to another person just by using the person's mobile phone number as well as pay utility bills and recharge their prepaid SIM cards, something vital to this type of area where over 90 per cent of mobile phone users are on pre-paid. As the program develops it will be extended to be able to pay merchants for goods and services.

Furthermore, Nokia is expanding its Life Tools service, which provides rural subscribers with livelihood and life improvement advice, including agriculture and education services. Life Tools is available in India and Indonesia and since its launch in mid-2009, around one million people have already subscribed to the service, but this is set to roll out to more markets this year.

While this is all well and good, the complete and utter lack of mention of any kind of hardware was striking, as no new devices were unveiled and no hardware figures were bandied about amongst the statistics about the various services.

So the question becomes, when will Nokia give up on the hardware business entirely and just have its phones made by HTC like everyone else? µ