Business | Telecoms
Nokia focuses on navigation to enhance services for users
Nokia has selected navigation as a major part of its shift to services.
- By Salil Kumar, Staff Reporter
- Published: 00:20 February 13, 2008
Barcelona: Nokia has selected navigation as a major part of its shift to services.
Among its announcements at the Mobile World Congress on Monday, the Helsinki-based company emphasised Maps 2.0, the second version of its mapping and navigation services that it has boosted by adding a pedestrian element alongside the existing car-navigation system.
Nokia also said Share on Ovi - a new media-sharing community through which it hopes users will upload and manage personal media using mobile or desktop devices - will help the company expand its online presence.
Nokia did introduce four devices - the N76, N78, the 6200 and 6210 Navigator - but picked out their ability to deliver location-based and multimedia services as prime features.
"Our ideas about what mobile phones are for will change," said chief executive officer Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo. "At home, at work or on the road, they will be in time with our surrounding and adjust accordingly. Time, place and location will bring new services to life."
Kallasvuo also said navigation will be a central theme in future and, on that basis, geotagging will be important. If a user takes a picture, which is then uploaded on to a blog (Ovi, for example), geotagging means the location where the picture was taken will also be available to other blog readers.
Geotagging does this by picking up the phone's coordinates from the GPS system.
The emphasis on location-based services was another reason why Nokia was prepared to pay $8.1 billion for mapping firm Navteq.
Regarding Ovi, the company said the portal will be launched in beta in the second quarter. Originally, Nokia had expected to go live by the end of 2007.
Ovi's music service is already available in the UK, with 10 more countries to follow by the first half.
Meanwhile, Nokia's delayed games platform, N-Gage, is in beta, but the company did not specify a launch date.
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