JEDDAH, 1 February 2005 — The global smartphone market is experiencing a growth of more than 100 percent, with more than 20 million units sold globally in 2004. This fast-growing segment of the mobile market is at the heart of both the latest mobile services and the digital convergence trend, which is not only changing the mobile phone industry, but also the IT and consumer electronics industries.
“The increasing popularity of smartphones is having a major impact on the IT, communications and consumer electronics industries,” Eddie Maalouf, general manager, Nokia Middle East & North Africa, told a group of Gulf journalists at a recent Dubai presentation.
“In 2004, we’ve already started to see the decline in demand for traditional personal digital assistants (PDAs), as the same functionality can be found in smartphones,” he said, adding that mobile operators and media companies are developing exciting new services for smartphone users like news, sports and games and other most appealing services.
Rich video, or “mobile TV” services, is the latest service enabled by the high-quality displays in smartphones and the opening of high-speed 3G networks around the world. The visiting group also took part in a Nokia imaging challenge and tested the power of its imaging phones, using features like capturing images with zoom, sequence and night mode, storing them to the Bluetooth enabled laptop, editing and printing on the Bluetooth printer.
Maalouf’s presentation also focused on the fact that application developers, as well as large IT companies, were increasingly shifting their development resources to smartphone platforms, as they see better business potential in selling applications on top of these platforms. Enterprises also see the potential of smartphones to improve efficiency while employees are out of the office as secure corporate e-mail and corporate database access becomes available.
“Smartphones are also expected to impact the camera, portable music, player and hand-held gaming markets,” he said. Many smartphones come with an integrated megapixel camera, and the imaging features will continue to improve rapidly.
There are already several smartphones with integrated FM radio and digital music players. In the area of games, smartphones are driving the growth of mobile gaming. During the past 20 years, the personal computer (PC), which was originally introduced mainly as a word-processing tool, has evolved into multiapplication platforms that offer a huge variety of functionality to both consumers and enterprise users alike. “Similarly, we see that the same evolution is happening as the mobile market is evolving from traditional phones to smartphones,” Maalouf said.
Consumers have a choice between several different smartphone platforms — Symbian OS, which Nokia uses for all of its smartphone models, Windows Mobile and Palm OS being the top three. The Symbian OS is considered the market leader in open operating systems for smartphones with 83 percent market share globally in the second quarter of 2004. “Nokia believes that Symbian OS will continue to be the leading smartphone platform in the future because of its benefits,” he said.
Meanwhile, Nokia’s imaging innovation continued apace in 2004 with the launch of the Nokia 7610 — Nokia’s first handset with a megapixel camera. Available since June 2004, users across Europe and Asia-Pacific can not only capture and send images, but also produce photo-quality prints by transferring images via Bluetooth to a compatible printer or printing kiosk.
In June 2004, Nokia marked a breakthrough in mobile communications with the introduction of the Nokia 6630, the world’s first mobile phone to combine the benefits of 3G, EDGE and the leading smartphone platform Series 60. For camera phone enthusiasts, 3G capability provides faster picture and video uploads and the ability to share audiovisual experiences real-time.
To make mobile imaging a reality for the masses, Nokia has been ensuring that there are well functioning global mobile imaging business systems in place. For instance, the improving camera resolution is set to dramatically increase the number of consumers wanting to print their images. Nokia aims to ensure that every user is easily able to utilize the best direct print experience to share memories through rich media, digital rendering and hardcopy. To realize this objective, it is essential to achieve wide interoperability between imaging terminals and printing devices or photo finishing service providers. Cooperative ventures with operators, as well as established digital imaging players like Kodak and Hewlett-Packard, offer consumers solutions to store and print digital images, Petr Hosek, senior sales manager, multimedia, Nokia Middle East & Africa, demonstrated in his presentation.
Nokia’s participation in the Mobile Imaging and Printing Consortium (MIPC) is another example of the company’s ongoing effort to ensure there are easy-to-use and interoperable mobile printing solutions available for consumers. MIPC is an industry initiative to create guidelines that enable consistent implementation of the current printing solutions for camera phones, he said.
Nokia and Kodak have jointly developed a kiosk printing service for users of Nokia imaging phones like the Nokia 7610 or the newly introduced Nokia 6670. Owners are able to upload, store, share and order prints of pictures with their handset using the Kodak Picture Center Online service. Together with Hewlett-Packard, Nokia has developed a printing application for Series 60 phones based on Bluetooth wireless technology. The application enables consumers and business professionals to print content from their phones to HP Bluetooth-enabled printers at the touch of a button.
