Anssi Vanjoki, the Nokia exec that oversees its multimedia unit, gave the keynote at Nokia World this morning, and focused largely on talking about Ovi, the umbrella name covering the company’s suite of internet services. The specifics about some of the aspects of Ovi were fairly interesting, and you can check out my photos of some of the screenshots on Flickr. But my main takeaway from the talk was that Nokia’s got a pretty good handle on the future of mobility, and how it needs to evolve its corporate outlook and its products to succeed.
Vanjoki presented Ovi as a “personal dashboard for life,” stressing that it is “not a portal.” He walked through its web, PC software and mobile features, and that made it clear that Ovi’s real goal isn’t for Nokia to sell content; it’s to fully integrate users’ mobile device with their web services, and with their life. What’s important for Ovi isn’t that it has a good music store, or that it sells TV show episodes, or stores photos. What’s important is that it acts as a manager for users’ digital, connected lives, melding their mobile with their PC and their online services.
It’s easy to see Ovi just as Nokia’s music store, plus the new N-Gage service, plus whatever other content services they lump in to it. That’s all well and good, but what’s going to make Ovi succeed isn’t having a passable music store; the real magic and value of Ovi won’t be as a content service, but as a “mobile life manager”. There remains a big gap between users’ PCs and their mobile devices. Sure, there’s plenty of software that will sync your contacts, and you can get your email on your phone. But there’s really nothing that brings things together between the two and adds some value. Ovi’s intended to do just that. (Nokia’s not the only one seeing this, of course. What’s Android, if not a way for Google to better extend its web services to mobile?)
A big part of this for Ovi will be its openness. In response to a question about how open Ovi will be, Vanjoki said the intention is that it will evolve to a platform that will allow any user or developer to integrate their own services to be integrated into it, though it will begin with certain specific relationships between Nokia and some internet companies. It’s going to have to be open to succeed. Too many mobile media offerings have suffered because of their closed nature. But Ovi will fail if users can’t integrate their content and media into it, regardless of their choice of photo-sharing site or whatever other service.
The other heartening aspect of Vanjoki’s speech was his talk about how Nokia has to improve its UIs and user experience in order to grab more mass-market users. This is crucial for smartphones and mobile services to move beyond the early adopter market. In a first step, Nokia is changing its S60 UI a bit, organizing certain functions around tasks — for instance, having a video pane of the UI that links on- and off-device video content, the device’s camera and so on. It’s sort of like Spaces in the latest Mac OS, which lets users essentially make different desktops for different tasks.
“Simplicity is the key to success,” Vanjoki said. It seems like Nokia does understand this, and hopefully their products and services will reflect it.
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