Nokia sets sights on Google
14 February 2008
Nokia sets sights on Google
Nokia's recent acquisition of Norwegian application framework developer Trolltech will put the Finnish company in a better position to go up against web giants like Google.
Speaking to telecoms.com at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona this week, Adam Lawson, product director for Trolltech's Qtopia platform, said that Nokia is now being perceived as more of a competitor to Google than to its traditional rivals in the handset market.
The Finnish handset giant sent ripples through the market in late January, with the announcement of plans to acquire Scandinavian mobile Linux developer Trolltech for $153m.
At the heart of the acquisition is Trolltech's Qt cross platform application framework, which would better allow Nokia and third party developers to build web applications that work across Nokia's device portfolio and on PCs.
From what the market has already seen of Nokia's internet services play, it is clear that the strategy is based on cross-platform development environments - layers of software that run across operating systems - such as Web runtime, Flash, Java and Open C.
Lawson said that handset vendors are reluctant to promote Google's web services because increasingly, they see themselves moving into that space - something more evident with Nokia than perhaps with the others.
Since the announcement of its Ovi strategy late in the summer of 2007, Nokia has been busy rebuilding the user interface on its devices to allow closer integration with web-based services. The announcement itself was a bit of a bombshell. At the time, Olli Pekka Kallasvuo, Nokia's chief executive, introduced the service, which translates into 'door' in Finnish, with the controversial statement: "Devices alone are not enough anymore."
Ovi as a platform incorporates all the vendor's various forays into the applications space - mobile music via the company's Music Store, games via the N-gage platform, social networking through Mosh, Twango and potentially, Facebook, and positioning and location based service through the recent Navteq acquisition.
It's a proposal the operators are welcoming, owing to a marked move away from a carrier controlled walled garden into the explicit support of open mobile internet experiences delivered by a multitude of web partners like Myspace, Google, eBay and YouTube. By way of enhancing its product arsenal to better compete with a market segment made popular by the Apple iPhone, Trolltech has also updated its version of Qtopia to 4.3, which includes support for a finger touch user interface. An update to its Qt cross platform development framework sees the inclusion of WebKit, the web browser technology used in Apple's iPhone and many of Nokia's Symbian smartphones.
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