High Speed Internet Access (HSIA): Mobile Broadband

Anssi Vanjoki, the Executive Vice President of Nokia’s New Market’s Unit has some thoughts on the trends  in mobile technology in a recent interview with Venture Beat.

On asked about the focus on Apple and the iPhone he says that while the iPhone is a fantastic product, its downfall will be the closed platform. He sees the future being in open systems such as the Nokia platform, Symbian.

He goes on to say that the most successful companies will be those who focus on applications rather than hardware and make the devices compelling for people to use: “we have converted ourselves over the last three years from being a hardware company to a software company. Today we are a software company that monetizes through hardware sales. We have to make great devices in the future. But we have to make services and solutions that use devices.”

A point of difference for Nokia will be the applications store which has a relevance engine. The technology behind the store learns from the usage history of the user, the user’s location and the user’s interaction with friends. This means that the content of the store will, in theory, be much more useful on a personal level rather than containing thousands of irrelevant applications never likely to appeal to that person.

He has some interesting thoughts on the way a phone interacts with the desktop. The iPhone is tied to the desktop creating the idea that the PC is the master and the phone is the slave. Anssi Vanjoki sees the relationship between phone and desktop differently in that the master should be the device that is the closest to the person which is usually the phone. The PC is important but only in the role of managing the whole environment.

Subscribe to the hsia RSS feed

• Mobile Apps Stores from Nokia and Windows Mobile
• Nokia N97 in Australia early next month
• Nokia N97 in Australia
• Google Android Phone
• Blackberry Bold versus 3G iPhone