Nokia in recent history has been all about segmenting the market and having at least one handset that competes in every segement.

By extending their experiement in the MID platform area to also include GSM capabilities Nokia should be able to get similar benefits to Apple i.e. a very small number of hardware platforms to support.

They can also expose the work they have been doing over the last few years with the Open source community, which is not to be under-estimated.

The other thing Nokia seems to have taken from Apple is to have the device available a month or two after the event it was announced at, rather than a half year (as was the case with the N97)

You can see a marketing type video here, and a more “human” version here
The Hardware specifications are listed on the site, but the really interesting thing is that Nokia seems to have listened to the information around the iPhone and seen it is all about the software, for example see this review over on maemo-guru.

The thing that may get ignored/glossed-over in all of the geekgasms happening all over the place (examples here and here) is Nokia’s moves to provide services targetted at the developing world.
I think at least some of this has to be caused by Nokia employing people like Jan Chipchase who was talking about something similar to Nokia Money over two years ago. It is also a nice complement to Nokia life tools.
These are HUGE markets that California (home of all the Web2.0, Social Media hype engine) currently does not seem to understand or want to work with, and while the margins may be very small, they are there!
Over the past few years Nokia has shown it understands how to work a very high volume, low margin business (at least for hardware) and it will be interesting to see if they can do the same with services.

The Nokia Booklet announcement resembles the begining of the partnership announcements made with Intel and Microsoft. I am guessing that although this product was being worked on before the announcements were made and may have even helped them along.
Of course i can’t find the article now, but I remember reading an article recently that pointed out that Enterprise IT changes very slowly (something like 3-5 years per cycle!) and even then is not keen on the change. As pointed out in this article by Tomi Ahonen, many Enterprises are currently married to the Microsoft stack (essentially Exchange and Active Directory), and for many this has also meant moving to Blackberry.
I see the combination of a stylish netbook alongside a small handset (for example the E52, allowing the modern road warrior to do their job more effectively, than using the compromise device that is the Blackberry (screen is too low resolution, can’t connect to a project, etc). The inclusion of Quickoffice on E-Series devices is potentially yet another string to this bow.

• What’s your take on location based services?
• What in your view are the best opportunities or use cases with LBS?

What’s your take on location based services?
So far, i have not really be able to find a real use for any of the ones i have tried so far.

Playing with LBS is fun and justifies buying a top of the range device (although now, GPS is moving down the range, in the same way that cameras did).
Currently the purpose of most of the LBS out there today are they allow you to connect with other people who are interested in experimenting with LBS.
So far, most of the services i have tried are (to me at least) obviously the result of people who are coming from a non-mobile development background. The experience on the web is so much better than the mobile experience. The mobile is only thought of as a place to *generate* data, and not as a potential primary consumption location.
The two exceptions to this are buddycloud and Google’s Latitude.
Both succeed as they offer an excellent experience on the mobile and currently the desktop use is more of a “second choice”.

What in your view are the best opportunities or use cases with LBS?
As Andrew says at the end of his article, Location in and of itself is not really that interesting.
It is the context where the value is and it is no great surprise that Jyri picks up on this in the Jaiku thread.
There might be some small use case in the sharing of your location as a “fuzzy” entity. I think brightkite had this at one point, but like Plazes before it, the interface became too complicated and it put location in the center, and location is rarely a social object that people care that strongly about.

As i see things, the Jaiku team created something that was one of the earliest real uses of location, by tying it in with your phone book. It is just a shame that more people did not make use of this feature.

Privacy:
Privacy is something else Latitude seem to have got mostly correct (because of the strong influence of Jyri Engeström?).
It seems that many people have missed the fact that there are actually THREE levels of sharing; hide, city and accurate (which if you are indoors is not actually all that accurate as it is cell tower based).
This extra city level allows for a level of the serendipity of meetings similar to the one that Dopplr has going for it, whilst still retaining some privacy.
The other thing that this simple 3 level scheme has going for it is that you apply it as you connect with people rather than having to think of some complicated grouping, or forcing people into the limited groups offered by the service.

As i see things today, the future will involve something like fire-eagle, where location is both easy to generate and consume. Probably in a similar manner to how things like atom and XMPP were created.

original article is here