Beating Google at its own game
With Mobile World Congress (which HEXUS.channel will be attending) drawing nearer, hardly a day goes past without Nokia promoting itself.
As it looks to defend its smartphone market share from the likes of Apple and Google, Nokia knows it's increasingly difficult to differentiate yourself on hardware alone - it's the software and services, stupid.
This was the thinking behind its somewhat surprising acquisition of digital map maker NAVTEQ in the middle of 2008; it realised that, in future, the smartphone will replace the standalone satnav device and wanted to make sure it was well positioned for that change. It is also banking on a whole range of location-based services becoming integral to the smartphone experience.
Whether or not Nokia originally planned to offer its navigation service - Ovi Maps - for free, we don't know. But it looks like Google's decision to include free satnav in Android made up its mind for it, and Nokia announced it was offering Ovi Maps for free a couple of weeks ago.
Today, Nokia has announced there were a million downloads of Ovi Maps in the first week - averaging a download per second. We can confirm that it seems to measure up to any standalone satnav service we're aware of, both in terms of map quality and GPS reception, on our N900.
This volume of downloads may be one of the reasons Nokia has appointed former Microsoft data-centre boss Mike Manos as its VP of service operations. "In this role I will have global responsibility for the strategy, operation and run of infrastructure aspects for Nokia's new cloud and mobile services platforms," said Manos in his blog, identifying Google and Apple as his main competitors.
The significance of this announcement lies in Nokia taking on Google at its own game - offering stuff for free. If Nokia is basing its future prosperity on providing cloud-based services to millions of users, it's going to need some pretty extensive data-centre assets, so it looks like Manos will be a busy man.
