Products & Services

Mobile email – once for business, now for pleasure

By James on 01 October 2008

GLOBAL – What a week. Whilst the world battles financial turmoil, Nokia shifts from the left foot to the right foot, saying adios, at least in part, to business and embracing consumers. Whilst there’s lots of change for some at Nokia (and as Charlie pointed out, not all of it positive) it does mean some pretty exciting innovations and changes for consumers too.

Oz has long been the leader when it comes to mobile messaging. Just flicking around its site I instantly got excited at the prospect of some of its products rolling onto my device. Although I’ve not actually used any, it does seem pretty clear why its the leader in its field. So what does this mean for Nokia customers? Well, according to the press release:

“With OZ, Nokia is renewing its mission of Connecting People by enabling consumers to easily connect and communicate using their favorite Internet communities,” said Niklas Savander, Head of Nokia Services & Software. “OZ’s team and technology will help Nokia to address the fast growing consumer messaging market.”

The release goes on to say that

“by acquiring Oz, Nokia will enable easy-to-use, fast access to leading instant messaging and email services, unlcuding AOL, Gmail, ICQ, Windows Live Messenger and Yahoo!.”

So it looks like that which was previously only on offer to a select few (5.5 million people is a select few when counted out of 3 billion) will soon be on offer to a lot more. And that’s pretty exciting to me.
Should we have seen this coming? Maybe. Back at the launch of the E71 in June there was talk of how big the consumer mobile email market was, versus the business market. This week’s moves seem to be following up on that strategy. Time will tell if it’s a wise one.

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Tags | communication, Mobile email

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msav Says:
October 1st, 2008 at 1:23 pm

Nice to see this kind of development. A lot of people working in the more creative part of life have a long time been using the so called business phones. If you look at the front row people in Bryant Park they all have Blackberries or Treos or iPhones or something. They don’t seem to have “fashionphones”. So it seems kind of clumsy or mixed signals when you see cool folks toting these devices targeted for the grey men in suits.

CHAPLIN Says:
October 1st, 2008 at 9:44 pm

“Msav”, I totally agree with you. But that’s the point: it’s not only men in black who want those devices like iPhones or Balackberries, all people want now! And they want it because it has the most advanced softwares around! Almost every phones nowadays have e-mail client service, internet access, all very advanced, but maybe only 5% of the owners use those features. So that’s why I ask myself: why is nokia giving of of Nokai Business? Is it not clear that the business phones are an emerging market!??