Best of 2008, Products & Services

Best of 2008 in Services – Nokia Life Tools

By Mike on 02 January 2009

INDIA – As we watch and experience first-hand the evolution of mobile technology, the focus naturally falls on how improved hardware and smarter software push the envelope and attempt to improve our lives on the go.

The thing about Nokia Life Tools, and why we’ve selected it in our Best of 2008 list, is that it defies this tradition, instead harnessing existing technology (SMS in this case), but uses it in an innovative fashion to offer a new breed of service that is easily accessible, valuable and simple to use. Surely the core ingredients of any of the best services out there.

This service is simply tailored to help farmers and students in remote rural locations in India and other emerging markets, delivering precious time-sensitive information such as market value crop prices, to even the most basic devices, via SMS. English language tools, general knowledge info and more are going to be available on the service which will officially launch as a pilot scheme in India in the first half of 2009, debuting on the Nokia 2323 and Nokia 2330 Classic.

SMS has proved itself as one of the most flexible and solid tech tools we have at our disposal, and one that is almost universally understood. Hence why it remains, and should continue to be exploited and explored for other purposes. Well, Ken Banks and his smart FrontlineSMS venture is proof of this, and deserves a mention here.

Nokia Life Tools promises to change and improve the lives of people who otherwise wouldn’t have easy access to this form of important contextualized information on a daily basis. It taps into a real need and delivers on that promise with a minimum of fuss and cost.

So hats off to Nokia Life Tools and the teams making it happen.

Read the full story here

Visit the Nokia Life Tools website

Post a comment

Ripul Kumar Says:
January 7th, 2009 at 5:31 am

I have yet to get my hands on the NLT application but whatever information I see here and other places, it is a great thought but clearly very poorly implemented.

Nearly 1/2 billion of about 3/4 billion who live in Indian villages cannot read or write ANY language.

As the interface of NLT expects people to be literate enough to read and make decisions, how on earth can most people for whom the tool is targeted (who obviously cannot read or write) do anything with the NLT tool?

Interestingly most people can identify numbers.

Also, looking at the icons, I am very sure that only the extraordinary can decipher them.

Text and icons are poor interface choices for rural India. Nokia has to think about a combination of text/icons and voice/sound as interface.

Having said all the above, the NLT service may be a hit as there are still enough people (1/4 billion) who can read / write atleast one language. And, if priced sensitively and localized well, they are enough to make any service succeed (while missing the other 1/2 billion).