GLOBAL – It always felt to me that we just weren’t getting it right with mobile email. Well, that was before this year, a year when Nokia really grasped the mobile email beast by the neck and wrestled it into something really good.

To start with, there has been a long beta period around Nokia Email before it went open, studying how folks use the service and providing a better mobile mail experience. We caught up with the product folks to learn more about this.

But there were a lot more shifts at Nokia around email, with far-ranging repercussions.

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Understanding the scale of the opportunity

LONDON, England – I just picked up on a report in the Economic Times in India about some stats revealed at Nokia World (which I missed, entirely – shriek!) First, the numbers. Nokia plans to have mobile email on some 400 million handsets in the next 24 months. It also plans to sell 300 million GPS-enabled handsets in the next 18-24 months. Let’s put that last figure into perspective. Sales of stand alone sat nav devices in Europe and the USA for 2008 are expected to top out at about 30-40 million units. Let’s assume Asia does a similar number, to give a total of about 60 million units for 2008, and something similar in 2009, given the global slowdown. Nokia, on its own then, is predicting to double even the most ambitious estimate of standalone sat nav sales. Am I the only one who finds that pretty exceptional?

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Messaging goes social

BARCELONA, Spain – Earlier we caught up with Tom Furlong who looks after messaging at Nokia. Clearly excited with the public unveiling of Mail on Ovi and Nokia Messaging, he took us through the details of what we can expect to see when the services go live. With Mail on Ovi rolling out this month and Nokia Messaging coming early next year, there’s plenty to look forward to.

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Nokia Life Tools and other cool things

GLOBAL – I’ve been a watcher of mobile phone use in emerging markets ever since Chris Heathcote planted the thought in my head many years ago. Back then, there were two billion mobile phone users globally and we were facing the prospect of one billion more being added over 18 months, of which 80 per cent of those will be first-time users in emerging markets without PCs. Indeed, the kernel of my Club 1100 thoughts come from that time, and with the reception the Nokia 1202 (very similar to the Nokia 1209 I am using) is having (see below), I think Nokia is onto something.