Unofficial iPhone Blog

The chief executive of Nokia, the world mobile phone leader, gave credit to new competitors from the computer world on Wednesday, but said his company was set to respond to all challengers.

Nokia President and CEO Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo said emerging rivals Apple Inc, Google Inc, Research in Motion Ltd and Microsoft Corp have helped to accelerate interest in using the Internet on mobile phones.

“Suddenly you have the mightiest companies in the world there as your competitors. That is a little mind-boggling,” Kallasvuo said in an on-stage interview at the Churchill Club, a speakers’ forum for Silicon Valley civic leaders.

Nokia sells more than 400 million phones a year and counts a 40 percent share of the conventional global mobile phone market, where it competes with Samsung, Motorola, LG Electronics and Sony Ericsson among others.

He said he was impressed by the strategy of Research in Motion (RIM), maker of the BlackBerry e-mail phone popular with business professionals, to sell not just devices themselves but whole solutions for managing corporate e-mail securely.

“Multiply what RIM has been doing here,” the Nokia executive said of his own company’s strategy to provide e-mail not only to business users but also consumers and a category of avid users in between the two markets, nicknamed “prosumers.”

Nokia recently struck a deal to use Microsoft e-mail software on its more than 80 million Series 60 phones sold so far. This should help Nokia quickly overtake RIM in terms of the numbers of phones running corporate e-mail, he said.

“We will exceed the RIM client (BlackBerry) in some months with a very good e-mail system,” Kallasvuo promised. RIM recently reported it had 19 million BlackBerry subscribers.

He singled out the positive impact that Apple has made on the industry with its iPhone over the past year, saying the Cupertino, California computer and consumer electronics company had done the mobile phone industry “a big favor.”

“We have a new, credible competitor in this business. You know I need to take my hat off,” he said of how the iPhone has raised expectations for phones. He added: “Of course we need to be able to respond to any competitor and we will.”

Of Google, the Nokia executive said it was too early to tell what impact the leading Internet company might have on the mobile phone business: “They are a newcomer here. I think the jury is still out: What is the new thing they bring here?”

Thinking back to nearly a year ago to when Google introduced its rival mobile Internet software system, Android, Kallasvuo said Nokia had been working toward similar goals for a far longer time. “I realized that we could have made the same announcement 10 years ago,” he said.

The first Android phones were introduced last month by T-Mobile in the United States, to be followed shortly by several T-Mobile markets in Europe. They feature an iPhone-like touchscreen and lots of software from independent developers.

Europe helped propel the global rise of mobile communications in the 1990s but Silicon Valley created and continues to dominate the Internet, he said. As the Internet moves onto phones, the United States is poised once again to lead that convergence, the leader of the Finnish company said.

More than a year after Apple launched the first-generation iPhone, Nokia has taken the wraps off its reply: the 5800 XpressMusic.

Nokia’s first-ever touchscreen phone, the 5800 will sell for €279 without plan from mid-October in the UK, bundled with a 12-month free subscription to the company’s Comes With Music service, which offers all-you-can-eat access to “millions of songs” from partners Sony BMG, Warner Music and Universal Music.

The only Comes With Music hold-out, EMI, signed on with Nokia last night, cementing a big-four label line-up cable of rivalling iTunes.
Nokia is targetting the first quarter of 2009 for the 5800’s New Zealand release.

The cost of Comes With Music’s unlimited’s downloads is “baked into” the 5800’s €279 up-front cost (which is less than half the cost of an unlocked iPhones in most Euro areas).

The 5800’s Symbian OS web browser adds the Adobe Flash support so conspicuously lacking on the 3G iPhone OS — meaning the 5800 should be able to automatically load any site with Flash elements (whereas many sites have added manual tweaks to optimise themselves for iPhone’s Flash-less browser).

The 5800 will also feature support for Nokia’s Ovi service.

By shuffling files through its online storage facility, Ovi lets you sync calendar, contact or data files on your cellphone with those on your PC.

It also lets you store or share dozens of different formats of photo, video and music files, as well as selling games and other software in an approach reminiscent of Apple’s AppStore. Ovi — which is also open to non-Nokia users — is live now.

It’s free for 60 days, then costs either £4.99 (10GB) or £9.99 (30GB) a month or £39.99 or £74.99 if you buy 10GB/month or 30GB/month storage on an annual plan

Although it shares the iPhone’s full-length touchscreen, virtual keyboard approach, the 5800 lacks the multi-touch technology that allows users of Apple’s handset to “pinch” an image to zoom in, among other tactile tricks.

At 3.2-inches, the 5800’s screen is also physically smaller than the 3G iPhone at 3.5 inches, but offers a better resolution picture at 640 x 360 pixels (to the iPhone’s 480 x 320).

Overall sizewise, the Nokia 5800 measures Dimensions: 111 x 51.7 x 15.5 mm and weighs 109g. The iPhone comes in at 115.5 x 62.1 x 12.3 mm and weighs 133 grams.

Memory is 8GB (the 3G iPhone comes in 8GB and 16GB options, with a 32GB model strongly rumoured before the end of the year).

The 5800 is specc’d to run on a 3G Broadband (aka HSDPA) network, such as Vodafone’s.

While Apple’s iPhone features GPS, Nokia’s 5800 makes it interactive, adding Nokia Maps 2.0 to allow it to offer turn-by-turn driving or walking directions.

The 5800 also one-ups the iPhone on photo and video, featuring a 3.2 megapixel still camera (to the iPhone’s 2 megapixel) and the ability to shoot 640 x 480 video (to the iPhone’s none).

See full 5800 specs on Nokia’s website here

Unless you’re Google, these look like rough times to launch a mobile operating system.

That puts Palm in an awkward position. Things have not been going well for the beleaguered smartphone maker, whose founders arguably kickstarted the smartphone revolution 12 years ago. Eighty percent of its sales come from the troubled U.S. market, its Treo phone has given up market share to the BlackBerry and it has lost buzz to the iPhone. Read more… »

okia is preparing to enter the touch-screen cell phone market next week, with the debut of its first finger-sensitive phone, according to a Reuters report.

The European handset makeris planning to take the wraps off its touch-screen phone, code-named “Tube,” during an event Thursday in London for analysts and the media, according to Reuters, which cites two unnamed sources. (For more, including a photo, see “Hold the phone: Nokia’s Tube is the Nokia 5300!”)

The Tube will join a field that has been getting crowded since Apple debuted its popular iPhone a little over a year ago. Since then, competitors such as Samsung Electronics and LG Electronics have come on the scene with their own touch-screen phones. Earlier this week, T-Mobile unveiled its G1, a touch-screen device that is the first to run Google’s Android software.

Nokia noted in July that it planned to enter the touch-screen market and was initially aiming for the low end of the market, Reuters reported.

A representative from Nokia could not immediately be reached.