Commentary

Ovi Smokes! Nokia Breaks It Down

Today in London, Nokia unveiled a number of new handsets as well as revamped media services under the new brand name Ovi.

Today in London, Nokia unveiled a number of new handsets as well as revamped media services under the new brand name Ovi.What we've suspected was going to be announced today has finally come to light. Nokia is hosting a number of journalists and analysts at its Nokia Go Play conference in London. During the keynote sessions this morning, Nokia announced a number of new initiatives, taking a bigger aim at providing content as well as devices.

Part of Nokia's year-long reorganization, the division formerly known as the Internet Services division is now being called Ovi. Ovi, which means 'door' in Finnish, is an umbrella brand overseeing all of Nokia's content services. This includes the new N-Gage gaming service, as well as Nokia Music Store, both also announced this morning.


More Mobility Insights

White Papers

More >>

Reports

More >>

Webcasts

More >>

The N-Gage gaming service is an attempt to rebrand its failed N-Gage gaming devices. Rather than be specific phones, the new N-Gage platform is a service for S60 phones. The service will allow people to hunt for games--as well as opponents--take games for a test drive before buying them, and will work on a select set of Symbian S60 devices. The first of which, the N81 (a new N Series multimedia computer also announced today) will be available in November. Games will be available from a fairly wide selection of gaming content developers and will cost anywhere form 6 to 10 Euros.

The Nokia Music Store is Nokia's stab at Apple and the iPhone. It will be going live in the fourth quarter of this year, and when it does, users will be able to download millions of songs to their S60 phones or PCs. Files will be DRM-protected WMA files ripped at 192 K/bits per second. The same file will be downloaded to the PC and the handset. There will not be a second, mobile-optimized version of the songs. Tracks will cost 1 Euro and albums will cost 10 Euros. You can also stream music to a PC for 10 Euros. The music store will launch in certain European companies later this year, with others following in 2008. No word on if or when the music store will be available in the U.S.

It also bowed two new versions of the N95 (one for the U.S. 3G network, and one for the rest of the world with 8GB of internal memory), and two other music-centric handsets, the 5610 XpressMusic and the 5310 XpressMusic. All the phones will be available in the fourth quarter.


Related Reading




Currently we allow the following HTML tags in comments:

Single tags

These tags can be used alone and don't need an ending tag.

<br> Defines a single line break

<hr> Defines a horizontal line

Matching tags

These require an ending tag - e.g. <i>italic text</i>

<a> Defines an anchor

<b> Defines bold text

<big> Defines big text

<blockquote> Defines a long quotation

<caption> Defines a table caption

<cite> Defines a citation

<code> Defines computer code text

<em> Defines emphasized text

<fieldset> Defines a border around elements in a form

<h1> This is heading 1

<h2> This is heading 2

<h3> This is heading 3

<h4> This is heading 4

<h5> This is heading 5

<h6> This is heading 6

<i> Defines italic text

<p> Defines a paragraph

<pre> Defines preformatted text

<q> Defines a short quotation

<samp> Defines sample computer code text

<small> Defines small text

<span> Defines a section in a document

<s> Defines strikethrough text

<strike> Defines strikethrough text

<strong> Defines strong text

<sub> Defines subscripted text

<sup> Defines superscripted text

<u> Defines underlined text

InformationWeek encourages readers to engage in spirited, healthy debate, including taking us to task. However, InformationWeek moderates all comments posted to our site, and reserves the right to modify or remove any content that it determines to be derogatory, offensive, inflammatory, vulgar, irrelevant/off-topic, racist or obvious marketing/SPAM. InformationWeek further reserves the right to disable the profile of any commenter participating in said activities.

Disqus Tips To upload an avatar photo, first complete your Disqus profile. | View the list of supported HTML tags you can use to style comments. | Please read our commenting policy.
T-Shirt Giveaway T-Shirt Giveaway: Each week we're selecting one great comment from our readers. The author of the comment will receive an InformaitonWeek Community t-shirt. So get posting!
Subscribe to RSS

Resource Links