"Nokia
continues to benefit from good demand for color-screen phones with advanced
mobile messaging capability," said Nokia Chairman and CEO Jorma
Ollila on Tuesday, speaking at the seventh annual Nokia Mobile Internet
Conference in Munich. Including new launches made on the eve of the
event, the company now has 15 phones supporting MMS.
Ollila told an audience
of developers, content providers and operators that in 2003, more than
half of all Nokia phones sold would be MMS-enabled.
"Next year Nokia
expects to ship 50-100 million devices which have a color display and
an open application development platform. Of these
phones, we expect roughly 10 million will be Series 60 based devices.
The rest will be based
on the Nokia operating systems and have the standard Open Mobile Alliance
service enablers, including MMS, Java
and browsing."
The mobile industry,
with more than 1 billion mobile phone users, offers very high potential
for software and applications developers,"
said Ollila. "In the months to come, you will see us doing a lot
to support developer efforts by lowering the costs and complexity of
deploying applications across multiple Nokia handsets, and by further
improving our channels to market for application developers.
This is supported
by our wide product portfolio and the sheer industry
volumes," he said.
Ollila emphasized
that the way forward in mobile communications would
be through openness and collaboration and that the GSM/EDGE/WCDMA
technology family would continue to set the global benchmark.
Almost one year ago
Nokia announced it would make core software
technology available to the industry in the form of its Series 60
platform. "The success of our Nokia Series 60 software platform is
evident," said Ollila. "There are already hundreds of applications
available and licensing agreements have been signed with several
phone manufacturers, whose combined handset market share accounts for
around 60%."
With the emergence
of totally new categories in mobile devices, the
transition to advanced mobile services is happening now. More than 60
network operators in Europe and Asia are already offering multimedia
messaging services and the number is increasing every week.
MMS-capable terminals, including those with digital cameras are in
strong demand and more than one million Nokia 7650s, the company's
first integrated camera phone, have already been sold.
On technology standards,
the evolution from GSM to EDGE and WCDMA
continues to be the most important path in the mobile world. More
than 100 licences have been allocated by national administrations for
the new 2GHz frequency band. Almost all licensees have chosen WCDMA
technology - and the majority of these networks are currently being
built. Looking ahead, the GSM family of technologies is estimated to
represent 85% of all mobile phone subscriptions in the world by 2006.
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