Navteq location begins permeating all of Nokia’s apps

While Nokia World focused on the vendor’s services strategy, the biggest buzz was by far generated by the new device designed to carry those services. The N97 is Nokia’s most advanced smartphone to date, offering both a 3.5-inch touch display along with a fold-out Qwerty keyboard. The device is its first to use active idle screen widgets, and it is clearly meant for intense multimedia use—the device comes with 32 gigabytes of memory. Inspiration for the N97 came far more from Nokia’s N810 Internet tablet line than the traditional N series smartphone, said N series head Guest. In fact, the device very much resembles a shrunken down N810, using HSPA instead of WiFi or WiMAX for data connectivity and the Symbian/S60 smartphone operating system rather than Linux. Much of the productive development for the N97 was geared at creating a mass market version of the Internet tablet, and in order to do that, Nokia had to make it in a phone form factor and give it cellular connectivity, Guest said. The device will begin shipping in the first half of 2009 and will come in both global and North American 3G flavors, though Nokia did not say whether both versions would launch simultaneously.

Also at Nokia World, Nokia revealed its plans to reposition another recent acquisition, Oz. Nokia is turning Oz’s consumer email platform into a Nokia device-centric messaging service, which will combine access to multiple Webmail and ISP email services into a single push email client running natively on S60 and S40 phones. While Nokia will continue to support Oz’s customer base in North America, its intention is to use the platform as a Nokia service it offers through carrier partnerships.