3GSM: Nokia aims to bring smartphone to the masses

Not to be outdone at the world's largest wireless showcase, Nokia today is revealing its plans to scale down its Series 60 platform to target mass-market handsets in an attempt to make the smartphone a ubiquitous device instead of just an upscale gadget for high-end users.

At the 3GSM World Congress in Cannes, France, Nokia is announcing the third revision of its Series 60 middleware built for Symbian's latest operating system (OS) release, announced earlier this month. Symbian OS v9 and Series 60 v3 claim to take advantage of new developments from silicon providers Intel and Texas Instruments, reducing hardware and development costs. Those cost and time-to-market savings, along with the modular nature of the OS and middleware — which allow vendors to remove fancier or more costly components of the platform — will help drive down the price of a Series 60 phone below the critical $200 line that separates the high-end phones from mid-range products, said Brian Woods, Nokia's senior product marketing manager for Series 60 in the Americas.

“It's always been our intention to bring Series 60 to the mass market since our launch three years ago,” Woods said. “In fact, we've already seen glimpses of Series 60 in the volume market.”

Woods pointed to Nokia's gaming deck N-Gage and its 3650 smartphone, both of which sell for about $200, just brushing the edge of the mid-range market. But Woods said the new platform would scale much further down, allowing manufacturers to include smartphone features in the majority of the handsets they ship. Though Woods wouldn't specify a potential bottom price for Series 60 phones, he said the platform would not teeter toward the top of the mid-range market and would allow vendors to build handsets below the average cost of $150.

At those prices, though, Nokia could find its platforms clashing. It's Series 40 Java handsets are targeted at the mid-range and upper-low end. But Woods said the two platforms have different markets. Series 60 handsets will remain smartphones, while Series 40 handsets are feature-rich, non-multimedia phones.

Over the last year, Nokia and Symbian have been partnering with silicon-makers to more closely integrate the hardware and software components of the handset. Last fall, Intel announced a reference design for its Xscale processor, which directly integrated the Symbian OS and aspects of Nokia's middleware directly into its chipsets. Last month, TI said Nokia would begin buying its single-chip silicon that combined the RF and baseband components onto a chipset (see story page 26). Though that silicon is targeted at low-end phones for emerging markets, it paved the way for more advanced single-chip solutions, which specifically target multimedia and smartphones, as TI is revealing today as part of its UMTS strategy.

Like Nokia, TI also is unveiling its mass-market strategy at 3GSM, announcing its OMAP-Vox platform, a series of UMTS chipsets that integrate the baseband modem and applications processor on a single silicon bed. Instead of building custom solutions for each vendor, Vox creates a hardware and software platform that vendors can use to scale multimedia phones from the high-end all the way down to budget handsets, said Deepu John, senior product marketing manager for TI's handset division.

“The same software that will be used in the value phone will be the same software used in the smartphone, and there's common processors along the whole platform,” John said.

3GSM NEWS

The following are just a few of the deals, innovations and products being announced at 3GSM World this week. To learn more about them and follow the rest of Telephony's 3GSM coverage, go to www.telephonyonline.com

• Microsoft launches a broad new content initiative, called the Connected Services Framework, which allows carriers to aggregate and combine disparate incompatible wireless services into new content offerings

• Oz adds branded e-mail to its popular mobile IM client

• Portal Software unveils the next generation of its revenue-management software, giving carriers real-time analysis of their revenue chain

• TI produces a multimode basestation DSP

• Motricity reveals it is powering Cingular's mobile content portal

• Nortel Networks and Orange mix it up on HSDPA