Nokia's Vision Quest

Finland has reached 63.4% penetration, said Anssi Vanjoki, senior vice president, Europe & Africa, and Nokia expects that by 2005, there will be more than 1 billion subscribers globally.

During Nokia's telecom update last month at its headquarters in Helsinki, Finland, it emphasized its position to promote a ubiquitous mobile society. Nokia's vision suggests that subscribers will begin to focus less on audio and more on the visual as they take advantage of data capabilities on their handsets.

Nokia thinks these subscribers will break into roughly four categories:

* The social-contact seekers need a basic phone mostly for personal use. They are brand conscious and quality-oriented.

* The posers want a "cool" phone they can trot out for personal and business use. They are brand-conscious, interested in fashionable products and the latest technology.

* The high fliers are heavy users, business-driven and interested in data. They generally buy at the high end and are cynical about ads.

* The trendsetters like to use their phones in cars and restaurants. They like phones with lots of features, and they look for the latest technology and exclusive products.

The phones of the future will be media phones, Vanjoki said, enticing the trend setters and high fliers with a seamless link to the Internet, word processing, network diary, moving images, information services and e-commerce capability.

Vanjoki said Nokia is trying to create a different vision of what a device does. He said devices should give the user a virtual presence. In other words, travelers should be able to use their devices as links to news or information from home instead of making do with the local news at a temporary destination. In Vanjoki's scenario, the handset registers with the television in the hotel room (through Bluetooth) and establishes a connection with the server back home. The handset then would download the latest news and transmit the data to the television (again through Bluetooth). Joe Subscriber can sit back and watch his hometown news from a hotel room across the continent.

It's easy to become focused on the technological possibilities wireless offers, but success requires that subscribers see these possibilities as well. To have broad acceptance, you have to have simplicity, which is why Ericsson, Motorola and Nokia have come up with a joint trademark that will let consumers know that a product or service is mobile friendly. Any product with WWW:MMM (Mobile Media Mode) means that high-resolution graphics and audio files have been filtered out so that only relevant text and hyperlinks are sent to the screen. According to Nokia, the Mobile Media Mode concept itself is a marketing innovation set to mobilize the industry.

Ilkka Raiskinen, vice president, Business Development, said in Europe & Africa, 13,000 Mobile Media Mode development kits have been sent out. That's a good start.