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Tuesday, October 09, 2007

Telefonica + Nokia services agreement

Fascinating announcement today from Nokia & Telefonica which is potentially game-changing, in that it recognises Nokia as a key partner for services as well as handsets:

"Nokia will customize the new Multimedia Menu to provide easy access to Telefónica services.. Similarly, Telefonica customers will be able to access all Nokia services through the Multimedia Menu"

I presume this opens the way for things like Ovi, and maybe Nokia-optimised versions of popular web apps like Flickr. Using Nokia as an intermediary could be a way around the current problem with the mobile/web collaboration model - web services companies really don't want to do 100 separate operator-specific optimisations, and 100 separate negotiations, to get their application deployed widely (and hopefully virally).

"Our customers can take advantage of Telefónica's high quality mobile broadband network to access both Telefónica and Nokia services, as well as other third-party applications"

What's not immediately obvious is whether this just applies to Nokia phones (and if so, whether it includes S40 featurephones), or if it relates to S60, in which case it could apply to Symbian-powered devices from Samsung, LG and others.

Also, looking out a couple of years & flying a kite here.... I wonder if we might eventually see a Nokia VoIP service as well, given how good Nokia is at integrating VoIP clients onto devices - especially if Nokia positioned it as a 'non-primary telephony' VoIP service (eg for voice-enhanced IM, conferencing, gaming etc etc) and enabled developers to access it via convenient APIs.

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