Nokia navigates social networking

By Paul Furber for Nokia

Barcelona, Spain, 12 Feb 2008

Nokia has unveiled four mobile handsets, which the company says will strengthen its vision of combining social networking, collaboration and personal navigation on the mobile platform.

At a press conference at the annual World Mobile Congress in Barcelona, CEO Olli-Pekka Kallasuvo said mobile technologies were changing the lives of people in ways that were unimaginable in 1991 when the first conference was held in Cannes.

"Mobile devices will soon be in tune with your surroundings," he said. "We have concentrated on improvements to our software, the location capabilities of our handsets and ways for users to share and collaborate. We are, in fact, redefining the Internet itself as we're making it more context-aware and more personal. With context, the Internet becomes a medium of very immediate and personal experiences."

The new handsets are the N96 - a "turbo-charged N95" - the N78, the 6220 Classic and the 6210 Navigator. Each handset features different location-based and multimedia capabilities including personal navigation, mapping, and video and photo sharing.

New Maps, better Ovi

Version 2.0 of Nokia Maps takes the navigation experience out of the car and onto the pavement by enhancing the pedestrian navigational experience.

The new "Walk" mode puts a real-time GPS map on the screen that adjusts to the user's orientation. Nokia has also introduced Share on Ovi, a free personal multimedia sharing portal that uses open standards and support for more than 100 file types.

According to Niklas Savander, executive VP of services and software, personal media sharing is an important part of social networking which has become the way people communicate.

"Twenty percent of overall Internet traffic today is social networking related," he said. "Share.ovi.com is a personal media sharing and storage service that can be used as a collaborative tool from any Web browser."

Hundreds of mobile service providers and hardware vendors are exhibiting at the Fir de Barcelona conference venue until Thursday.