Nokia expects the next jump for its growth to come from delivering messaging to the masses. Nokias Ovi mail and Mail for Exchange will evolve into Nokia Messaging, a single application which will let users access all their messages, all their inboxes from one place.
The market for messaging can be seen from three consumer groups. The first group comprises enterprise customers, who already use servers such as Microsoft’s Exchange or IBM’s Domino. The ‘mobilisation’ of these services has been relatively easy as most enterprise customers use only a handful of such server products. Nokia uses the Mail For Exchange and ActiveSync programs to connect mobile phones to the enterprise email.
The second group comprises about one billion people, those who already have a Web mail account with Gmail, Yahoo, and Rediff. From the mobility perspective, this group is trickier to satisfy as different email providers have different ways of providing their services to mobile phones and the access to the email are service-based offerings, meaning that each email service has its own email client for the mobile phone.
Then comes the ‘potential’ group. Mark Thomas, Director - Product Marketing, Consumer messaging, services, Nokia, says that Nokia’s mission is to take ‘messaging to everyone’. Out of the 6.6 billion people in the world today, only about one billion have access to email and actually take email for granted. But for the rest, a ‘killer app’ is missing because of lack of access to a PC.
Thomas says, “the idea is to provide a digital identity for everyone. For many people, email is the first digital identity that opens up new opportunities as a lot of new services shut out for the small guy because of a lack of persistent digital identity. It makes a difference to people’s lives.”
Thomas says that Nokia Messaging will centralise all of one’s inboxes so that you need to go to a single place to access all your messages. Presence awareness and instant messaging features, integrated into messaging, can be expected in the near future.
This correspondent had a look at the new service in the pre-production version of the E75 and came away impressed. The pain points of email access through mobile phone - multiple inboxes and applications, complex setting up process, and difficult user experience are pretty much mitigated as can be. The ‘first identity’ concept, too, works very well, asking you if you’d like to use an existing email account or open a new one the first time you click on messaging. The sign-up process for obtaining @ovi.com – Nokia’s own email service – was also very simple.
Thomas says that India is a big target for messaging, and why not – it’s a large part of the ’first digital identity’ market.
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