To print: Click here or Select File and then Print from your browser's menu

This story was printed from silicon.com, located at http://www.silicon.com/

Story URL: http://hardware.silicon.com/pdas/0,39024643,39297113,00.htm

'I take my hat off to the iPhone': Nokia CEO
Apple did the industry a big favour, says Kallasvuo

By Reuters

Published: Thursday 02 October 2008

Nokia's chief exec gave credit to the company's new mobile competitors from the computer world on Wednesday, but said the Finnish phone company is set to respond to all challengers.

Nokia president and CEO Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo said emerging rivals Apple, Google, RIM and Microsoft have helped to accelerate interest in using the internet on mobile phones.

"Suddenly you have the mightiest companies in the world there as your competitors. That is a little mind-boggling," Kallasvuo said in an on-stage interview at the Churchill Club, a speakers' forum for Silicon Valley civic leaders.

Nokia sells more than 400 million phones a year and counts a 40 per cent share of the conventional global mobile phone market, where it competes with Samsung, Motorola, LG and Sony Ericsson, among others.

He said he was impressed by the strategy of BlackBerry maker RIM to sell not just devices themselves but complete packages for managing corporate email securely.

"Multiply what RIM has been doing here," the Nokia executive said of his own company's strategy to provide email not only to business users but also consumers and a category of avid users in between the two markets, nicknamed "prosumers".

Nokia recently struck a deal to use Microsoft email software on its more than 80 million Series 60 phones sold so far. This should help Nokia quickly overtake RIM in terms of the numbers of phones running corporate email, he said.

"We will exceed the RIM client in some months with a very good email system," Kallasvuo promised. RIM recently reported it had 19 million BlackBerry subscribers.

He singled out the positive impact that Apple has made on the industry with its iPhone over the past year, saying the Cupertino company has done the mobile phone industry "a big favour".

"We have a new, credible competitor in this business. You know I need to take my hat off," he said of how the iPhone has raised expectations for phones. He added: "Of course we need to be able to respond to any competitor and we will."

Of Google, the Nokia executive said it was too early to tell what impact the web company might have on the mobile phone business: "They are a newcomer here. I think the jury is still out: what is the new thing they bring here?"

Thinking back to nearly a year ago to when Google introduced its rival mobile internet software system, Android, Kallasvuo said Nokia had been working towards similar goals for a far longer time. "I realised that we could have made the same announcement 10 years ago," he said.

The first Android phone was introduced last month by T-Mobile in the US, to be followed shortly by several T-Mobile markets in Europe.

Europe helped propel the global rise of mobile communications in the 1990s but Silicon Valley created and continues to dominate the internet, he said. As the internet moves onto phones, the US is poised once again to lead that convergence, the leader of the Finnish company said.