Nokia Gets It
Sometimes I’m amazed at how much Nokia “gets” being in the mobile domain, and I wonder why they haven’t made a bigger dent in the American market yet.
Take the Nokia Sports Tracker for example, which comes to us from the Nokia Research Center which just got a brilliant highlight in BusinessWeek that’s worth reading:
This option alone says a lot. Here’s how the NRC describes this application:
[This] is a GPS based activity tracker that runs on S60 smartphones. Information such as speed, distance and time are automatically stored to your training diary. To be able to use [this] application for real, you need Nokia S60 3.0 phone with Bluetooth GPS device or Nokia S60 3.0 phone with integrated GPS.
And this is just the surface of what they do. On the flip side, as Jan Chipchase, one of their exploratory human behavioral field researchers — who recently spoke at the TED conference on the mobile experience — says in the BusinessWeek article:
Let’s talk about a study we did last year on how people share objects. You can relate this to mobile phones. They’re basically designed as personal objects. But if you look at usage in Africa, increasingly the phone is shared. A family might have one. A village might have one, or someone who runs a phone kiosk in a village might have one. We’re thinking about how we could redesign the mobile phone and the communication experience to be more suitable for sharing.
These are truly smart people who really are looking to enhance the mobile experience and you gotta applaud them.
