27 11 02

More than half of all phones sold by Nokia in 2003 to be MMS-enabled


"Nokia continues to benefit from good demand for color-screen phones with advanced mobile messaging capability," said Nokia Chairman and CEO Jorma Ollila on Tuesday, speaking at the seventh annual Nokia Mobile Internet Conference in Munich. Including new launches made on the eve of the event, the company now has 15 phones supporting MMS. Ollila told an audience of developers, content providers and operators that in 2003, more than half of all Nokia phones sold would be MMS-enabled.

"Next year Nokia expects to ship 50-100 million devices which have a color display and an open application development platform. Of these phones, we expect roughly 10 million will be Series 60 based devices. The rest will be based on the Nokia operating systems and have the standard Open Mobile Alliance service enablers, including MMS, Java and browsing."

The mobile industry, with more than 1 billion mobile phone users, offers very high potential for software and applications developers," said Ollila. "In the months to come, you will see us doing a lot to support developer efforts by lowering the costs and complexity of deploying applications across multiple Nokia handsets, and by further improving our channels to market for application developers. This is supported by our wide product portfolio and the sheer industry volumes," he said.

Ollila emphasized that the way forward in mobile communications would be through openness and collaboration and that the GSM/EDGE/WCDMA technology family would continue to set the global benchmark.

Almost one year ago Nokia announced it would make core software technology available to the industry in the form of its Series 60 platform. "The success of our Nokia Series 60 software platform is evident," said Ollila. "There are already hundreds of applications available and licensing agreements have been signed with several phone manufacturers, whose combined handset market share accounts for around 60%."

With the emergence of totally new categories in mobile devices, the transition to advanced mobile services is happening now. More than 60 network operators in Europe and Asia are already offering multimedia messaging services and the number is increasing every week. MMS-capable terminals, including those with digital cameras are in strong demand and more than one million Nokia 7650s, the company's first integrated camera phone, have already been sold.

On technology standards, the evolution from GSM to EDGE and WCDMA continues to be the most important path in the mobile world. More than 100 licences have been allocated by national administrations for the new 2GHz frequency band. Almost all licensees have chosen WCDMA technology – and the majority of these networks are currently being built. Looking ahead, the GSM family of technologies is estimated to represent 85% of all mobile phone subscriptions in the world by 2006.