Nokia N-Series & E-Series Success Is Great News for Mobile Application Developers

Tero Ojanpera, Nokia’s chief strategist and CTO, gave Om Malik at the AlwaysOn conference some very positive numbers on the sales of N-Series & E-Series high-end phones.

• Nokia shipped 9 million N-Series phones and 2 million E-Series phones in Q2 2007.
• Nokia gained about 4% of the global mobile handset market.
• The Nokia CTO expects that the features present in today’s state-of-the-art N-Series Nokia phones will be common in 3 years time in low-end phones sold in emerging markets.

Putting smartphones in the hands of regular people
The N-Series is a set of smartphones for the regular consumer that offer the ability to connect to wifi, take & edit high-res. photos and share them on Flickr (Nokia N73), access program guides and watch mobile tv (Nokia N92), and get maps & directions (Nokia N95). The features offered have usually been reserved for high-end smartphones. With the N-Series Nokia is democritizing smartphones. The proof lies in the sales numbers. There are almost 5 times more ‘fun’ smartphones shipped than ‘business’ smartphones.

The good news for social / local / mobile application developers

1. Companies wanting to create social applications can use the full power of the Symbian OS and the N-Series’ relatively generous screen sizes to create fun and social products targeted for young hip people. A smartphone software does not anymore need to be a business or personal productivity app.
2. Companies wanting to create location-based services can use the JSR 179 library included in some of the N-Series phones running S60 feature pack 3, a flavour of the Symbian operating system. The library gives you access to the location of the user independent of the underlying method: internal GPS, external GPS over bluetooth, Assisted-GPS, or operator-determined positioning through triangulation.

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