Nokia chief executive offers praise for the iPhone

May 28, 2009 | Dean Takahashi | Comments | |

Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo spoke at the AllThingsD conference today where he gave some unexpected praise for Apple’s iPhone in a couple of interviews. If you haven’t caught some of the video, it’s worth a look.

Kallasvuo said the iPhone did a service to the whole telecom industry because it inspired consumers to use mobile devices as if they were computers with all sorts of software and services attached to them.

“No doubt the iPhone was a wake-up call for us,” Kallasvuo said. “But innovation will not stop here.”

Kallasvuo said Nokia holds about 35 percent to 40 percent of the worldwide cell phone market, or 1.1 billion Nokia users. But he emphasized the company is shifting from hardware to solutions, with investments in software and services.

Examples of that include the launch of the Ovi Store, which had a rocky launch yesterday but represents a lot of integration work. The store is built with location awareness in mind so that it can direct users to buy things that are nearby. Nokia is able to do that in part because it bought mapping technology with its $8 billion acquisition of Navteq.

Nokia has a long way to go to catch up to Apple’s AppStore, which has more than 49,000 applications. Kallasvuo said one should not underestimate the challenge, but he believes that Nokia has an opportunity because of its solutions approach.

“The whole industry is at an inflection point,” he said.

Kallsvuo said it was easier to define competition a few years ago: Motorola. Today, the competition includes Samsung, LG, Microsoft, Google, RIM, and Apple. At times, the company has to partner with some of those rivals.

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About the Author, Dean Takahashi

Dean is lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat. He covers video games, security, chips and a variety of other subjects. Dean previously worked at the San Jose Mercury News, the Wall Street Journal, the Red Herring, the Los Angeles Times, the Orange County Register and the Dallas Times Herald. He is the author of two books, Opening the Xbox and the Xbox 360 Uncloaked. Follow him on Twitter at @deantak, and follow VentureBeat on Twitter at @venturebeat.

  • A lot of them actually, in Asia especially. In some areas where phones are stolen often and different prepaid sims can be used.
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  • I say to all telco's and especially Nokia: ship your phones with a decent browser and open up your phone's APIs to the web. Otherwise, you're making developers' lives difficult with your 100 different platforms.
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  • Even if only a fraction of the 1.1 billion Nokia phone owners starts using Ovi, that will represent more consumers than the entire iPhone market.
  • Great, iphone is really great. It was my dream to get one for myself. I got one recently and I really agree with the chief executive of nokia.

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