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Technology Stocks : Nokia (NOK) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: tero kuittinen who wrote (8773)	1/11/2001 4:39:47 PM
From: Eric L	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 34857

<< I see bright a bright future for Simon in the consultancy business. >> Seems to be doing OK. GSMA not a bad account for a consultant to have. More Simon on Nokia: >> Nokia Explains Its New Handset, Infrastructure And Service Strategies And Targets Simon Buckingham Mobile Lifestreams 5 December 2000 At Nokia's annual global analyst meeting today, several interesting announcements were made. Here they are from Nokia's press release with Mobile Lifestreams' counter comments: NOKIA: Nokia is set to benefit from new functionality such as messaging, imaging, other digital services and applications, by providing the required technology to consumers as well as operators and other service providers. MOBILE LIFESTREAMS: A clear indication that multimedia messaging will be key in 3G markets. Notice that consumers are listed ahead of operators. NOKIA: Nokia is also expanding "Club Nokia", a value-added platform for Nokia handset users to further leverage the Nokia brand, increase customer loyalty and offer new phone related services. MOBILE LIFESTREAMS: One of the key trends for 2001 is Nokia's new strategy of going direct to the end mobile phone user by using Club Nokia as a trojan horse to bypass their principle current customer group. Nokia will be offering services starting with ringtones direct to end users, irrespective of what network they are on. How the network operators respond to this will be very interesting to see. NOKIA: Management confirmed the company's objective to target an approximate 35% share of the WCDMA markets. MOBILE LIFESTREAMS: This is an ambitious target in view of Ericsson’s entrenched infrastructure position and Nortel’s aggressive 3G/ WCDMA contract wins as explained on www.mobileumts.com. Siemens has indicated at least two dozen UMTS network trial and commercial contracts and Lucent has been winning business too- announcing today a contract in Germany. Lets not forget Alcatel and Motorola and others too. NOKIA: Nokia's mobile phone growth has continued to exceed market growth. The company believes it now has a market share in excess of 30%, MOBILE LIFESTREAMS: Mobile Lifestreams expects Nokia’s share of the global handset market to decline as the Korean and Japanese manufacturers take market share in Europe on the back of 3G rollouts. Nokia is already late with GPRS and is not expected to have commercial GPRS terminals available until mid 2001 at the earliest. The recently announced Communicator 9210 does NOT support GPRS. See the Casio MessageCam review at mobilemms.com for an example of a superb Japanese 3G terminal that is a couple of years ahead of any black and white small screensaver Nokia can offer on a handset. [Note: I think that one reason 9210 does NOT support GPRS is that Symbian does not yet have an SDK available supporting GPRS but will in it's next release]. NOKIA: Nokia estimates that web-enabled handset unit volumes will increase to around 200 million with WAP handsets representing some 180 million of the total. MOBILE LIFESTREAMS: The big question here will be how many of those 180 million WAP handsets will be being used for WAP, the fact that WAP does not have an upgrade path to new versions of the WAP standard without the need for a new phone, the non-support of GPRS, the ideal bearer for WAP, as explained earlier. WAP handsets are looking more like any other voice-centric devices. The strange looking Nokia 7110 with its bulb like screen for mobile Internet has now been replaced by the Nokia 6210 with regular screen size. NOKIA: Nokia announced that it is executing its strategy to become a leader in the CDMA handset business. The company is now shipping its new tri-mode Nokia 5185i (CDMA1900/800/AMPS) phone in large volumes and, in 2001, is planning to bring exciting new models to the market including Korea. Nokia also announced that a new mobile phone model specifically for the trend-setting Asia Pacific markets would be launched before the end of this year. MOBILE LIFESTREAMS: Nokia’s entry into the Japanese i-mode and Korean markets should build volumes of handsets but not necessarily values- Nokia will lose ground in the higher value segments such as smart phones. These volumes may be behind the ambitious market share statement described above. MOBILE LIFESTREAMS: In summary, Nokia faces a lot of challenges in its existing business on the terminals and infrastructure side and therefore it is surprising that it would go ahead and set such high expectations for its future performance. Nokia is simultaneously transforming itself from a mere hardware manufacturer into a supplier of value-added services direct to end users. It success in implementing this strategy is likely to determine the future success of the company. << - Eric -

To: tero kuittinen who wrote (8773)	1/11/2001 7:46:35 PM
From: Eric L	Respond to of 34857

re: "Buck" on EMS v. "Smart Messaging" << I'm sure this messaging system fight is going to be a huge issue. Considering how strong Ericsson is in the teen niche market, this will be a battle of titans! I mean; just look at Ericsson's market share in the pre-paid market (which drives the messaging traffic). That 5% sure translates into colossal standardization strength! >> Oh. I see. Ericsson is infra. Nokia is NOW King of handsets. So why should a standard, initially proposed by Ericsson, be supported by Nokia .... Still curious as to how this will work out and more than a little surprised that Nokia is hewing to a prorpietary architecture here, when there is a 3GPP standard in place. Maybe nokia wants to be the Gorilla of handsets and is starting with proprietary control of "Smart Messaging"? A few excerpts from a whitepaper called "Next Messaging An Introduction to SMS, EMS and MMS": mobileipworld.com >> Enhanced Messaging Service (EMS) 1. EMS Introduction The Enhanced Messaging Service (EMS) is the ability to send a combination of simple melodies, pictures, sounds, animations, modified text and standard text as an integrated message for display on an EMS compliant handset. There are many different potential combinations of these media. For example, when an exclamation mark appears in the enhanced message, a melody could be played. A simple black and white image could be displayed along with some text and this sound effect. EMS is an enhancement to SMS but is very similar to SMS in terms of using the store and forward SMS Centers, the signaling channel and the like to realize EMS. <snip> 3. EMS Background The Enhanced Messaging Service (EMS) came about as a submission to the standards committees by Ericsson. Ericsson presented the outline structure of EMS to the relevant ETSI/ 3GPP committees and stated that they would only commit more resource to propagating EMS if the handset vendors all committed to supporting it. All of the major handset vendors with the exception of Nokia who reserved their position did commit to supported the concept of EMS, hence the EMS standards have evolved and are now stable and complete as part of the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) technical specification: 3G TS 23.040, "Technical realization of the Short Message Service (SMS)". 4. EMS Handsets As in many other "non-voice" mobile services, wide availability of EMS compliant handsets will ultimately decide the success of EMS. Many EMS uses will involved person to person messaging, like SMS. Early indications are that the likes of Ericsson, Panasonic, Sony and Samsung will be the first to announce EMS compliant terminals in quarter 1 or quarter 2 of 2001 (most probably at the annual CeBIT trade fair). Both Siemens and Alcatel have recently been involved in the EMS standard work. Siemens are committed to including Nokia has also finally been involved in the standards work, but they are waiting to see. When large volumes of stable EMS compliant handsets will be available is however not yet clear. Ericsson has now implemented (Nokia's) Smart Messaging protocol for over the air (OTA) WAP service configuration, but will clearly be using EMS and not Smart Messaging for picture messaging purposes. The joint Ericsson/Nokia OTA protocol specification can be seen more as an extension to the WAP Push over an SMS bearer than a smart messaging application; but the two have much in common anyway. <snip> 6. EMS Associated Technologies Currently, the only EMS like technologies that are proprietary in their nature and not therefore standardized, such as: - *Nokia Smart Messaging. This pre-WAP protocol is a proprietary format for some Nokia phones that is used to deliver ringtones, picture messages, operator logos, group graphics, business cards and other services to and from certain Nokia only phones. See www.ringtones.com and www.picturemessaging.com as examples of professional end user sites delivering Smart Messaging based content to Nokia phones. Nokia seems to favor continued support for its proprietary smart messaging based formats for ringtones and picture messaging and has not yet stated either way whether it will support EMS. However, Nokia seems as inclined as ever to implement its own formats such as the proprietary Nokia chat service incorporated into the new Nokia 3310 consumer phone. This service features a clever user interface for sending SMS (incorporating the sender's nickname) to a group of people. All proprietary services cause problems for users in that they are unable to send messages to non-Nokia and non-feature supporting phones. Mobile Lifestreams feels that the success of EMS is heavily dependent on de facto support across ALL handsets and handset vendors and would encourage Nokia to join with the rest of the industry and support EMS to ensure the success of this new service. - M@gic4* is a UK based company that has developed an advanced messaging standard for the delivery of rich media and content using SMS as a bearer. Their technology is similar to EMS and also uses the SMS User Data Header to enhance SMS. Additionally, unlike EMS but like Nokia Smart Messaging, M@gic4's technology supports operator logo replacement and downloadable ringtones. M@gic4 is attempting to license its technology- called g@te- to handset vendors and work with the 3GPP standards committees to try to have its enhancements incorporated into the EMS standards. (www.magic4.com) << - Eric -