Future of mobile services: Ovi?

We’ve heard a lot recently about music on phones, haven’t we? It seems like finding the holy grail sometimes. Apple’s push into the mobile market with the iPhone was long expected, surely hyped but also wanted by many who wanted to finally have a mobile phone that actually integrates music well. And now, it is Nokia pushing into the mobile music market. Ovi it is, the mobile service and content portal. I won’t judge the potential success of this counteract by the mobile giant.

Instead I want to revisit the future of mobile services as it was painted so many times, such as in the Book of Visions written years back by some UMTS backers. So where are we nowadays? We surely got mobile devices more powerful than my computer some 10 years ago. Some tens of MBs of RAM, up to several GBs of swappable flash memory, a processor with about 200 to 300 MHz, 2G/3G/HSPA/WLAN, nice displays, software platform. All you wish you’d think.

But what can you actually do with all your abundance of connectivity and computing power? Particular the envisioned 3G services like IM, video calling or PTT are nowhere near widespread deployment. Either the pricing simply won’t do it (ever tried a video phone call and checked your costs later?) or the installed software is not countered by appropriate service backends.

For instance, while we have Internet IM for nearly 10 years (I opened my Yahoo account sometime in 1998), all the WirelessVillages and OMA standards of the mobile world are nowhere when it comes to deployment or accounts opened. For some four or so years now, Nokia has been placing a rather useless program on their S60 devices that seemingly allows for IM. But nobody seems to be putting up actual systems, i.e., servers, neither the operators nor Nokia and other device vendors themselves. And you wonder why. Wouldn’t the increased traffic create new revenue for the operators? And even if they simply can’t put up the systems themselves, why aren’t the device manufacturers stepping in themselves? It not only makes their own devices more useful, it would also satisfy their (operator) customers due to the potential of increased data traffic.

So in the light of Ovi, I wonder why none of the mobile players actually came up with setting up a minimum of mobile services themselves that people can actually use. IM is the simplest example here. And it goes further towards calendar sharing, photo sharing, etc.

So I wonder what the future of mobile services is. It is certainly bright looking at the plethora of solutions and ideas coming from independent developers. But it is only disappointment that one can have for the mobile services put forward by the giants like Nokia and others. Instead of wasting time and energy to hunt after the music market share, some energy towards making the simple things work might be a good step forward.