First impressions of Nokia’s new N8 handset are impressive build quality, best camera I’ve experienced on a smartphone and a big improvement in the operating system with the introduction of Symbian ^3.
I plan a full review in the Personal Technology column in the FT’s Business Life section shortly, but, in the meantime, more on the N8 in an interview after the jump with Tero Ojanperä, head of Nokia’s mobile services, who handed me an N8 review unit on its first day of shipping on Thursday.
When will everyone else be able to get an N8?
We began shipping worldwide today, we have had the highest number of pre-orders of any device we have produced, so we have to first satisfy the pre-order customers, so it will vary market by market when people get it.
To what do you attribute this unprecedented demand?
The user interface and the Ovi Store are completely revamped with a new user experience, I think the development environment with the new QT [software developer kit] means you can speed up your devleopment and it will work cross-platform, so it works with the MeeGo operating system as well. So there have been a lot of new developments that are focused not just on what the phone can do but how we get the developers involved. The new in-app analytics helps them to really focus on what users did with the app after they downloaded it so they can focus on engagement. We now have 95 operators offering integrated carrier billing, so that helps with monetisation. We are the only one doing this today. We now have 70 developers who have had more than 1m downloads and we now have 200,000 new Ovi users signing up every day.
Where is your strength in apps?
I call mapping an anchor service, we launched free Ovi maps at the beginning of the year and turn-by-turn navigation, we are now seeing 1.5bn GPS probes a month, which means we are able from those probes to compile a traffic map, so you can see where traffic is flowing well or where the jam is, so when a consumer wants traffic data they know their data can be recorded on an anonymous basis and in return they can get the traffic information.
How important is the N8 to Nokia?
We will now have four different devices and the N8 is the world’s best-ever camera phone so it’s an iconic signature phone in that sense. But the E7 is also coming out with a QWERTY keyboard and the same Symbian ^3 software and then the C7, which is a more sleek , stylish fashion-oriented phone and the C6 that has an even smaller form factor, but the same software. Each one works in a similar way but wraps around different hardware, so we believe there is still segmentation based on the hardware, but for developers, their games and apps work the same on all the devices.
Can you explain your strategy on MeeGo and Symbian?
They will co-exist, Symbian is not going to be phased out, it’s alive and kicking. The positioning is MeeGo is the highest-end platform and Symbian is going to be democratising the smartphone and go into lower and lower price points. MeeGo with Intel is a platform that can power not only smartphones, but also tablets, automotive products, connected TVs, so it’s a very versatile computing platform.
Does Nokia plan a tablet?
Currently we are really focused on the smartphone segment.
Have the management changes led to any change in strategy?
It’s been about how can we get much tighter between the smartphone and the software and services, there is much tighter collaboration and it’s already visible and we start from the consumers, it’s more about their lifestyles, and what that means for our development approach and this has been the big transformation – focus on the software and services instead of hardware only and we need to accelerate that and having a new CEO that we are excited about is accelerating that.
How soon before every phone is a smartphone?
Today, with the S40, our low end platform we have the Ovi Store there for applications, we launched a candy-bar feature phone with a touch screen and that has Ovi Store, so every phone is already a smartphone, even the lowest end phones that can only do SMS, we provide services like Ovi life that is making them smart with information for education, agriculture etc. We also have a proxy browser that compresses information from the web for these phones.
Can the N8 help you make progress with US carriers?
We are working more closely with the US carriers on new services and applications. The [$10m in prizes developer] initiative we have with AT&T is good for development. We have also been working with T-Mobile, with Ovi maps, the Ovi Store and carrier billing and with the location services, we have been seeing quite good usage from T-Mobile devices that are enabled with Ovi maps.
