You might think that Sony Ericsson, Samsung or maybe even an upstart like LG or Apple would be considered more direct competitors to the mobile behemoth that is Nokia, but the ever contrary Finnish company sees things differently, declaring Google as it’s main dueler.
It seems however that this is not a presumptive comment about the potential success of Android, but rather some mild chest beating about some of the inroads the company has been making on some of Google’s more established territory.
Specifically, mobile advertising is where Nokia believes it could step up to the plate as it has shipped over 35 million GPS-enabled mobile phones this year all capable of supporting location-based mobile advertising. Google is somewhat interested in this slice of the market as it already commands the lion’s share of online advertising and location-based mobile advertising is a particularly fertile economic pasture at the moment. It’s no surprise that Nokia is making an aggressive play in that area.Then there is mapping, something Nokia has been shouting about conquering for a while now, with an application simply called Maps available on Ovi. The application is quite a bit more advanced than Google’s Google Maps and rather than doing all of the processing on the server, Maps opts for a vector-based solution, processing on the client making its response time much faster.
Add to that the fact that Nokia has just bought NavTeq, the mapping company that powers several prominent Sat-Nav systems and mapping software, including Google Maps, and Nokia VP Michael Halbherr’s recent comment “Google is our competitor” seems entirely justified.
Sounds like healthy competition to us and if it means that we will soon never be able to get lost again while on holiday (scoff!) in the busy maze-like streets of Marrakech, then bring it on.
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