THE world's biggest mobile handset maker, Nokia Corporation, is looking to provide a host of services like music, gaming, maps and navigation aids on its mobile phones. This is the Finland-based company's response to phone users' demanding more bells and whistles on their phones, a top official said.

Nokia's chief technology officer, Tero Ojanpera, told BizIT in an interview that there has been a paradigm shift in user expectations with the Internet and mobility coming together.

'To take advantage of this convergence as well as the emergence of other new technologies, users are now looking at their phones as more of multi-functional devices that do a number of things, other than just communicating,' Mr Ojanpera said.

The Nokia official, who is based in New York, is in Singapore to attend the giant imbX trade event which runs through this week. He will also be speaking at the Nokia Connections 2007 conference, which starts today.

Explaining the emphasis on music, Mr Ojanpera noted that Nokia is now the biggest maker of MP3 devices - specifically, mobile phones equipped to play and store MP3 files - in the world.

'Later this year we will introduce a comprehensive experience around music that combines a number of different elements,' he said, adding that at this point he could not elaborate further.

In 2006, Nokia, the world's top mobile phone maker, sold 347 million phones worldwide, or almost a million a day.

In October last year, it completed the acquisition of digital music distributor LoudEye Corp. Mr Ojanpera said LoudEye would be used to 'give a new comprehensive experience in music' to users.

Nokia had said, after the LoudEye acquisition, that its vision is to enable people to access all the music they want, anywhere, anytime and at a reasonable cost.

The Nokia music experience will include music-optimised devices like the Nokia N91 and other Nokia Nseries multimedia devices. It will also include music applications like the Nokia Podcasting application, and the ability to discover, purchase and manage music, Mr Ojanpera added.

For the gaming experience, the company will build on its N-Gage platform and introduce a new platform. 'We are building a comprehensive gaming platform around the N-Gage arena - a platform where people can go and seek out other gamers who like similar games and can play against each other,' Mr Ojanpera said.

The other area of thrust is maps and navigation. Last year, Nokia announced that it had completed its acquisition of gate5 AG, a leading supplier of mapping, routing and navigation software and services.

The acquisition of gate5 is an important step in developing the new product category of multimedia computers that offer people multiple ways to connect to information, entertainment and other people, Mr Ojanpera said.

He added that Nokia's strategy is to offer world-leading location based services as an integrated offering to its customers. Nokia has established a sales unit for its Location Based Software and Services in Hong Kong, targeting its PND (personal navigation device) customers in the Asia-Pacific region.

'We will be putting maps in the majority of our devices and those maps are free, so wherever in the world you might be you will get free maps with the Nokia device. . . If you want to enhance the experience with navigation you can buy a navigation capability,' Mr Ojanpera said. 'You can buy a licence for one day, three days or three years depending on your requirements.'

Mr Ojanpera added that apart from music, gaming, maps and camera functions, the other major driver for mobile phone usage will be access to the Internet, as mobile broadband becomes a reality.

'We have started to provide comprehensive browsing capabilities with the S60 phone software and our smart phone platform browser,' he said. 'We did not accept the fact that the browsing within a mobile phone should be compromised and so we actually decided that we like to make it as similar as browsing on the Internet through a PC.'

Adding that Nokia was the first to bring this capability to the market, he said the company was now enhancing the browser platform with 'widsets'. A takeoff from Microsoft's Widgets concept, widsets are mini applications specially designed for mobile devices and downloadable from the Internet. Users having phones equipped with a Java MIDP 2.0 client, a 128x128 screen and Internet access can sign up for free and get the client sent directly to the phone.

Nokia will let users create and share their own widsets; for example, a widset could be defined so that it would update the local weather forecast automatically.

'We are running a service called www.widsets.com that has more than one million registered users. The users can define a dashboard where one can locate the different types of the widsets and view the Internet in a compelling way,' Mr Ojanpera said.

According to the Nokia official, this is the company's way of bringing the interactive Internet experience known as Web 2.0 to the mobile space. Mr Ojanpera agreed that despite all the enhancements, a mobile phone could never duplicate the complete Internet experience on a large screen PC.

However, he argued that there will be a huge number of people who have never seen a PC and will be getting their first Internet and computer experience with the mobile phone. 'And in this way, some of the functionalities that you find in a PC, and which a PC user is used to, are not necessarily even required in mobile computers.'

And in any case, users' browsing habits are evolving. 'While I personally still belong to the generation that learnt to use e-mail, if you look at young people who are teenagers or in their early twenties, they don't use e-mail, rather they use communications methods like IM (instant messaging). They are using social networking to communicate; it's a completely different experience.

'And those are the kind of capabilities that we are trying to bring into the market, making social networking in a mobile context as easy as possible where it kind of fits quite naturally.'

This article first appeared in BT on June 18, 2007