Huawei Vision : a view from the cloud

Huawei Vision runs on Android 2.3 but comes with a 160 Gigabyte spot in the cloud for every owner, positioning the Chinese player at the strategic gateway between that soft spot and its own hardware (scheduled for September in China, along with 4G). Apps agregation starts with the usual suspects : music, images or video that you may not want to transfer forever from laptop to laptop or to XX century storage solutions (ie CDs, DVDs).

Hardly disruptive : Alibaba just launched a similar concept, and of course Apple made a splash with its iCloud earlier this year. But Huawei was supposed to be essentially about hardware.

Sounds like that business model may not be sustainable anymore. Clouds may pass in the sky, replaced with new UFOs, but the truth is starting to sink in : smartphones are not much smarter than computers, and differenciation is getting more and more difficult every year. Worse : product cycles are even shorter and being cool never lasts long.

Food for thought for Samsung, who's been threatened by the Nokia syndrome even before claiming the leadership in handsets. But at least the Finns did venture into new business models. Never forget that OVI preceded Apple's App Store iOs by one year.

Of course, back then, Jorma Ollila was already gone, and Steve Jobs still cool.


mot-bile 2011

Nokia's Ovi Store - a follower-leader

Embarrassingly too late, Nokia decided to open its online Ovi Store globally. Or to revive the buzz around it.

About two years ago, I had some doubts about OVI's ability to counter Microsoft ("OVI, a Door facing Windows"). But since then, it also left Apple snatch the bulk of a market it was supposed to rule (the App Store recently celebrated 1 billion downloads). The mobile phone leader definitely lost his mojo a couple of years ago.

Yeah... I know there's this coopetition between the Scandinavian King and MNOs, who prefer a hyper hype partner taking a bigger cut, but on a pie customers want to pay for.

Luckily for Nokia, there's always AT&T, ever the enthusiast for MVNOs and other pipe-fillers. For a Texan, anything coming from Finland must be cool.

S60 does have a cool factor, after all. 50M users can't be totally wrong. What if they decide to turn what they saved by not chosing iPhone into more apps ?

OVI - a door facing Windows

Another sign of global warming ? Penguins are spreading over new territories, and Linux becomes a major threat for Windows Mobile, already struggling against the leading OS Symbian.

And leading handset manufacturer Nokia recently created MOSH (MObilize and SHare), "a content sharing site where community members upload, distribute and manage content to be viewed and enjoyed on mobile devices".

In real life, Mosh happens to be "a type of dance characterized by audience members aggressively pushing or slamming into each other". The word also sounds like the French slang for "ugly".

All this could perfectly define the mobile arena right now.

Cornier than ever after the successful launch of iPhone in the US, Nokia delivers a new concept called OVI, supposed to give another chance to such failures as N-Gage and leverage from such charming initiatives as MOSH. No synergies with Twango yet, officially.

OVI means "eggs" in Latin but also "door" in Finnish. So NokNok's answer to Windows Mobile is the killer combo of a fragile door (OVI) and an ugly portal (MOSH).

I can wait to try it.