April 5, 2011
By Donovan Jackson

When you’re the biggest maker of handsets in the world, just how far can your ambition reach? Very far when you’re Nokia. Its new mobile phones strategy centres on connecting the next billion people to the internet. People who have never been connected to it before, that is.

Why’s that important? Well, because the internet makes life easier. It also makes it possible to expand your horizons dramatically.

Anyway, back to Nokia and the next billion. Since it is expressly aiming at bringing new consumers into the world of telecommunications and the internet, the focus falls very firmly on creating low-cost, high-performance handsets. The price point at which these phones are targeted is below R1000. And the markets are those in the developing world, particularly BRIICA (Brazil, Russia, India, Indonesia, China, Africa).

As an aside, it is also somewhat fascinating to see that Nokia is shifting its focus from being a ‘telecommunications’ device provider to being an ‘internet communications’ device provider. That’s convergence for you.

Affordable Nokia Phones = Great Mobile Products

But these handsets must be what Nokia calls ‘Great Mobile Products’. In other words, they are to deliver a great experience of the mobile internet. That is especially important, as the goal is to take mobile phone users beyond mere SMS and phone calls and to open their eyes and minds to the possibilities of the internet. Achieving that is very unlikely with slow connections, poor quality screen or difficult user input.

As we all by now should know, mobile phones are massively used in the developing world. What we also know is that the human capital of the developing world is consistently neglected. People don’t enjoy the opportunity to explore their intelligence, to educate themselves (which, in the absence of formal education, is quite possible using the internet and definitely your mobile phone), to become more informed and more switched on. With a mobile internet delivered via an inexpensive but high-performance smartphone, the possibilities really can become endless.

That’s something Nokia is tackling head-on. It has the experience to create such handsets. Perhaps even more importantly, it can also (uniquely, perhaps) achieve the massive economies of scale to make a reality of a handset which has advanced features at an affordable price point.

Connect to the information age

Right now is the information age. It is an age created and ushered in by the people who use the internet. Sure there is a lot of twaddle out there, but so is practically the sum total of human knowledge. The more people who are empowered to participate in that knowledge, the richer it becomes.

And that’s a challenge which Nokia is setting out to meet.

FAST FACTS: Who is connected right now?

- 30%* of the world’s population is online but 90 percent live within range of a mobile signal.

- 3.2 billion people do not own a phone.

- Of the 3.7 billion who do, 1.2 billion have SMS only; of the remaining 2.5 billion over half are not using the web at all.

*Access to the Internet via mobile or computer

The next billion people are entering the information age not with PCs … but with affordable mobile phones.