I am sure your first reaction after the title of this post would be – bah! Mine too was similar to an extent. Nokia has been calling its Nseries devices ‘multimedia computers’ for the last two years or so, a title which is justified considering the sheer amount of work you can do on the phone itself – Email, Web, Music, Video, RSS, Basic Editing and so on. However, if you do not look at the smartphone in isolation then we sometimes have doubts. No body here is saying that the smartphone will replace the computer as we know it today, it never will. What might happen is that the definition of computer might chance.

Tomi T Ahonen has written a really thought provoking post on why Nokia is now the world’s biggest computer maker with a 14% market share. He also has this chart up that traces the development of computers and after looking at it, I think you might agree with the title of this post. (via: AAS)

This is something that I have waited to see happen for months now. About the time when N-Gage launched, at the Mobile World Congress in Feb. 08, I had the opportunity to speak to Nokia employees about how they propose to market N-Gage games and make them available for purchase specially in countries which are not receptive to online credit card purchases.

The reason I was so wanted them to come out with vouchers that could be available at your local Nokia dealership was that I simply couldn’t see many people buying games online, at least here in India. To Nokia’s credit, they already seemed to be aware of that possibility and willing to put such a system in place.

Today, comes news that at least in Indonesia, Nokia has a bus touring the country with staff on board who demonstrate to people how to get the N-Gage client on their phone and download the demos themselves. They also act as a place where people can purchase the games using pre-pay vouchers. Brilliant. The idea is simply, you buy a voucher which has a code on it – that code can be used to activate any game of your choice or even a particular game depending on the voucher you buy.

I have always believed that having such runs around the cities, demos in malls and so on is a much better, effective and cheaper way to not only advertise but also to get the people to actually experience the product.

Continued

A pretty cool and interesting video from Nokia. on the evolution of entertainment, from what it was, to how it is now with our cellphones.

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