Few questions with Hannu Markus from Nokia

I’ve been privileged to get some questions answered from Nokia’s Communications Manager, Mr. Hannu Markus. In the email discussion, he resolved some of my thoughts about Nokia (NYSE: NOK) and its strategy. Here are some question he answered:

Q: One of the important recent news is that Palm (NSDQ: PALM)’s market share is going down. That could be good thing for Symbian. What’s the Nokia’s take on this?

A: Last year, Forum Nokia initiated a campaign to inform Palm developers about the S60 platform offering on the Forum Nokia web site. In early April of this year, we also began a similar but less extensive campaign to attract Windows Mobile developers to port their applications to S60. We welcome all developers, not only the Palm or Windows Mobile developers, to join Forum Nokia and to port their applications to Symbian OS and the S60 platform to take advantage of the S60 consumer marketplace, which continues to grow fast.

Q: Nokia recently launched the Nokia 6708 handset with Symbian UIQ platform. Can we expect to see some other Nokia handset which uses the UIQ platform?

A: We decided to use a UIQ-based device engine for the Nokia 6708, but we have not disclosed plans for any further UIQ-based devices.

Q: Nokia started the Maemo (Linux) platform for its Nokia 770 Internet Tablet and is the single largest shareholder of Symbian. It may look like sending the mixed signals. How do you see that conflict and where does Symbian ends and Linux begins (or vice versa) at Nokia?

A: Nokia’s mobile platform strategy is based on Symbian OS and S60, which provide mature capabilities for smartphones and their applications. We are confident that it is a better OS for phones than Linux. Nokia is also committed to ensuring that Symbian OS will be developed further to remain competitive.

Linux suits the non-cellular Nokia 770 Internet Tablet product category, because the technology in the device is very commonly used in IT products. Linux and the open source community surrounding it have to date focused on back-end IT infrastructure applications and have enjoyed great success there. At the moment, Linux does not support the rich feature set of Symbian OS and S60 for mobile phones and as such Nokia does not have a strategy to develop mobile phones based on it.

Q: Which phone do you use and why?

A: I use the Nokia 9500 Communicator in work and the Nokia 6630 smartphone at leisure. The communicator is excellent for reading emails, manage contacts and calendar, and for other work-related activities. At my leisure time, I use the smaller Nokia 6630 e.g. for shooting photos, sending multimedia messages, browsing web, access to various mobile services, playing games and running various other S60 applications.

Q: At the end, after the release of the N72, N73 and N93 (great release BTW) what’s next for Nokia?

A: Naturally, we further develop current features in our products, and we continuously monitor market needs to bring new products with new features into the market.

That means more cool smartphones (or mobile computers as they are called these days) from Nokia.