look-a-like contest - Nokia 7110 vs N91

Do you remember the Nokia 7110 from 1999/2000, it was one of those gadgets you had to have (in Europe at least). At that time for me as a student it was way to expensive and it was Nokia's first WAP phone, which was hyped to the max. But WAP didn't live up to its mobile internet dreams, because it was slow and didn't have any color. No color + no speed = no mobile internet.

Now in Q4 of 2005 Nokia will launch the real killer phone according to me and again it gets into trouble. It has everything I hoped for and that's the problem, because not one telecom operator wants to lose that goose with the golden eggs.

What does it have, that the telco's probably don't like:
1. WiFi, bluetooth 1.2, mini-usb
2. Visual Radio
3. Music shop
4. 4 gb Harddisk for mp3/mp4
5. (instant messaging?)

With WiFi, bluetooth and mini-usb it's making the local p2p exchange of ringtone's, wallpapers and games a lot easier. Why would users use the portal of their telco? I exchange my files this way with friends, so probably everyone will do it this way if they've got a suitable device and a simple user interface.

Another big threat and a pleasure for me when I'm traveling is the fact that Skype is going to launch a Symbian version of their VOIP solution. Instead of 1,50 euro a minute, I would pay 0,01 dollar a minute for a call from the USA to the Netherlands and I wouldn't have to pay the absurd amount of 28 euro's for 1 mb of data traffic.

Mobile marketing with Nokia’s visual radio by sending graphics/animations together with the radio signal is a very interesting technology for advertising to a broader audience. If users interact with these advertisements some data will be used and they can charge customers for that part of the message. But think of all of those bits and bytes that are not flowing over their own network. So it looks like some services are getting lose of the chains the Telco's had them in.

Can it get even worse? Yes it can, equip the phone with a music store they don't control (motorola itunes phone, where is it?) and miss 3 dollar for each sold song. The telco's that want to sell streaming music/video instead of "I own the song" aren't very pleased also, when users download songs/movies from the internet and put them on the phone with help of WiFi/bluetooth/usb.

Do you think this phone will be available in the shops when you think about it from the perspective of a telco?

I think they really can't stop this from happening. Mobile phones are converging with pda's/pc's and the consumer doesn't like it at all when he/she knows devices are crippled and technology they want to use isn't available for them. Because of weblogs and forums on the internet consumers are able to communicate and organize in a rather quick and effective way; consumer empowerment. One great example of this is the crippling of the motorola V710 by Verizon.

The time has come that Telco's should re-think their business models/pricing or would they rather sell every consumer a Nokia 7110...they look-a-like, don’t you think?