More N80 Musings

A few months ago I got my first rich media mobile phone, the Nokia N80, and I have been using it ever since. The phone is remarkable - although I suspect that very soon these features will be considered standard on a phone - for a variety of reasons. It is clearly a version of what we'll see in mobile multimedia in the coming years.

Marek Pawlowski, who writes in the MEX blog, has an interesting blog post on the N80. The main point he makes, and I think it is a serious one, is that this phone has added considerable value to him and at every stage in that value chain he was able to bypass his network operator and use third party networks  and applications. In fact, a lot of the value proposition came *because* of the ability to bypass his network operator.

For incumbant network operators, this sort of thing has to be a bit of a warning. At the present, phones like this are too expensive (currently over $700 once you get it home in Canada), and the user interface is a bit too clunky - Marek glosses over some of the grief of using WiFi on these things, I think - but those are problems that a combination of user interface design and Moore's law will take care of... it is just a matter of when.

Check out his comments and let me know what you think. Thanks to David for the suggestion on this one!

...r