The battle for differentiation in mobile is at fever pitch. iPhone has the app store, BlackBerry has cut-rate, unlimited internet access, Android has… well… Google and Nokia has a mounting collection of services that includes an extensive, and now entirely free, mapping solution.

Nokia Maps was an early play from the Finnish mobile giant that has put it ahead of the pack when it comes to affordable mapping and navigation on your phone.

The service has been mostly free for some time, offering maps of the world and their updates to Nokia users for gratis. Voice navigation and a few other bits and pieces were levied via subscription, however – but these are now free as part of the re-branded Ovi Maps product announced by Nokia this week. (more…)

Nokia surprised the market this week by announcing a netbook device that it will launch soon. The Finnish mobile company claims the Booklet 3G will deliver 12 hours of battery life, run Windows 7 and include all of the features one would expect from a modern netbook-slash-laptop. It’ll also include Nokia applications, such as Ovi Maps – and has a built-in GPS, which is unusual for such a device.

As smartphones become more capable and netbooks become smaller the Booklet 3G resembles a strategy from Nokia that aligns well to the evolution of the market. Nokia has also recently forged agreements with Microsoft and Intel designed to keep it ahead of the pack, although is has been lagging on the smartphone side where it must contend with the likes of RIM (Blackberry), Apple and others.

Nokia’s timing is also impeccable if Apple does, in fact, plan on releasing a tablet-slash-netbook device soon. And when that happens it’s on like Donkey Kong.

The included video shows off more features of the Booklet 3G. Looks decent. I’ve contacted Nokia to establish availability for South Africa but the company had no further details at time of writing. The biggest question, of course, is in price. And here Nokia will have to tread carefully if it intends to capture any form of market share in the hotly contested netbook arena.

The Apple iPhone is possibly the most near-perfect mobile phone product I’ve used. But it does lack some features that I feel are key. Some of them would be challenging to implement while others really should be there and I’m confused that they aren’t. That said, the iPhone also gets flack for missing some things that I honestly couldn’t care less about.

The competition is heating up for Apple in the phone space. Most of the touch-phone products that claim to compete with the iPhone are rubbish, but Palm recently unveiled its Pre, complete with new operating system WebOS and implementation of some of the features, like copy and paste, that the iPhone doesn’t have.
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