Mobile user interface: Tea with Kamar Shah Global Head of Industry Marketing Multimedia Experiences Nokia at MEF Live

by: admin Tuesday, December 4th, 2007

Rating: switched on and sharp

As I left the MEF Live keynote session I bumped into Nokia’s Kamar Shah. I have met Kamar on several occasions and indeed there are a couple of pictures of him at the Mobile Entertainment party; when I managed to work my way onto the top table.

However, I am not ashamed to say; this was the first time I met Kamar and we were both sober. But I am glad I did because the party guy was replaced with a clued up individual that got what I was asking and probably did Nokia huge favours in terms of our perception of the company. And I probably wasn’t babbling either which is unfortunately a huge demeanour of mine after tons of Champers.

I hate to say it; but finally some real answers from Nokia and not just “that is not my area” or “not allowed to speak on that” etc.

So, I wanted to know about “improving the user experience for content search and discovery” which is the keynote he gave in the morning that I missed as I attended the Mobility World Congress.

So I managed to get a meeting room in the press section and he got out the laptop and gave me my own keynote. In short:

• Nokia wants to become and Internet company so that it can push content on the Nokia platform with maps and channels

• To do this Nokia needs to educate and show companies how the technology or social networking can improve the Nokia value proposition moving forward.

• At present the user interface is not seamless its fragmented and this needs to change.

• Nokia aims to ensure the same user interface for consumption of mobile content by enforcing five features for every mobile content service. They are:

• Try, Buy, Manage, Share, Find

• Ovi is the platform and the content will all have the five services attached to them to ensure the consumer knows what he/she is getting; can test it; can forward it; can search it and then save it to one place which is easy to find and of course buy it.

What we think?
Sounds brilliant. Love it. But not sure if Nokia’s mobile search features are strong enough to really manage search of all content. Twango is the share but search is still a missing link.

Thanks Kamar great sitting down with you – but definitely looking forward to the next party.