At the Nokia Growing Together conference we had had a close interview with Alex Lambeek, who is the Vice President for Entry-Level devices, and has been with Nokia since 1994. In our interview we questioned about some of the steps Nokia is taking in order to secure dominance in the emerging markets, and we also questioned about some of the steps we feel Nokia has missed. You can catch our coverage of the event here.

Just for curiosity, what phone was your first?

My first phone was the Nokia 2110, which was our second GSM phone, and it was given to me by Nokia when I joined.

Many kids like have their phones at an early age, and to help parents, I'm sure that entry level phones are good for them because they help to lower the cost. Now entry level phones that we've seen here don't have features that kids are looking for, such as MP3, camera and large memory. Now how do expect that entry level phones will improve in order to meet their requirements?

I would not entirely agree with that, I believe that things that kids like are in them, such as FM Radio. I got a daughter of mine, and she loves listening to the radio all day long, and if I ask her to turn it off, she's going to argue about it! Cameras, we announced the Nokia 5000 which has a pretty good 1.3 megapixel camera.

The MP3 function, I've been walking around, and I haven't seen one phone with a memory card slot, and I don't think there must be a phone that has a memory of anything close to 1GB memory.

There is a trend that MP3 devices will come to lower price points, and if you want to look back a few years, and if you look in the future, you will see that in few months they will come to lower price. If you look at the 5300 and 5310, they are tremendously successful devices, which are sort of mid-range phones, nice design, great MP3 players, large memory. So it's only a matter of time before that comes to lower price points. But clearly FM Radio with FM recording, is something which is clearly an innovation, because you can now for the first time record your favourite song and share it with somebody, and with the external speaker you can put it out with your friends and listen to music.

Talking about transferring songs, I haven't seen USB connectivity either on the phones. There is Bluetooth, but nothing about USB.

We look at what's most important and certainly the PC penetration in the emerging markets is not that high, so connectivity on USB isn't that important, but it is important to be able to transfer, whether it is an image or whether it is a song, and therefore the Bluetooth has been built-in in these phones for the first time, and also all these devices that we launched today have GPRS and indeed EDGE.

Back there at the exhibitions I saw printing over Bluetooth, but it came to my mind why not use PictBridge, is that not more widely available [than Bluetooth printers]?

Well, you can build all kinds of things in these devices but then the price goes up, so we have to look at what's really most important, and Bluetooth is fine with these kinds of phones.

Entry-level phones should be a synonym of affordability, so how low are you set to go in order to make a phone affordable?

How low can you go?! [chuckles] I forgot that you were recording...[chuckles]

I won't state that on the interview [chuckles]

The minimum pricetag on the phones released today was 50€ without taxes and subsidies, so when adding the duties, it can go up to 75€, which is kind of unaffordable.

These are not our lowest cost devices. We have other devices in the market today which are significantly lower priced, also the devices that I mentioned today at the press conference, are not solely, but more than ever before focusing on the replacement users, who want to upgrade to something better, than they have before, and that's about value, and they see value in what we put in these devices, the services and functionality, they will be willing to pay for it. The digital camera being a great example: what would it cost you if you went to a store and bought a separate digital camera?

We do have devices, not announced today, more for the first time users, and are significantly lower in price, the 1209 being a good example.

The displays on the devices have also generated confusion, sometimes Nokia uses OLED, sometimes LCD, and sometimes just plain old black and white. What you think is the best to keep a device modernized and affordable?

It's a trade-off, so monochrome devices are the cheapest ones, so in markets where the absolute lowest cost is the key, we continue these monochrome screens, but of course, if you want to consume content, see pictures, and so on, you will want to have a colour screen, and ultimately OLED and other technologies.

So is OLED better than LCD pricewise?

It will take sometime for OLED to cascade in the lower price range, but these things tend to happen.

But in the future you don't expect to have black and white screens?

I expect us to continue having monochrome screens in the very lowest price points for some time to come, because affordability is the key, but not only for affordability, remember that the device is only a small part of the cost of ownership. The services charged, the import duties and so on, add up to more than 80% of the total cost in some cases. And the 1100, the device I talked about previously, take India as an example: it was never the cheapest device there, but by far the best-selling. Put the flash light on to it, and other values, consumers are willing to pay for it.

We are clearly in the connectivity era, and at the press conference you also said that we must look into the next generation, but none of the devices have 3G, nor WiFi for that matter. 3G should be preferential for users that don't have much money but need internet for researches, or even just to download music, so why do none of the devices feature 3G?

I don't think 3G isn't that important in that range, but yes, higher data speeds are nice to have and that's why these devices support EDGE, which is pretty good when downloading large music files, where even 3G isn't used that much. There isn't that kind of a difference when it comes to GPRS, EDGE or 3G. For example, when you want to send and receive an email, you need to have data capabilities and a service platform, and that's what we have on these devices.

A question about smartphones: There are many businesses, students, and a lot of other people with different professions that might want to use smartphones with multitasking, and to add dedicated applications. With entry-level devices do you expect any in the future to have smartphone capabilities?

I would argue that we are already getting that. Like the Nokia 5000, it's not a S60 device, it's S40, but what you can do with it in terms of consuming email, sending pictures and many other features that you might be doing on your computer, you can already do on these devices. How do you define a smartphone or smartphone capabilities? I would say that for many consumers in emerging markets we start now to bring a serious way to address what a smartphone does.

But do you expect S60 to become a part of entry-level devices?

I would say that in the longer-term it's certainly not impossible.

Regarding cameraphone devices released today for the emerging markets, you said that they can “capture and share”. Now sharing can be via MMS or even email, but it can also be via Nokia's latest bet, Share on Ovi. Do you expect any Ovi capabilities for these phones?

On the services side I see two things: Many of the services we announced under Ovi, will start from S60 devices and developed markets, and gradually cascade to emerging markets, but it will take some time, but it will spread. Then there's an opportunity for services that are unique for emerging markets, perhaps even delivered over SMS, not requiring an internet connection. Think about healthcare services, commodity prices, on-line banking as well, so we see a very interesting market here as well, which we are looking at it.

A feature that you named today was Mobile Email. Nokia partnered up with WebMail, which is a South African company. Will this work for the entire world, or just African markets?

This particular announcement today is really focusing on South Africa. The important thing here is that we extend our philosophy of ease-of-use. Whether you are a first-time email user or an existing user, if it's too hard to connect to your email on your mobile phone, you need to change all kinds of settings, and you know what? You're not going to do it. You'll say that it's a once-and-never-again experience. So now we make it really easy with these kinds of partnerships, you're connected almost immediately, and for many people it will be their first email connection, it will be their first time they take a picture, and send it as an attachment to somebody. We believe that we will actually be enabling internet though mobility in a way that it will be much faster than before.

WebMail is only for South Africa, so for other markets what will you provide?

You will start to see many similar products.

So you expect to bring many more products?

Enabling email and bringing it to the masses, making it easy to use is one of our philosophies. Today we announced one small step in that direction, and there'll be more to come. All big things start small.

Anything else you would like to state about these upcoming devices and services?

The big thing here is the trend towards replacement markets, today's announcements are really about creating excitement whether it's about style and design or about cool features and functionality, which are going to drive people to replace their handsets.

Alright Alex thank you very much for the interview, we appreciate yours and Nokia's views on the status of the emerging markets and how you are approaching it.

Thank you

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