Orange maps out agreement with Nokia

Orange has signed a three-year deal with Nokia to bring the Finnish phone maker's mobile maps and games services to its customers in nine European countries, including Britain, this year.

The deal, to be announced today, is a step back for Nokia, which had threatened the position of mobile phone operators with the launch of its own suite of mobile services under the Ovi banner last year.

Ovi was seen as a direct challenge to the power of the big mobile operators such as Vodafone, Orange and T-Mobile which are trying hard to persuade customers to do more than talk and text.

But today's deal, under which Orange will share revenue with Nokia, will see the latter's mobile maps co-branded with the operator's name.

The two companies are aiming for 10 million Orange customers using Nokia's mobile maps by 2010. The deal is not exclusive and Nokia already has other partners.

While Orange and Nokia will sell their own games under their own brands, most significantly the deal does not include Nokia's music service, which caused consternation among mobile phone companies when it was unveiled last year.

They saw the service as a direct challenge to their relationship with customers and Orange said it would not let its users access the Nokia music store.

Anyone buying one of the 10 new Nokia handsets from Orange in the second half of the year will have one-click access to Orange's music store, which has about a million tracks.

Kai Öistämö, Nokia's head of devices, said the perceived fight between the company, and the rest of the industry was more "a public image rather than a reality".

source : http://www.guardian.co.uk/