So how did Annsi handle that question?

He got stuck right in. He wasn’t sitting back and trying to remember the talking points, no. I witnessed a chap who sincerely believes (and, has most probably seen) in his vision for the future. It makes really, really interesting viewing — especially his assertion that the generic mobile interface for consuming ‘media’ will be a map.

I really was impressed that this ‘grey-haired’ executive could talk-the-talk. I really hope that he continues to galvanise the team at Nokia (and, to a lesser extent, the Symbian and MeeGo teams) to deliver the vision he described in this video.

I don’t think Anssi was being creative when, in Part 1, he commented that (in relation to the N97 failures) his ‘sleepless nights are now in the past’. For someone as enthusiastic and as excited about the possibilities of mobile technology, it must have been a galling experience watching the utter derision with which consumers and the media greeted the arrival of the bug-laden disappointing Nokia N97.

What the hell were Nokia doing delivering the N97 into the marketplace as a high-end top-of-the-range device when it was going to get immediate comparisons to other bleeding-edge devices (and be found wanting, by everyone but the die-hard Nokia fans).

Of course the N97 and the N97 mini were a total success. Commercially. Annsi was careful to point this out. They shipped millions of them to their customers. But remember, the customers, of course, were the mobile operators, who, frankly, couldn’t-give-a-damn. They’d already committed to adding the ‘next’ Nokia device into their range whether it was good, bad or entirely rubbish. The end-consumers, however, well… I’m reasonably sure a lot of them fully intend not making the same mistake every again.

I think Annsi is right, however, when he makes the point that consumers really do trust Nokia. Or at least, they want to do so. They will, as Annsi maintains, “give us a second chance.” But just once. I think Nokia really must work hard to make sure that the high-end devices they ship into the marketplace this year are fantastic.

Anyway, to the video. If you’re even half interested in Nokia, if you follow the mobile industry, I strongly recommend sitting and watching Part 3 of the interview.

I’m willing to bet that even the most ardent iPhone and BlackBerry fans reading are closet Nokia fans too…

For convenience I’ve put all the parts together here:

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

I’m already sold, if only for the cutesy sensor capabilities that Nokia’s built in (although I’d rather see a UI that silences the phone alarm by sensing you’ve chucked the device across the room). But a stylus? Really? Didn’t we kill those off a while back?

InvenSense, whose applications include image stabilisation and navigation, will put the funding towards “company growth and evolv[ing] both the company business and product strategy”. The company reckons motion sensing will take off in mobile gaming and in smart user interfaces.

Motion sensing is a fascinating area, but applications are still in niche and more gimmicky than useful. Still, it’s a chicken and egg problem: phones need to have the appropriate tech inside them to make use of motion-sensitive applications, and without the apps, why put the necessary tech into the handsets? Hopefully, with some funding and some R&D, the motion-sensing people out there can come up with some must-have apps.

Apparently, Window Mobile 7 “basically addresses everything wrong with WM6 today”. While there’s no hard details on what that might mean, I’m guessing this, along with the purchase of Danger might see a more user friendly, up to date interface on the way.

That said, Gizmodo says the expected release date of Windows Mobile 7 will be mid-2009. If that’s true, it’s a long time to wait for improvements that Microsoft should really have made iterations ago.

The data consumption spike also carried across to other services, with 30.9 percent of iPhone owners watching mobile TV or video, compared to 4.6 percent of the market average or 14.2 percent of smartphones; while 49.7 percent of iPhone owners accessed a social networking site in January, compared to 19.4 precent of smartphone owners and 4.2 percent of average mobile users.

So what’s driving the trend: it’s not the speedy network access, after all, so it’s either the huge screen or the slick interface. Either way, I suspect once carriers and content providers get wind of this, they’ll be pressurising other handset manufacturers to start moving in the same direction while keeping their fingers crossed for a spike in data consumption as a result.