The chances of me being genuinely amazed at something I see a Belgian tech company achieve are rather slim. But occasionally, it happens. Last week I went to local entrepreneur meetup BetaGroup and saw five startups pitch their stuff to the 200-person audience.

The last one to get its five minutes of fame was Cherry, a new mobile operator that promised to “revolutionize the telecom world”. Needless to say, I was as curious as I was skeptical.

Then the company’s CEO got up on stage, introduced himself, took out his Nokia smartphone, called some random guy in the audience and had him call him back on his phone afterwards. Projecting his mobile phone screen on a bigger screen for everyone to see, he demonstrated how he didn’t need to launch an application and just browsed his contact list to call the other person. Standard functionality, sure, but the cool part of it was the fact that the phone was lacking the presence of a SIM card, which is supposed to identify you as a subscriber of a telephony service.

When Nokia launched its Ovi Store for mobile applications a month ago, it was clear that - despite its less than stellar launch - it would be a mistake to simply dismiss the Finnish mobile juggernaut’s efforts as meaningless. The company may be struggling to stay relevant on the software and services side, but with a reach like Nokia’s on the handset distribution level I think it goes without saying that a lot of eyes are firmly fixed on Nokia’s initiatives in the field.

There was some criticism about the lack of content on the Ovi Store at launch day, particularly because of the fact that a lot of big names were lacking, but I figured I should give it at least a month to see if and how many developers would flock to the platform. Now, I think it’s time to take a look at where they stand after that month, and I thought I’d start by comparing the content offering to that of Apple’s App Store.

Here are some notes from Intel’s “breaking news” conference call with Anand Chandrasekher, Intel senior vice president and general manager, Ultra Mobility Group and Kai Öistämö, Executive Vice President, Devices, Nokia.

• Intel and Nokia have formed a long-term strategic partnership to create an open standard for a new mobile computing platform built upon Linux-based operating systems.
• Intel will acquire a Nokia HSPA/3G modem IP license for use in future products — will complement Intel’s Wi-Fi and WiMax offerings.

So is it a new Nokia phone with an Intel chipset? Is it a new Nokia netbook?

No. Not yet, at least. They’re not ready to talk about products today. The two companies basically announced that they’ll be teaming up to work on future mobile computing devices — not quite as exciting as it seemed earlier today, at least not from a hardware/gadget angle.

A new report from Juniper Research forecasts that by 2014, annual sales of low-budget mobile devices will rise to north of 700 million units, up 22% from this year. The report goes into the various schemes that have been implemented to help ‘connect the unconnected’, or the estimated 3 billion people on the planet that do not own mobile phones.

Apparently, the key to be able to tap into this vast pool of potential customers in these so-called ‘emerging markets’ lies in drastically reducing the cost of handsets that can be used by low-income users.

With all of the collaboration going on between Qik and Nokia over the past few months, it seemed like it wouldn’t be too long before Nokia went ahead and put the live mobile video broadcasting service onto handsets right out of the box. Sure, enough: Beginning with this morning’s release of the North American model N97, Qik will come preloaded onto all Nokia S60-based phones.

Yes, the rumors are true: Nokia will start shipping its N97 device (they call it a mobile computer) to no less than 75 countries this month, after starting to accept pre-orders earlier last month. In the second half of 2009, Nokia plans to start rolling out a bunch of new features and functions, but right off the bat it will be the first device to come pre-installed with the recently launched Ovi Store. We hope the experience is better than the actual launch.

Nokia hasn’t detailed exactly which countries will start seeing N97 shipments roll in, but it’s safe to say they will most likely include most of the European markets, as well as North America.

When you look at sales of the iPhone or Blackberry as a percentage of total cell phone sales, they are still a tiny smidgen of the one billion phones estimated to be sold this year. But when you look at what really matters—their share of revenues or operating profits—the picture looks a lot different. Deutsche Bank analyst Brian Modoff calculated the share of operating profits going to each major mobile handset manufacturer and came up with the eye-opening chart above. It shows Apple (pink) and RIM (turquoise) increasingly taking a disproportionate share of industry profits, mostly at the expense of Nokia’s diminishing handset operating profits (blue).

This was supposed to be a glorious day for mobile phone giant Nokia. The Finnish company got out-innovated by Apple a couple of years ago with the introduction and subsequent success of the iPhone and the iTunes App Store, and has been desperately trying to catch up with Cupertino’s disruptive initiatives ever since by launching a couple of new devices on one hand, and consolidating its software & services business on the other hand.

Today sees the worldwide roll-out of Nokia’s Ovi Store, the company’s response to Apple’s App Store (and other centralized content stores for mobile phones and OS’es), and no doubt the company is watching the launch unfold on a global scale with watchful eyes. Here’s the thing: the launch is an utter disaster and I assume (hope) Nokia executives are outraged with the way things are going.

Update: the Ovi team posted a response to the recurring problems, see below.

Nokia’s very own central application marketplace, dubbed Ovi Store, today officially made its way to the public arena as we expected.

We’ve browsed the online store extensively and hand-picked 10 applications we think you should download and install first. Note that the available content you can download depends on which device you’re using, we’ve selected the option ‘any phone’ to increase the chances of these being available for you as well:

(after the jump)

Move over, Nokia N97. Your bigger, badder, unannounced brother is on the way - and one of our sources at Nokia has just clued us in on all of the details, from worldwide launch targets to hardware specs.

Nokia’s next tablet device is designed in the same vein as their N810, albeit significantly more polished. Though it doesn’t appear to have an official name as of yet, it’s referred to internally as “N900″, “Rover”, or “Maemo Flagship”. We’ll be referring to this device as the N900 for the rest of this post, though it’s quite possible that this name will change.

After we broke the news this morning that Nokia was cracking away at a phone-friendly and potentially ad-supported version of their Internet tablet OS, Maemo, we figured we might be able to swing a screenshot.

Sure enough, our source came through. With that, we present the world’s first ever look at the mobile OS Nokia tentatively plans on launching around the end of 2010: Maemo Harmattan.

I’m pleased to report that no one dressed up in coveralls and hats at the TC/CG Helsinki meet-up at A21. The turnout was fantastic - about 100 or so folks at 8pm on a Tuesday - and everyone either worked for Nokia, contracted for Nokia, or sold their children into servitude in Nokia’s diamond mines in the heart of Northern Troll country.

Special thanks to F-Secure, the anti-virus company and the Mothership herself for sponsoring a few hours of drinks. I heard a lot of great pitches - please send me more information when you get settled - and met a lot folks who were quite excited about start-ups and the start-up scene. Special thanks to Ville and the boys at Arctic Startup, the TechCrunch of the Tundra.

Click through for some pictures and look for more information about these great folks in the next few weeks.

When news came out earlier this week that mobile payments company Obopay raised another $70 million, effectively doubling its total funding raised to date, some observers were surprised at the sheer size of the round. While others expressed skepticism that mobile payments would ever really take off, at least in the U.S.

But the bigger opportunity for Obopay and mobile payments in general is not in the U.S. It is in India and other parts of the world where a large portion of the population don’t have bank accounts. These are the so-called “unbanked.” There are billions of them and their relative spending power is on an upwards trajectory.

YouTube can now be widely accessedthrough an application on most Window Mobile and Nokia S60 devices. You can visit m.youtube.com from your phone to download the app. YouTube says that the devices will have a faster application start-up, searching capabilities, and video loading and will allows users to easily access YouTube via an icon on the device’s screen. YouTube has also improved the quality of the videos on mobile devices by providing the highest available stream quality and improved buffering (which will help videos play in weak coverage areas). Once the app is installed on the mobile device, no configuration is required outside of the application.

A year ago, Google Mobile started offering all YouTube videos on m.youtube.com, so any mobile device could access an assortment of YouTube videos via their devices’ browser. Google Mobile also added a YouTube application for some Sony and Nokia cell phones. And there’s been a custom app for the iPhone and Android for a while now.

Qik’s mobile video streaming service began its life on the Nokia S60 platform, so it makes sense that a number of its recent big wins involve Finland’s finest. This morning, Qik is announcing that their application is now compatible with Nokia’s Share on Ovi media sharing service, and that it will be prominently featured in Nokia’s Ovi Store when it launches in a few months.

Skype is (finally) teaming up with mobile handset maker Nokia to get their VoIP and IM software program pre-installed on some of its devices, as announced at the Mobile World Congress and reported by MobileCrunch. The eBay-owned company had 405 million registered users in total at the end of last year, and Nokia is still the largest handset maker in the world until further notice, so this is a significant deal.

Of course, the operators won’t be jumping up and down from joy over the news.

The first Nokia device to get the Skype integration will be the N97, beginning in Q3 of 2009, followed by (unnamed but reportedly high-end) Nseries devices. Leveraging N97’s WiFi and HSDPA connectivity, users will be able to communicate with Skype-to-Skype voice calls, as well as make mobile and landline Skype calls at reasonable prices.

But what does this mean for mobile VoIP startups for which supporting Skype functionality on mobile handsets is a prime reason of existence in the first place, like fring, Nimbuzz and Truphone?

Our sister site MobileCrunch may be convinced that not every company needs an app store, but for Nokia to launch a central platform for distribution and sales of micro-programs developed for the Symbian OS, it would make a whole lotta sense.

And if what Eldar Murtazin, editor of Mobile-review.com (both blogs are in Russian) writes is true, then that’s exactly what the Finnish juggernaut in mobile is going to launch at the upcoming Mobile World Congress. I concur with Engadget who says launching an application portal/store is a logical step to take for any mobile handset maker these days, but if Nokia is in fact going to launch one it will be worth taking a look at, and not only from a consumer or developer standpoint.

Part of this year’s ACM Multimedia conference, the Multimedia Grand Challenge 2009 aims to collect information on the specific problems and issues companies like Google, Yahoo, Nokia, HP, Radvision and CeWe see arise on the multimedia horizon for the next 2-5 years.

Researchers from around the world will be encouraged to submit working systems that significantly address the challenges defined by the companies cited above, in order to win the Grand Challenge competition (prizes to be defined). Deadline for submissions is June 15th.

The six companies have put forward eight challenges so far, which all make for interesting reads.

A list and brief summaries per challenge can be found after the jump.

Are cell phones no longer a growth business? At least in the fourth quarter, cell phone shipments actually declined. According to Deutsche Bank analyst Brian Modoff, shipments from the top five cell phone manufacturers (Nokia, Samsung, LG, Sony Ericsson, and Motorola) dropped 13 percent year-over-year in the fourth quarter of 2008. Unit shipments decelerated from 14 percent growth in the second quarter to 2 percent growth in the third quarter, and then finally went into negative territory in the fourth quarter.

Even Apple saw a 36 percent quarterly decline in sales of iPhones (4.4 million in the December quarter versus 6.9 million in the September quarter). And RIM’s Blackberry Storm sold only 500,000 units its first month, despite a $100 million marketing campaign.

Earlier this morning, Nokia released a public beta version of its Mail on Ovi service, which enables users to sign up for a free e-mail account directly from their Series 40 handsets. The new service is available worldwide and available in a dozen languages, after a test period of one month during which users in India, Malaysia and the Philippines were able to try out the service.

Mail on Ovi gives users all the features and functionalities of a PC-based e-mail account, and functions on some 35 different Series 40 handsets. Nokia claims to have shipped over 110 million of such devices globally as of October 2008, so this is definitely a major announcement, particularly for countries where mobile devices are the main digital communication hubs instead of computers.