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Nokia Looks For The Next Turning

• Rory Cellan-Jones
• 11 Feb 08, 17:00 GMT

I've spent the day searching for one real stand-out innovation at Mobile World Congress - and I'm afraid it wasn't on the Nokia stand. (I'll tell you what did make an impact in a subsequent post). What seemed to excite Nokia's Niklas Savander when I asked him which was the outstanding product in its new line-up was the 6210 Navigator which has a built-in compass and is aimed at helping pedestrians rather than drivers. It's obviously part of the whole drive - which I seem to have been hearing about for years - to make location-based services take off, promising an advertising bonanza as bars and shops try to lure passing pedestrians with ads on their Nokia Maps.

Maps are certainly useful on mobiles - though on the last Nokia handset I tried they drained the battery miles short of my destination - but this year's efforts look like evolution rather than revolution. Perhaps though, the big thinkers at Nokia are not so focussed on new gimmicks for jaded European customers as on the huge potential of markets in the developing world. In our interview, Niklas Savander talked of the excitement of bringing the internet to a village that had never heard of it.

By the way, during this video you'll see Mr Savander facing the usual live demo nightmare - but when we filmed the navigation handset later it seemed to work pretty well.