ME online editor Stuart Dredge on the app battle outside the Western world.
My heart sank when I read the first few paragraphs of this Fast Company feature on Nokia this week.
It sounded like more big-number boasting from a company too used to its dominant position in the mobile handset market.
"Nokia not only wants to revolutionise music, but I am claiming now that we will quickly be the world's biggest entertainment media network," Nokia's Tero Ojanpera told an audience of music execs.
The obviously cynical response is 'Yeah? What about BitTorrent?'. A more charitable reaction would be to point out that Nokia's entertainment ambitions have rarely run smoothly.
N-Gage is seemingly on the way out for a second time, Comes With Music has been dogged by reports of sluggish sales, and Ovi Store's first-week technical gremlins furnished plenty of ammunition for those who suggest Nokia has been left flat-footed by the competition from Apple's iPhone.
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In other words, selling billions of handsets is one thing, but making a success of this entertainment media network lark is quite another. Nokia still has work to do in proving that the two go together.
But further into Fast Company's piece, the boasting is replaced by something more interesting - information on the apps Nokia's R&D division is creating for the emerging world.
Like? A compass to show Muslim mobile users the direction of Mecca, a voice-based classified ads service for countries with high illiteracy rates, and a Life Tools service bringing news and entertainment updates to Indian farmers, as well as weather reports and crop prices.
It's here that the scale argument starts to make more sense, particularly against our Western sense that Apple is currently handing Nokia its posterior on a plate.
"Apple has a dominant role in the US, but in the global game, it's a very different company," says research chief Henry Tirri. "Nokia makes more than a million handsets a day, so when we do an innovation, we can have it in the hands of more than 400 million people very quickly."
Maybe Ovi Store's success shouldn't be judged by how many N97 owners are accessing it in the developed world, but about how it delivers entertainment, information or utility apps to lower-spec handsets in the developing world.
Perhaps Comes With Music's importance isn't so much about slow sales in the UK, but about its rollout in Mexico, Brazil and Singapore, and other markets where PC penetration is low or piracy levels are high (or, indeed, both).
Nokia is still top dog in many emerging markets, so Ojanpera's promise to become the world's biggest entertainment media network may not be empty after all.
