Nokia’s recent launch of mobile media store Ovi has started another round of commentary about handset manufacturers, carriers and service providers moving into each others teritory, just as the hullabaloo about the iPhone had started dying down. NYT has a fairly non-sensationalist piece on the topic covering Nokia, Apple, Microsoft and Sony Ericsson. There is an interesting comment at the end: “I pity the poor consumer,” said Mark Newman, chief research officer at Informa Telecoms & Media. “From a consumer perspective, it’s very confusing to figure out where to go.” Choice is not normally considered a bad thing for consumers, and while there may be some initial confusion as to which icon goes to which portal consumers are pretty good at selecting the goods and services they want from a wide variety of offerings. I pity the poor companies, because it’s at the business end that things are going to start getting complicated—not from a technical sense but because disparate companies will both cooperate and compete with each other.

SEE ALSO: Nokia’s New Internet Service Brand: Ovi

Most of the commentary focuses on Nokia’s new music store, probably because that’s in the zeitgeist more than any other reason. However, it is the service where Nokia competes most directly with the carriers, even though the service is currently restricted to a few high-end handsets. The carriers are probably looking a few years down the track when today’s high-end handsets become commonplace. Personally, I think it would be a mistake for the carriers to play hardball with this—even the most successful carrier music stores still provide only a fraction of the carriers revenue, and not supplying a high-end handset which get people to use more services just because it has another place to buy music would be cutting their collective noses off to spite their faces.

The N-Gage announcement is more interesting but less controversial…the main benefits are the multiplayer and community aspects of N-Gage. Once again, the service only works on high-end Nokia handsets which make up a small proportion of the overall sales (so carriers aren’t really losing that many mobile game sales), and this means that the number of people using the handsets on any given carrier are relatively small. If you take the fraction of that small user-base who use the handsets to play games, it becomes clear that to get any sort of community going there needs to be a centralized place for all the users to join. This not only makes the handsets more attractive but will probably increase data usage as well, so the carriers should be happy. The same arguments largely apply to the various social networking services Nokia launched under Ovi. It will be a couple of years before it becomes clear if these services are a success or not, as the new handsets have to get into the marketplace and sold.