It's partly because of developers that Nokia sought partnerships with Macromedia and Palm. With Palm, the deal works for Nokia because it means that the company immediately has access to over 50,000 developers who are already creating applications for Palm devices. There Nokia definitely has faith in WAP being a viable standard. The big advantage of WAP for Nokia, according to Roberts, is that the standard is accessible to everyone. There are thousands of WAP-enabled sites out there today.
Consumers have access to thousands and thousands of sites to get content.
Of course, the eventual goal for Nokia, as is the entire industry's, is to get the wireless Internet up to speed with its land-line cousin. In parallel to that evolution, we'll also have the network speed in the wireless world go from 14.4 Kbps to 100 Kbps next year. You can expect to see AOL's hugely popular instant messenger program on a future Nokia model . With Real, Nokia will develop a version of the Real Player program which will allow for the streaming of audio and video on its handsets . Nokia's wireless Internet strategy extends into hardware and operating systems.