Nokia has signed an agreement to acquire transcoding business Novarra and intends to initially embed the technology into Nokia Series 40 devices and that’s not good news, especially for any one who has invested time and effort in creating a purpose built mobile site.
According to the Novarra’s mobile browser and services platform will be used by Nokia to deliver enhanced Internet experiences on Nokia mobile devices.
“Connecting the next billion consumers to the Internet will happen primarily on mobile devices,” said Niklas Savander, Executive Vice President, Services, Nokia, “and delivering an optimized internet experience on our devices is core to our mission. By driving innovation in all segments of our portfolio, we are building one of the largest consumer audiences for web services and content.”
Nokia expects a new service offering utilising the Novarra technology platform to be available later this year.
We’re not great fans of transcoding here at Business Mobile, we’d probably go as far as to say we actively hate them. The businesses that use it, say it helps create a better experience for mobile users, we say it takes perfectly good sites and mangles them into horrible representations of the site. It takes away a users choice, and it confuses the hell out of the users. If I wanted you to take my site and put it through a mangle I would have asked you. We don’t like them. We think this is a very poor decision from Nokia.
Just say no to transcoders.