Is Nokia making its biggest gamble yet?

The mighty Finn could well be shooting itself in the foot with mobile's next big thing...

Remember the advent of text messaging, when mobile companies wanted to cut off their nose to spite their (multi-billion pound) face – and put the mockers on network-to-network chat? Well, it looks like those self-same companies could well be heading down the same road with push-to-talk.

PTT has been getting the mobile operators slavering – IMS Research believes it'll be a $50bn industry by 2008 for services alone – but the handset makers may well be about to throw a spanner in the works.

For push-to-talk to work, all handsets need to be interoperable. You can chat with one or many people instantaneously but all your desired messagees need to have a handset that can receive the messages – like text – even if they use a different network. Interoperability is good news for consumers with network-dispersed mates or business contacts and it's good news for operators – more communication means more cash. So far, so logical.

With PTT, however, not all the handset manufacturers are thinking the same way. The Open Mobile Alliance (OMA) is dreaming up a standard for PoC (Push-to-talk over cellular), scheduled to hit the vendors at the end of this year.

Nokia, however, doesn't fancy the wait much and is letting the rest get on with it, while making its own PTT-functional handsets and proprietary standard. Understandable, when all-powerful operators such as Orange are keen to follow the US example and get the technology into the hands of users as soon as possible.

The wrangling over the PoC standard, depending on your perspective, is either the shot in the arm that PTT needs or just bloody-mindedness that hampers adoption and will dampen consumers' enthusiasm.

Ericsson's senior marketing manager, Niklas Medman, said that interoperability is still the dream for all operators, even if Nokia is proving a little slow to get on the bandwagon. "There is no other mullti-vendor standard," he said. "The industry is saying there's only one standard – PoC – and that's where we want to end up eventually... There are different approaches at the moment. That's not atypical to see when new services are rolled out. Everyone agrees there's only one endgame... and that's PoC."

Fellow handset maker Siemens takes very much the same tack. Speaking at the Push-to-talk world summit this week, Christoph Aktas, from Siemens mobile divsion, said "For PTT to be widely available and successful, the required functionality needs to be built into a wide range of mobile devices... If we don't have interoperability, then we're fooling ourselves the market will ever pick up."

And with Nokia currently holding a 35 per cent share of the mobile market as a whole, no one would deny they're worth having on board. But surely, where Nokia lead, handset buyers follow and the world's number one in Europe leading from the front can be no bad thing. The manufacturer has said when the standard makes it to completion its phones will all be compatible with the PoC standard and remains part of the OMA.

Nevertheless, Nokia's stance hasn't gone down well with everyone, with some other manufacturers viewing it as the bigger kid throwing its weight around. Mark Boulding, analyst at Quocirca, thinks the strategy risks backfiring on the mobile maker.

"It will accelerate take-up by giving consumers the opportunity to invest in PTT earlier. It could go one of two ways for Nokia though – either it accelerates the market for them or operators boycott them and say 'we're not prepared to play by your terms', and they may lose out not only on handset by on infrastructure play too," he said.

Jeremy Green, analyst at Ovum, said Nokia isn't playing dirty, it's just like all the other operators in the sector. "Given that the standard isn't finalised yet, everyone's offering is proprietary. Everyone else is going after market share, why shouldn't Nokia?" He added that the operators will still be shy of the changes of ending up with one maker. "Standards wars don't do anyone any good... Operators won't want to get locked into a limited range of handsets."

In the US, PTT has made its mark mostly as business service. It's a market that may be able to dodge the question of standards – after all, chances are all employees in one business will be on the same network. In Europe, however, the big money looks to be with consumers and where will PTT be if teenagers can't chat with their mates? Neither use nor ornament, it would seem.

To return to the text analogy, the future of PTT may be squarely in the hands of the consumer. One of the key drivers for text interoperability was consumers' annoyance, coupled with vendors realisation that sharing would only be good news for their bank balances.

So will PTT follow the SMS path? It remains to be seen. John Devlin, wireless communications group analyst for IMS Research, said that the issue of interoperability was a question that needs to be resolved by the industry: "The final decision rests with the operators on how far and how quickly they allow it to take place," he said.

And while operators and manufacturers alike continue to lick their lips over the big fat cash piles that they expect to see, the phrase "premium toy" surfaces with regularity. With Orange's TalkNow launch taking the 'watch this space' track and Ericsson bigging up the technology whilst admitting it has no European handsets ready or planned, standards could well be far from the largest stumbling block for PTT.