Yesterday I went to the Nokia Analyst event and pretty early on I asked a couple of questions on mobile search. Within a few minutes I was introduced to Jussi-Pekka Partanen. Jussi-Pekka or JP (as I am now allowed to call him) is the head of mobile search at Nokia.

We met during a tea break and then (anyone that knows me will laugh); he didn’t get rid of me until the end of the day as we spent lunch, tea and dinner together.  In fact we had a lovely dinner and I met Jupiter’s Julie Ask who also sat next on the same table. Between us both Julie and I squeezed every last bit of mobile search news out of JP.

During the course of the day I quizzed JP on universal search, indexing, Lucene, vertical search and on device search (in that order).  Nokia’s approach to search seems to have u-turned. Instead of trying to invent a new wheel the focus is now on discovery of existing content and partnership with branded players. This represents a major change in strategy.

The relationship with Medio and Nokia has come to an end but instead Yahoo! and Windows live are brandished as search clients on the services (I predict Google will join by the end of year).

Instead of now crawling data the focus is on vertical discovery and all the Music content on the new N81 device (6000 songs) will be indexed by Nokia in terms of genre, artist, track ensuring an instant one to three button search response.

The on device discovery will then not only search music but deliver results from all content areas in a one search idle screen client.

I have tested Qix, Discovery, Abaxia and other competitor on content mobile search devices and I am only luke warm on this on device discovery from Nokia at the moment. Why? Because 6000 songs is nothing – operators already offer content libraries of 300,000. Indeed an online music service is coming but as 8GB devices are being launched and cross-communication music services inter-link then a catalogue that appeals to everyone is increasingly difficult with only 6000 tracks.

We believe that Nokia’s purchase of Loudeye is going to play a bigger role in the music discovery and recommendation services moving forward – but Nokia didn’t say whether or not its new recommendation services are in-house or from the Loudeye acquisition. This makes in difficult to judge the quality and type of services that will be available, especially when competitors such as Sony Ericsson have high profile partnerships with Gracenote. More over the promise of FM Radio search was also down played. Is this in-house from Gracenote or from MCN? Finally the arrival of the FM music appli that are growing in demand and success in Japan?

As usual, I will do a full review of the S40, S60 and content search in the next issue of the Mobile Search Analyst. I have also just downloaded the new mobile search client and will test that too this time on a Windows Mobile device.