Nokia: We Are "Front Of The Pack" In LBS; No Sprint Phone Plans

Nokia reckons that location-based services are the future of mobile internet, and believes itself to be ahead of the pack with its NAVTEQ IP.  That's the message from sales and marketing chief Niklas Savander, who took to Twitter yesterday and invited questions about the Finnish company's plans and premonitions.  Savander also reiterated Nokia's plan for "a major product milestone by the end of the year"; however anybody looking for true insight in their tweet stream likely ended up disappointed.

Averaging almost a tweet per minute over the course of the hour-long session, Savander nonetheless only grazed the roughly 400 questions fired at him; meanwhile those answers he did give were limited by Twitter's terse nature.  In fact the system worked best for short denials: "no plans at this time" for a Nokia device on Sprint in the US, still no intention of adopting Android, and "no change" to the end-of-Q3 release timeframe for the Nokia N8.

Twitter has its place for consumer outreach, certainly; it's already proving itself a great way for timely customer service support and making the sort of announcements that perhaps wouldn't by themselves warrant a full press release.  However, we're not entirely convinced that 140 characters (less after you include the obligatory hash-tag) is the right arena for interviews of this sort, at least not if you want any degree of meat in your answer.  Though it may have lacked the sense of instant interaction, Savander's time would probably have been better spent sitting down for a regular interview with one of the increasingly frustrated Nokia faithful.