AMSTERDAM--Nokia plans to take the offensive with Ovi in 2008.

At its annual Nokia World conference, the company unveiled not only a plan to include unlimited music downloads through Ovi with the purchase of a Nokia music phone but also a blueprint for its new Web services portal that would ultimately link its handheld devices to a plethora of other community and commercial Web applications through a single Internet interface.

Nokia executive vice president and head of multimedia Anssi Vanjoki announced plans in 2008 to launch “Comes with Music,” a promotion in which Nokia will allow unlimited downloads of music for an entire year with the purchase of a Nokia music phone. The deal isn’t a subscription—customers can keep every song they download after the year runs out—but they can only listen to those songs on the phone they purchased and on their PCs. Nokia announced it had partnered with its first record label, Universal Music Group, but it plans to seek agreements with the other major labels before the program launches.

“Even if you listened to music 24 hours a day, seven days a week, you would still only scratch the surface of the music that we're making available,” Vanjoki said. “This is not a streaming service. All of the songs and albums are here for you to own and keep.”

Though the music promotion is certain to have the most immediate impact on Nokia’s still newborn Internet services platform, its plans to contextualize Ovi on the Web may ultimately be its defining characteristic. Vanjoki said that the Ovi portal would transform from a platform merely offering services like music and maps into a central repository for all of a customer’s personal information, which will in turn link the phone directly to any Internet networking site or service portal through the Ovi site. Web services by Google, picture archiving sites like Flickr and social networking communities like Facebook could all be aggregated on the Ovi portal, sharing contact information, multimedia and even presence information between them, Vanjoki said.

Nokia calls the concept a “personal dashboard for your life,” and its intended goal is to create a single user interface for managing information between all Web services, either mobile or wireline, through a single user interface. The concept plays off of a current application running on current Nseries devices, the Nokia Life Blog, which organizes all photos, videos and multimedia recorded by the phone on the PC. The difference is the Life Blog is isolated, while Ovi will have hook-ins to most of the major destinations on the Web. For example, a customer could take a photo with his or her phone. When the phone synchs with the Ovi portal, either over the air or through a direct connection, the customer can indicate the photo be uploaded to a photo archiving site like Flickr, placed in one or several social networking profiles and sent off to a photo printing service for a hard copy—all from the same interface, said Illka Raiskinen, senior vice president of multimedia experiences for Nokia.

A key component of the strategy, Raiskinen said, is to bring the address book in the phone to the forefront. That address book contains the relationship information necessary to establish most of the necessary contextual links that would allow Ovi to bridge multiple Web services, he said. Presence data could be linked to messaging applications, which then could be tied into the communications applications of social networking portals, allowing a customer to communicate across all of his or her social groups from a single interface on the phone or on the Web, Raiskinen said.

The details of the new Ovi plans are still fuzzy. Nokia has yet to release a software developer’s kit or announce any specific Internet partners that have elected to integrate with Ovi. But Vanjoki said Nokia plans to steadily roll out those partnerships and more elements of the portal throughout 2008.

“In the first instance, we already have relationships with key Internet players, but our ambition is: If you are a consumer with the necessary skills and want to make a mash-up, it can be inserted into your own personal Ovi profile,” Vanjoki said.