Amid all the hype and excitement about Google "super phones" and iTablets at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas last week, Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo, CEO of Nokia, tried to divert everyone's attention to the opportunities in developing countries where smartphones are barely used.

It is not hard to see why. Nokia's share of the North American handset market is less than 6%, while it is the leading vendor in all of the top ten emerging markets, accounting for at least 34% of unit shipments in each of them, according to Morgan Stanley. The investment bank believes that Nokia's market dominance in the southern hemisphere, its strong brand name and its unmatched distribution network means the Finland-based company may have "Apple-like potential in emerging markets."

In other words, Nokia still has an opportunity to create a highly-profitable and vibrant software and services ecosystem around its devices. The hottest phones in Europe and North America right now (the iPhone and Android devices) are clearly too expensive for the vast majority of the billions of people in developing countries, whereas Nokia has a raft of sub $100 handsets capable of running Java apps, accessing email and some web sites, as well as SMS-based services.

Ovi Mail Secures a Foothold

In his Vegas speech, Kallasvuo highlighted how some of the building blocks of Nokia's software and services strategy are finally falling into place, announcing that Nokia's Ovi email service has signed up more than five million accounts in its first year, while launching the Nokia Growth Economy Venture Challenge, which will award the winning innovator with a USD 1 million investment from Nokia.

But, as Nokia is well aware, every developing country is different and in some of them, mobile operators, rather than Apple and Google, may be its biggest rivals in the software and services space.  China Mobile, in particular, already has an array of popular Internet-style services and is even developing its own OMS handset software platform based on Android. 

Still, China Mobile is exceptionally huge. In many emerging markets, mobile operators probably don't have the scale or the know-how to build a compelling software and services ecosystem.  So, Nokia clearly has a window of opportunity. That window should remain wide open at least until Apple, or more likely Google, decides to subsidise the retail price of a super phone down below the $100 threshold.  Even then, the Silicon Valley elite will struggle with distribution - serving consumers in Indonesia's 900 inhabited islands, Nigeria's shanty towns or Brazil's vast interior is far from easy.

And there is one thing you can be sure of: Nokia handsets, which will be many people's first Internet access device, won't be optimised to work with Apple or Google's web stores for the foreseeable future.