See Sir Alan on the bus to work - iPlayer and N96 hookup.

Talk about finally hitting the back of the net. Nokia, having played second fiddle to Apple in the mobile phone hype-wars since Stevie J first announced that the mobile phone sector was his latest industry-to-conquer, have seemingly pulled a bit of a rabbit out of the hat with news of a tie-up with the BBC.

Since 3G mobile phones cost the networks a cool twenty-two billion quid back in the day one of the big questions asked by everyone (punters, shareholders, worried mobile phone execs) is “what do we do with a 3G phone?”

Of course techies have always been rubbish at working out uses for technology - some of the first Home PCs were promoted as recipe ”stores” for housewifes, I kid you not.  Funnily enough Microsoft Spongecake just never took off in the same way that stuff like word-processing and surfing the internet did.

Everyone knew that with 3G phones (or multimedia handsets as they tend to get called these days) content was King, but no one was quite sure what content was suitably regal (short football clips that have already been on Sky Sports News a million times that afternoon, for example, weren’t a roaring success at about 50p a goal). 

Well it turns out that for Nokia content isn’t King it is actually Queen… Queen Victoria and the other famous names of Albert Square to be exact.  By inking a deal to pre-install the BBC iPlayer on the Nokia N96 with full download-and-keep rights Nokia have finally shown the casual mobile phone shopper that they understand what sort of content makes people pony up their hard-earned for a new mob.

No hacks or workarounds, this is full licenced BBC content on demand to go along with the built in digital telly tuner, proving that we might all have loads more devices than we did in the 50s, but Auntie still knows best…

Sadly the Nokia 96 is the only one of the nSeries range to get the iPlayer at the moment (or more accurately preloaded after the 1st of October, although early purchasers can download it on this date as well), but we presume that if the numbers stack up, this is a deal that will be extended to all new nSeries phones.  How long before Apple, in a spectacular case on one upmanship announce that they’ve done a deal with the UK government to launch a new public funded broadcaster, develop a rival web-based content on demand platform and give that away free with their iPhones…. (Ed: Steady).

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