Nokia eyes more Internet buys

By Tarmo Virki

HELSINKI (Reuters) - Nokia's Internet offering is still a work in progress and the world's top mobile phone maker is seeking further acquisitions to speed up the roll out of new services, Niklas Savander, the head of the unit, said in an interview.

Nokia bought U.S. digital maps firm Navteq for $8.1 billion in July and has acquired ten smaller firms to jump-start its Internet services business as the growth in the mobile phones market is set to stall.

"We're not done," Savander told Reuters when asked about further acquisition plans.

Nokia hopes to combine its Internet services -- such as gaming service N-Gage, its navigation service and digital music stores -- into one user-friendly system, but so far all services have separate sign-on systems and no links between them.

In the handset industry Nokia has built its success on easy-to-use phones, but growth in this sector is becoming more difficult to achieve.

Likely acquisition targets could be small companies which develop services Nokia itself plans to offer in the future -- enabling the Finnish firm to roll those services out faster, he said.

In a media event later on Tuesday, Nokia was due to introduce The Files on Ovi service, based on the acquisition of Avvenu last year, which allows users to store files on the Web so that they are always accessible, an increasingly common service offered by Internet firms like Google and Yahoo.

Nokia introduced a new personal information management (PIM) synchronization service for calendar, contacts, notes and tasks between Nokia phones and its Internet services site -- similar to Apple and Microsoft offerings.