If Conor Pierce has his way mobile phone use will be more high-tech, writes Robin O'Brien Lynch

Conor Pierce has come full circle in his career. It's been a pretty large circle; from Clonskeagh to Riyadh and Lagos, then to Ballsbridge and back to Clonskeagh, where he goes to work every day as general manager of Nokia Ireland - on the same floor in the same building as he did when he was working for rivals Ericsson at the turn of the decade.

In the meantime, he has worked in countries "you wouldn't want to go on holidays to", for Avaya and Ericsson, where the focus was on introducing basic mobile technology to developing markets.

Now, just over a year after taking up his current post, his mission is to repeat the same trick; in the Republic's case, the emphasis is on moving customers up the technology chain.

"The industry is completely changing, moving from mobile phase to the internet phase, and from our point of view it's really important to push digital cameras, mobile music, mobile e-mail. They were once in their own space and in their own individual markets but now they're converging towards the handset," says Pierce.

"I worked with Ericsson in Clonskeagh, both on the handset side of things and the network. Three or four years later, I'm back in the same building. It's been surreal all right coming back. It's not just a different company that I'm working for, but the company culture is completely different as well.

"It's much more dynamic at Nokia and I see that as a result of constantly evolving and trying to stay ahead by empowering local markets.

"There are very few layers, whereas, at Ericsson, there were a lot of layers which made it very slow to come to decisions. With Nokia you present them with two choices, you discuss it with them, they empower you to make the right decision and you go and do it. You learn from your mistakes, but I think Nokia haven't made too many mistakes."

Pierce's latest local market has always been one of the most chatty, and therefore most lucrative, in Europe since mobile phones entered the mass market.

Irish people have embraced each new step of mobile technology over the last decade and, although we like to believe that the soaring profits enjoyed by mobile operators in this State are down to high tariffs, it's also down to the fact that, as a country, we can't get off the phone.

But the early boom years for both operators and handset manufacturers are long gone and, as the providers noisily compete to offer the lowest text costs and handset saturation sits around 95 per cent, the future lies in two areas: convergence and 3G.

The mass uptake of phones, digital cameras, MP3 players, Blackberrys and PDAs in recent years has left us all literally weighed down with gadgets. Nokia's N-series is the first serious attempt by the major handset manufacturers to converge all these devices into one. Pierce's manifesto is to bring to the market a product with all these features that is accessible to everyone, not just gadget lovers and show-offs.

"You will always have the voice and text market but, as we all know, the revenues from voice are coming down because there is more competition and there are competing technologies coming out in the future that will further accelerate that," says Pierce.

"For Nokia and all the other manufacturers and the operators, the message is that we have to drive new business, and 'upsolve' away from the voice and text market."

For the record, the N91 is the first of the breed of Nokia's smartphones to be released into the Irish market.

It has arrived at a time when most manufacturers have upgraded their cameras from around 1.2-1.5 megapixels to two megapixels and higher.

In layman's terms, that means the difference from grainy novelty shots to grown-up photographs.

The biggest benefit is the memory; 4GB allows storage of around 3,000 music tracks as well as the web browsing capability to download all this information. All this doesn't come cheap, nor is it lightweight, at 164g (most handsets come in at under 100g) and €399 for bill-pay customers.

But then it is a lot cheaper than buying all these gadgets separately and, although size could be a sticking point, Pierce is confident that the cost will soon be a lot more accessible.

"If you look at the Asian market, miniaturisation has been the key word for a long time in gadgets, whether it's a mobile phone or camera or camcorder. But if you're looking at those devices converging towards one then there is a limit," he says.

"There is saturation point, and there is also a limit in terms of people actually being able to use it - so the keypad isn't too small and, if someone is going to use a digital camera, you want a good lens, you want good memory and you want good software to use the web.

"This isn't just at a high level either, in terms of high-end products the technology must come down and be saturated. Our job is to be able to price it so that it becomes mass market and that's what we're doing.

The N-Series is the flagship and as time goes on, these technologies will move down to the mass market.

"But, however we do it, the most important thing is that the mindset of the end users changes so that people don't go round carrying a digital camera and a mobile phone. They have one device and they're comfortable with it because it does all they want.

"It has quality images, quality e-mail, quality web browsing, everything's there. We and the operators can bring it into the game, but it's very important to bring consumers into that world as well."

Judging by Pierce's covert surveillance activities though, it shouldn't be too difficult to sell Irish consumers the notion of the phone as a mini-computer, which is the term Nokia prefer to use when talking about the N-Series.

"I do a lot of mystery shopping and talk to the people on the streets and the shops and they always ask me for handsets that aren't actually available on the Irish market, that they might have seen on the web or in magazines. Normally, these are at the high end of the market, niche products," he says.

The smartphones are on the way, although the 3G technology that makes these features tick has not been the roaring success it was expected it to be. Pierce is confident that it will be integrated seamlessly before long, same as 2G - digital voice and text - was before it.

"Multimedia is the flagship at the moment," says Pierce.

"For example we've just brought out a golf edition of the N93, which is fantastic. It takes a video clip of your swing, so you can go over it and analyse it and compare it to the professionals on the video swing. Then you can see where you're going wrong. It's very easy to use and it creates DVD-quality videos."

If the prospect of golfers up and down the country endlessly photographing each other on the tee box with their smartphones becomes a reality, Pierce's plan to spread 3G technology to all phone users will definitely have come to fruition.