Downloading Christina Aguilera videos to your mobile phone is so, like, old. For Nokia, a Mumbai car pooling service powered by text messaging may be a far more telling glimpse of the future.

Mobile phone users are increasingly using their phones to surf the net and send e-mail, rather than just make calls. Improvements in screen sizes and interfaces are prompting a big increase in data usage in developed markets. Yet in the developed world, telecoms operators, rightly, see phone maker Nokia's move into services such as music downloads and maps as a threat.