MANILA, Philippines – The Philippines remains a goldmine for mobile data services as users turn to the Internet for their communication needs, according to Nokia’s newly-appointed country chief.

Nokia Philippines General Manager Benoit Nalin sees more Filipino users migrating traditional voice and SMS (or text messaging). One of the key driving forces of this expected growth is the availability of handsets.

Noting that the majority of Filipinos is still on the “entry-level, prepaid” handset segment, Nalin said the company is taking steps in bringing more data services to the mass market.

The Finnish firm recently offered Nokia Messaging, which allows users to get access to any free email service from their mobile phone.

The service has recently been activated for postpaid subscribers through Smart Communications but will eventually extend this to prepaid subscribers. The initial cost of the service is P299 per month of top of the postpaid subscription plan.

Nalin said their intention is to get more data service companies to get their services to more people. Email services will be one of the drivers for this data growth.

He also noted that the cost of technology is declining, making these available to more people.

“The cost of storage is coming to almost zero. You have the Internet taking much of the storage, freeing people the concern of having storage on their devices. What's important for users is that their phones have all the capabilities they need for everything they do,” Nalin said.

While he envisions that mobile phones will be a primary communication device for most people, he still believes it as a complementary device to notebook computers, especially those that are connected wirelessly.

Nalin said: “People would have specific needs per device, as long as they are connected.”

Jerome Almirante, Smart Communications Head for Value Added Services and Data Services, said there has been an increase in traffic for Smart’s data services, though voice and SMS data remains to be the heavier traffic. Still, he believes that there will be a migration of all communications services to the Internet.

Almirante said there has been growth in traffic for social networking services, such as Facebook, Twitter, and Plurk, noting that more Filipinos are heavily using SNS sites for their communication needs.

“There will be a huge market for unified communications in the future. It may not happen very soon, but that's the direction we're seeing,” Almirante said.