Nokia's Aki Jarvilehto kicked off the Develop Mobile 2008 conference this morning, with a keynote speech outlining some of the technologies and trends that Nokia sees as important for mobile gaming going forward.

He kicked off by saying that mobile gaming is predicted to be a 2bn Euro market this year, with predicted annual growth of 20 per cent in the next few years.

He outlined Nokia's platforms, saying that N-Gage isn't intended to challenge DS or PSP - "it's about creating the best global native mobile platform in the world". Nokia is seeing N-Gage transactions in some unusual countries too – India, China – places you might not expect N-Gage handsets to be selling in large numbers.

Jarvilehto says Nokia is keen to create iconic games through its publishing activities, working with the likes of Ideaworks3D – he says Metal Gear Solid for N-Gage will be out by the end of this year, and is looking "absolutely brilliant".

He then focused on market dynamics, stressing the past barriers of discovery and purchase transactions – the ease of finding and buying mobile games. He also referred to the age-old porting issue.

"The good news is that this Catch 22 is old news. N-Gage is not the only platform solving these issues – there are multiple mobile platforms solving them," he says. "Platform holders need to go out of the way to support developers."

He pointed out that Nokia isn't the only company investing in 'high-quality' games – although he was referring to publishers, I think, rather than Apple, Sony Ericsson, etc.

"Two years down the road doing another single-button mobile game probably won't catch anybody's attention," he said, slightly controversially. "Just as doing yet another hardware accelerated racing game in 2010 probably won't."

He then focused on innovation, and definitions of it. "The guiding beacon should always be the consumer," said Jarvilehto, stressing that developers shouldn't get too carried away with new technologies instead of pleasing gamers. "Things that make them go wow!"

He outlined six opportunity areas fo rmobile gaming. Core Gamer, Web 2.0, Personal Development, Casual Gamer, Feminine Games, and Local Content.

Core Gamer is the hardcore gamers who like action games and want to compete with others in goal-oriented gameplay. Casual gaming is what's dominating mobile today, said Jarvilehto, saying it's hard for games to stand out in this area.

What about Web 2.0? It's social-driven game concepts (could be Facebook stuff – he didn't really specify). Feminine Games is games targeting women, where you don't kill or beat others, but are "just entertained on my own terms".

Personal Development is basically brain training – for people who "want gaming to be more fun – besides being leisure, it's to somehow build up a skill or develop themselves, in terms of body or mind".

Finally, Local Content – Jarvilehto says Nokia has identified this as a new opportunity – games that resonate with players' cultural backgrounds, citing Bollywood as one example (you can also look at what Gameloft has done with UK TV shows and mobile games).

Next, Jarvilehto talked about Reset Generation, the new N-Gage game that's Nokia's first cross-platform game, running on N-Gage handsets, but also PCs and the web. I can attest to the addictiveness of it, having been up last night at 2am playing review code for next week's Pocket Gamer review.

He said it's "probably one of the most expensive titles we've ever done" (but wouldn't say how much it cost, naturally).

He then talked about another upcoming N-Gage game – Dirk Dagger And The Fallen Idol – which is a camera-controlled detective game with a comic strip look - "we're looking to take this in an episodic content direction," he said – scoop! - and said it will be available in the next four to six weeks.

Jarvilehto also showed off Yamake, Nokia's intriguing user-generated content game, which lets you turn the content on your phone into mini-games and share them with other players. It's due out in the second half of this year.

Finally, he showed Creebies, the virtual pet community made by the developers of Creatures, and aimed at a younger female audience. It's clear Nokia sees these titles as the flagbearers for how N-Gage will evolve.

The most interesting part of Jarvilehto's talk was the section on disruptive technologies. He suggested that 'quality is the new black' – production values will increasingly differentiate mobile games.

He also said that self-publishing is becoming more realistic for developers, and also suggested that mobile developers look into other platforms, making games web to web, web to PC/console, and web to mobile. He also bigged up Digital Chocolate's Facebook version of Tower Bloxx.

What about those hot techs though? Jarvilehto outlined a few. CPU performance was the first, with ARM CPUs now ranging up to 600MHz which can "deliver a decent punch", along with the fact that memory capacity is on the increase, with some N-Gage games being "tens of megabytes" in size.

"Two or three years from now, we'll probably be taking memory capacity for granted," he said. Nokia is also excited about 3D acceleration hardware in mobile phones – although he didn't say how this'll blend with the N-Gage SDK roadmap.

Now TV-Out. "Plugging these devices into TVs, for many people in developing markets, the first time they experience a high-quality console game, it will be like this," he said.

Touch and accelerometer were also highlighted, but Jarvilehto was particularly keen to highlight another tech – GPS - "we are taking this mainstream in a significant way," he said. "You can assume you'll have a platform with tens of millions of GPS-enabled handsets by the end of this year," he said.

Magnetometer? That was his next tech – compass-like abilities in your phone, which could become important for mixed-reality or augmented reality games. "Coming up with multiplayer concepts with spaceships hovering over New York and people firing at them with their mobile phones is possible," he said, while conceding that it's anyone's guess how mainstream this'll be.

Context Sensitivity was his next tech – with Yamake as the illustration, with people creating games from their own content.

Service Integration? "We've just invested five billion Euros in Navtech, and we're making huge investments in music. We're trying to redefine the way the mobile music industry is operating. And we're looking to leverage this in every which way we can," he said.

That means using assets from Nokia's maps division for games, potentially.

Next, Augmented Reality, where Jarvilehto said Nokia has several concepts running in its labs. They include barcode-battling games where you take a photo of a barcode and it gets turned into a fighter - "A little nerdy? Yes, but we think they will become more popular in the future," he said.

Then Mixed Reality - "the relaxed little brother of Augmented Reality" - which includes Nokia using the map data from Navtech. "We're looking into game concepts. How can we automatically generate levels from the citymaps that we have available, where we have information about heights and so on," he said.

"Let's do a race from here in Brighton to London, and fight against our mates in the cities or places that we find relevant," he says. "This is going to be one of the game changing things moving forward, and it's about more than just maps. You wanna race in the Grand Canyon? Fine!"

Jarvilehto says the Nokia address book could also be used for games, with 400 million people in the world storing their contacts using it. "How do we somehow turn that into context that makes gameplay fun and exciting?" he said. This is all intriguing stuff.

And that was it. Oh, in questions, Jarvilehto said Nokia isn't worried by competition to N-Gage from the iPhone. "We've been alone in this for some years now, it's good to have more platforms in the space," he said.

"Of course, we are a big company, and we're nothing if not persistent, so if there is something to be done in this space, we will be there!"