Nokia To Pre-load Qik On S60 Phones

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With all of the collaboration going on between Qik and Nokia over the past few months, it seemed like it wouldn’t be too long before Nokia went ahead and put the live mobile video broadcasting service onto handsets right out of the box. Sure, enough: Beginning with this morning’s release of the North American N97, Qik will come preloaded onto all Nokia S60-based phones.

This is exactly what we thought had happened months ago with the Nokia 5800, though we later found out that, while Qik did make an appearance on the device, it was simply an icon that led to a download page. This time around, Qik comes installed and ready to go.

This is a fairly significant win for Qik; beyond all the technical hurdles involved with streaming live video from a mobile phone, one of the most challenging things is getting people to use it. Nokia’s been featuring Qik pretty prominently in their Ovi Store, and the aforementioned preloaded download link are nice – but convincing people to make the leap, download the app, register an account, and broadcast their lives seems like a tough sell. Remove one of the steps, and it becomes slightly less so.