Microsoft announcement later this morning: Live ID signup from Nokia devices
In less than three hours from now, I will be live-blogging Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer's keynoter from the CTIA show in San Francisco.
It appears so much more than likely that Ballmer will talk about new functionality that will enable users to sign up for a Live ID from their Windows Mobile-running Nokia PDA or mobile phone.
How do we know this? Why, it's because Phil, a blogger on the Microsoft-run Windows Live Blog, tells us so with a prescient post that went up last night.
Phil writes in part:
As we look at our customers today its clear that almost all of the folks that use our services on the mobile phone first started to use them on a PC, be that messenger, hotmail, spaces etc. As they started to rely on the services they started to use them on the mobile phone. They can sign-in using the same account, with the same contact store and it just worked on the mobile phone like it should.
For countries where the PC is the primary computing device that's great, however for folks that don't have access to a PC everyday, often going days without a visit to an Internet Cafe they were out of luck. Not much point in creating an email account when you could only get to it once every week, stick with sms as your primary way to chat with your friends.
Now with help from the Live ID team we are hopefully going to resolve that now that we have the ability to sign-up for a new Live ID completely from the mobile phone. The process has been designed to be as easy as it can, while still offering a secure sign-up. Its a simple three step process, you can see the simplified inputs that we now ask below to create an account.
The service has been designed to work with the built in mobile browser that comes with your phone and all folks need is a data plan to get started. Its going to be available in 33 languages and about 70 different countries so hopefully we have the availability we need.
Moving forward this sign-up will be integrated into our client based services like Windows Live For Nokia so for customers that go and purchase a Nokia device later this year they will be able to create an account directly on the phone.
Phil then goes above-and-beyond the call of corporate blogging to take and post three screen shots that illustrate the process. They are at the top of this post.
Ah the morning coffee is ready and the morning personal clean-up is ready to begin. See you live from Ballmer's talk soon...