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Here at the Nokia press conference at Mobile World Congress, the Finnish phone behemoth just announced two new E-series phones and–inevitably–an application store for distributing software not only to new Nokia smartphones but to millions of the company’s handsets that are already out there.

The first new phone the company introduced is the E55, which Nokia says is the world’s thinnest smartphone, and can run for up to a month in standby mode on a single charge of its battery; it sports a BlackBerry Pearl-style keyboard that puts two characters on each key and uses predictive input to figure out what you’re trying to type.  The unsubsidized price is 264 Euros ($337), and it’ll be available this summer.

The other new phone is the E75, a new model that’s supposedly a sort of descendant of phones in Nokia’s Communicator range (read: slide-out keyboard and business-y features); the company says it’s less of a brick (and yes, they used that word) than earlier versions. It’ll cost 375 Euros ($479) unsubsidized, and is due next month.

The store is the Ovi Store–Ovi being Nokia’s name for its portfolio of consumery services–and while the images we saw look very much like Apple’s App Store, Nokia says that its storefront will use information such as your location and your friends’ favorite downloads to get to know you and recommend stuff you might like–including media as well as software. (Example given by the company: If your phone noticed you were in Barcelona, it might recommend a travel guide to Spain.) Facebook, MySpace, Fox Interactive, Electronic Arts, Lonely Planet, Rough Guides, Shazam, and Handmark are among the content and app developers already on board.

For all the bragging Nokia did this morning about the eerie precision with which the Ovi Store will get to know you and anticipate your needs and desires, I’ll believe it when I see it: Countless software and service companies have promised me their technologies would be able to read me like a book over the years, and I can’t think of one example of an experience feeling anywhere near that magical.

Nokia’s upcoming N97 will be the first phone to include Ovi when it shows up in June, but the store will be available as a downloadable upgrade for some phones beginning in May. It’ll let developers offer for-pay and free aps, and there will be options for credit card and carrier billing payment options which will vary by region.

After the jump, Nokia beauty shots of the E55 and E75, and my own fuzzy images of the Ovi Store from the press event.

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The Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Fred von Lohmann has published a post saying that Apple has filed comments with the Copyright Office contending that jailbreaking an iPhone is a violation of its copyright on the iPhone’s software. Jailbreaking–the act of modifying your iPhone’s OS to allow the installation of any software you want, rather than only what’s available from Apple’s iTunes Store–is the only way to get some software, such as turn-by-turn GPS and videostreaming tools.

I don’t know if Apple’s stance is a reasonable interpretation of the law as it stands–although if the company was correct that the Digital Millennium Copyright Act makes jailbreaking illegal, it wouldn’t be the first time that the DMCA enabled anti-consumer, anti-competitive behavior. As terrific as the iPhone, the iPhone OS, and the App Store are, I’m bothered both by Apple having a monopoly on iPhone app distribution in principle and by some of the actions it’s taken. It’s been cryptic and inconsistent about the apps it will and won’t approve; it’s told developers they’re not allowed to compete with functionality in Apple’s own programs; it’s taken a ridicuously long time to approve software for sale in the App Store.

I’m an optimist, so I think Apple will eventually get iPhone software distribution right. But I believe it’ll do so much faster if alternate means of iPhone software distribution exist, even if very few iPhone users take advantage of them.

While I don’t always agree with von Lohmann and the EFF’s take on things, I do like this quote in his post:

One need only transpose Apple’s arguments to the world of automobiles to recognize their absurdity. Sure, GM might tell us that, for our own safety, all servicing should be done by an authorized GM dealer using only genuine GM parts. Toyota might say that swapping your engine could reduce the reliability of your car. And Mazda could say that those who throw a supercharger on their Miatas frequently exceed the legal speed limit.

But we’d never accept this corporate paternalism as a justification for welding every car hood shut and imposing legal liability on car buffs tinkering in their garages. After all, the culture of tinkering (or hacking, if you prefer) is an important part of our innovation economy.

Well said–and I support the EFF’s attempt to get the Copyright Office to officially state that jailbreaking doesn’t violate copyright law. Even though I own an unjailbroken iPhone, and I’m still going back and forth on whether I wanna go for it…

Google Docs has added some features for doing basic spreadsheet editing and wrangling on a phone–you can use T-Mobile’s G1, the iPhone, or Nokia S60 devices–and I’m not sure whether to be impressed that it’s working at all, or fixated on how rudimentary it is to the spreadsheet tools that the full-blown Google Docs provides when you’re in a desktop browser.

The good news is that you can filter and sort rows in spreadsheets you’ve created in Google Docs. (As far as I can tell, there’s still no way to create a spreadsheet from scratch on a phone–these new features are for working with sheets you’ve created in full-strength Google Docs.) But while Google Docs’ slick use of AJAX techniques makes it feel much like a piece of desktop software when you run it on a computer, the phone version is nowhere near as zippy and interactive. It’s kind of like how the desktop version of Docs’ spreadsheet might have turned out if Google had tried to create it in 1996 or so. Each time you make a change, Docs needs to send your instructions back to Google’s servers, which then send updated data back.

Sorting and filtering work reasonably well, but editing data is clumsy. Rather than just clicking in a cell to enter data, you click an Edit link for an entire row, then slide your way over to the cell you want to change. The iPhone on-screen keyboard eats up half the real estate, and it can be tough to identify which column you’re in without a lot of panning back and forth. All in all, it might work for some quick spreadsheet tweaks, but you wouldn’t want to do any serious number crunching this way.

Did I say that the issue with Google Docs on phones is that you needed to wait for Google’s servers to send data back? I lied–my biggest issue that they apparently don’t send data back in some cases. I tried out Docs’ new phone features using a real-world example I’ve implemented on multiple phone and PDA spreadsheets in the past: A simple little sheet for scoring miniature golf games, with a formula that keeps score as you enter scores for each hole. When I used the Edit links to enter scores hole-by-hole, the cells that tallied the scores didn’t update–making this incarnation of Google Docs perhaps the first spreadsheet in the history of spreadsheets without autocalc. I had to back out of the sheet then go back in before the formulas did their work–even though if I left the same spreadsheet open in Firefox, the scores autorefreshed as I made changes on the phone.

Some or all of Google Docs’ editing limitations may stem from basic issues with trying to do this fairly ambitious stuff on the still relatively crude browsers you get on phones. (I haven’t checked out the iPhone version of EditGrid, another Web spreadsheet, that’s been around for quite awhile now.) I’m still hankering for a word processor and spreadsheet on the iPhone that are as good as the ones I’ve had for years on Windows Mobile, Palm, Psion, and other pocket-sized platforms; I’ll keep an eye on Google Docs’ phone features, but for now, I’m more eager to see the iPhone versions of venerable mobile suites Documents to Go and QuickOffice. Both have been announced, but neither is available just yet.