While today's low-end phones in the developing world can offer extremely important services beyond voice / text communication,  these additional services rarely scale beyond small, local markets. With Nokia's annoucement of Life Tools, it looks as if a major corporation is finally getting serious about services for mobile phone subscribers living in the developing world - a market that now has surpassed 2 billion users and represents the majority of mobile phone subscribers today.  

Nokia Life Tools is a range of innovative agriculture information and education services designed especially for rural and small town communities in emerging markets. Nokia Life Tools helps overcome information constraints and provides farmers and students with timely and relevant information. These services use an icon-based, graphically rich user interface that comes complete with tables and which can even display information simultaneously in two languages. Behind this rich interface, SMS is used to deliver the critical information to ensure that this service works wherever a mobile phone does, without the hassles of additional settings or the need for GPRS coverage. Nokia plans to launch the service in the first half of 2009 with the Nokia 2323 classic and the Nokia 2330 classic as the lead devices in India, and expand it across select countries in Asia and Africa later in 2009.

 More information is available here and here.