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VIDEONokia: Is That a Laptop in Your Pocket?
By
Scott Reeves Feb 26, 2009 1:30 pm
Cellphone maker to move into portable-computer market.
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“We are looking very actively at this opportunity,” Olli-Pekka Kallasuvo, Nokia’s chief executive officer, told Reuters. “We don’t have to look even 5 years from now to see that... mobile phones and what we know as a PC are in many ways converging.”
Nokia’s move would make sense as a step in developing a souped-up smartphone - not as a plan to forge a continuing presence in the market for stand-alone netbooks - the small, cheap laptops that are becoming increasingly popular as price continues to fall.
Microsoft (MSFT) CEO Steve Ballmer shares Nokia’s view about the convergence of mobile computers and cell phones. Earlier this year, rumors began to circulate that Dell (DELL) would also enter the smartphone market. In short, it’s a market that Nokia can’t ignore without endangering its future competitiveness.
Others are positioning themselves for what they see as the coming convergence of PCs and smartphones. Acer, the number-3 PC maker, recently announced plans to enter the mobile-phone business, a crowded field that includes Apple (AAPL), Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) and Research in Motion (RIMM).
Techie gurus see wondrous things for future smartphones: They could serve as an all-in-one electronic credit and debit card, entertainment center and Internet hub. Some prophets who have been to the mountaintop foresee a day when users hook their smartphone to a standard-size keyboard and screen by sliding it into a universal connector box.
Increased functionality would certainly boost the unit price of the fancy gizmos, and the next-generation networks needed to support them won’t be cheap to users.
This is duck soup for the network providers and the companies that make the devices. In the meantime, Nokia needs some experience in building netbooks to avoid outsourcing the computer element of its future super-smartphone.
If you expect to be in the market for a netbook in the future, it’s a good bet that Nokia will develop a good one. It might even be smart to buy one because it’s sure to be an intermediate step on the way to a grand everything-in-one handheld device. That would make Nokia’s laptop a collector’s item that you could sell on eBay while sipping coffee at your favorite wi-fi enabled yuppie haven.
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