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Nokia’s vision of the future

Mobilementalism has a feature on what Nokia sees as the future of the mobile phone. Apparently the company has forbidden its employees from calling their products “phones”, instead using the term “multimedia computer”. The strategy is for the mobile phone to perform all the tasks that an MP3 player, a mobile phone and a PDA do separately today. The N-series is the coming-together of the first two. The target is now devices like the Treo. Eventually the company sees the computer as we know it today to fade into obsolescence. Consider what the article has to say about Nokia’s N80 device:

…images and video stored on the Nokia N80 or a compatible PC can be viewed wirelessly on the living room TV, while listening to music stored on the device through the living room audio system. It also lets you print wirelessly to any compatible UPnP-enabled home printer or printing kiosk. It’s only a small step from the Nokia N80 to a device that renders the PC obsolete.

Nokia is banking on the fact that we are increasingly moving our data online, having them stored on remote servers. Today we interface our smartphones with our home computers, for storing and sourcing multimedia captured on these phones. With the advent and ubiquity of high-speed networks in the future, we can interface in the exact same manner with such remote storage. The PC will no longer be needed as a local store for data.

Here’s the company’s ultimate goal, though:

If you hook up a monitor and wireless keyboard to a suitably-equipped mobile phone, you have no need for a PC:

  • all your files are stored remotely;
  • your web browser resides on your mobile phone, but is displayed on your monitor;
  • and all the applications you currently use reside on a web server, again accessible through the web browser from your mobile phone.

Indeed, you won’t even notice you’re not using a PC, as you still use a keyboard and monitor, and all interactivity occurs through a browser, just as most of it does now.

Fascinating! And as the article summarizes at the end, Dell had better watch out!