AlbertPacino
Explorer
The product marks a significant strategy expansion for Nokia which is venturing outside its mainstay cellular phone business. Nokia aims to sell the device through broadband home Internet providers and directly to consumers on its Internet web site.
"We're launching a completely new product category," said Janne Jormalainen, Nokia's vice president for convergence products at its multimedia devices division.
The device is aimed at consumers looking for an affordable extra Internet screen in the house that they can also carry with them and use at wireless hotspots outside the home or connect to a cell phone through a Bluetooth wireless link.
It will be available in the third quarter.
The product will run entirely on open source software, including a standard Linux operating system also used in desktop computers, marking more unchartered waters for Nokia. "Using standard desktop Linux means innovation is happening faster (than in Linux versions for small devices). We will be very fast in implementing this innovation," Jormalainen said.
Several of the innovations already in the pipeline are upgrades by early 2006 to enable Voice over Internet protocol (VoIP) calls and instant messaging. Anyone who buys the device now will be able to upgrade the software next year.
VoIP phone calls from this portable device may cannibalise cell phone voice revenues from Nokia's main customers which are all of the world's biggest mobile operators.
NEW OPEN SOURCE WEBSITE
Nokia will also launch and support an open source community Web Site, encouraging software developers to hack into the device and improve the product.
A rival to Microsoft's Windows, Linux is an open source operating system, meaning that the software will be freely available to everybody.
Nokia aims to be competitive by implementing innovations ahead of competitors, while benefiting from its huge scale -- it makes one of every three mobile phones sold in the world and the total mobile phone market is expected to be well over 700 million units in 2005.
Consumers will be able to store content downloaded from the Internet on removable MMC memory cards, or transfer it to a desktop computer with a USB connection or Bluetooth.
Nokia has been looking for growth opportunities outside the strict boundaries of the mobile phone industry, first with its N-Gage gaming phone and later with a multimedia device which can double up as a television and video device, but these have been slow to catch on and always came with integrated a mobile phone.
This new device, which took Nokia two years to develop, is a stab at the market for portable computers.
Last year 189 million PCs were sold worldwide, and by 2008 market researchers expect more than half of all sales will be portable computers rather than desktops.
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