The Hindu Business Line : Nokia unveils ‘mobile computer’, aims at Net-savvy

Smart features: New services announced by Nokia such as Maps on Ovi (bottom left), Nokia Messaging (top left) and the new phone unveiled by the company, Nokia N97, at the Nokia World, held in Barcelona.

Ravikanth Nandula

Recently in Barcelona If anybody needed confirmation that the line that divided a mobile phone from a computer is getting increasingly thinner, the fact was on display in ample measures at the Nokia World, the mobile phone company’s annual developer event held mid-week in this Spanish port city.

The company announced a new phone – N97 – that it preferred to label as a ‘mobile computer’, and unveiled a few new services that put the power of the Internet, the most-accessed feature of PCs, into the pockets of phone users.

If one wanted to hear a statement of intent, it came from the President and CEO of the company, Mr Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo.

Noting that there are four billion mobile phones in the world and that their company with more than one billion customers globally – 15 per cent of world population – was in a unique position to put the power of Internet into the hands of more users, he stressed, “and that’s what we intend to do.”

Most of the attention at the event was centred around N97, the high-end phone that the company plans to roll out into the stores in the first half of 2009. Sporting a 3.5 inch TFT widescreen (at 16:9 aspect ratio) with an almost-VGA resolution of 640 x 360 pixels, the phone comes with a QWERTY keyboard under the screen, a 5 megapixel camera that uses Carl Zeiss Tessar lens and a touch-sensitive screen that also gives tactile feedback.

Aimed at the Internet-savvy, the phone enables the users to browse real Web pages thanks to the big screen real estate.

It supports RSS feeds and has integrated A-GPS sensors and a digital compass that enable the users to update their locations to their social networks automatically.

A demo-video of the device shows a user taking a photograph of a cathedral, uploading the image to the Nokia services and getting the information about the church in real-time; the telepathic trick performed here is based on the phone’s GPS capabilities than any leaps in image recognition technology.

It comes with a unique slider that skids the touch screen up at a 30 degree angle. This makes for easy viewing of the screen, cutting off reflections from ambient lighting, or, from the sun when used outdoors, while enabling the users work on the screen with both the thumbs.

Nifty features such as orientation sensors (changes the screen orientation between horizontal/vertical depending on the way one holds the phone), proximity sensors (disabling the touch sensitivity of the screen when the phone is held to the ear while on a call, so that the phone doesn’t respond to the accidental touch of the cheek or the ear) and a 1500 mAh battery, the highest capacity in any Nokia phone to date, complete the picture.

The new services also include Nokia Messaging, which gives the users access to their existing e-mail and instant messaging accounts (Web-based accounts or ISPs) from the confines of their phone. Maps on Ovi, is a free service that enables users to pre-plan their journeys at home on their PCs, synchronise the plans to their phones and access them at the destination.

Mail on Ovi, aims to bring the power of e-mail to ‘everybody, not just a few’. “Some 75 per cent of world population is yet to have their first e-mail account. Many of them will have the experience on their mobile phones, not on a PC,” asserts Mr Anssi Vanjoki, Executive Vice-President of Nokia.

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Nokia unveils ‘mobile computer’, aims at Net-savvy

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