The device certainly seems to have its specs sorted
Nokia's decision to unveil its Booklet 3G netbook a week ahead of its Nokia World show will certainly build anticipation for its annual shindig.
Although Nokia's netbook plans haven't quite had the blogosphere buzzing as furiously as Apple's still-rumoured iTablet, the Finnish firm's move into the laptops market has still been an open secret for some time. Today it broke cover.
Nokia's device certainly seems to have its specs sorted: 10-inch screen, HSPA and Wi-Fi, A-GPS, Intel's new Atom processor, and a whopping (promised) 12-hour battery life are all welcome, not to mention its HD video capabilities.
However, the most interesting thing about the Booklet 3G is its contribution to the next big trend in netbooks: devices that are truly designed from the ground up to be connected.
It sounds like a silly thing to say: you can plug a 3G dongle into all netbooks - and indeed, the boom in sales has lately been fuelled by mobile operators throwing their mobile broadband weight behind the devices.
Article continues belowAdvertisement
But Booklet 3G is hopefully about more than that: a netbook designed around content and services residing in 'the cloud' - in its case, Ovi. And in that sense, you can file Nokia's netbook along with Google's recently-announced Chrome OS, which next year will be used for netbooks from various manufacturers.
That's the real competition for the Booklet 3G, although if Apple ever does launch its own netbook that's tied into the company's MobileMe service, it'll join the fray too.
The first generation of netbooks were all about the hardware: size, weight and battery life, although design gradually became a factor too.
The second generation will be about connectivity and the services built around them. Something tells me we're going to hear a lot about the cloud at Nokia World, and how Ovi is evolving in that direction to take on Google.
There are questions, of course. Nokia doesn't always get innovative new hardware right first time round - sometimes taking a couple of iterations of user complaints to get into its stride.
That applies just as much to services. Chrome OS netbooks will be syncing up with Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Maps and Google Docs, while web browsing will be built around the whipsmart Chrome browser itself. How will Ovi stack up against all this?
Even so, Nokia's entry into the netbook market is fascinating, as it goes toe-to-toe with the Googles of the world in a new area for mobile entertainment. Come next week, we should have a better idea of its chances.
