When Nokia talks about the future it's generally a good idea to pay attention. After all, even with
diminishing market share, a split
Maemo and
Symbian smartphone strategy, and
less than stellar financials, the company remains the world's leading supplier of handsets with a proven ability to innovate. So take notice when Nokia's head of corporate strategy, Heikki Norta, describes what life will be like in 2015 in a video littered with high-tech devices driven by finger-based UIs. Of course, five years is generally only enough time for the nascent technologies we see today to mature enough for mass market acceptance -- in other words, readers of
Engadget won't find anything mind-blowing in a presentation laced with liberal doses of
augmented reality, pervasive
connectivity,
dual-display clamshells, and as always:
micro projectors and
laser keyboards. Beyond hardware and software, Nokia sees itself at the heart of a global network aggregating data from hundreds of millions of intelligent devices for an unprecedented level of knowledge sharing that enables services such as highly
localized traffic reports and
weather trends. Fun stuff and certainly worth a few minutes to ponder on your own. Still, it's difficult to get too excited by the vision from a company that was not only
totally caught off guard by consumer trends at the margin-rich (read: money making) end of its devices portfolio, but also
so slow to respond in any meaningful way.
