Last week I was kindly invited to a Nokia roundtable event called “The way we live next 3.0”. The event was held at the new One & Only hotel in Cape Town and Nokia invited Missing Linking entrepreneur and legend Richard Mulholland to be the guest speaker. He shared his vision on the latest trends in the mobile space and where he sees these trends going in the future. The short of it was that mobile phones/devices will eventually replace computers and that for companies and leaders to be successful they will have to heed Alvin Toffler’s wise words: “The illiterates of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.” The other speaker was Nokia’s product marketing manager Patrick Henchie who talked about Nokia’s vision of what the future (see video above) and how mobility might evolve.
Nokia also introduced us to some future products and let us have a play;
- N900: This is the first Nokia phone to run on the open source OS Maemo. Its basically a 3.5” touch screen phone with slide out keyboard. My brief impression was its a step in the right direction but still not an iPhone (and a bit fat). For the specs PDF click here.
- X6 touch phone: I didn’t get to play with this for too long but it was my favourite product on show. Its a 3.5” capacitive touch screen phone. It runs Nokia’s symbian OS and it just worked great. Also when you get the phone you get access to unlimited free music downloads from the Nokia Ovi Store (For the phone only but still is a great bonus and the phone has 32GB internal memory).
- Nokia Booklet 3G: This new Nokia laptop is pretty exiting, its made from a single piece of machined aluminium and feels great. It has shortcuts to the Ovi store and maps built in, as well as an integrated 3G HSPA modem. The machine runs Windows 7, has a 10.1” screen and has an incredible battery life of up to 12 hours. After a little play I thought it was very sluggish, but then I turned off the power saving mode and it worked fine. Great bit of kit if you travel lots and want to use it to access cloud services and do some light work on the go. For the specs PDF click here.
Overall the event was a great initiative and I liked the way they made the sessions intimate with only about 15 influential journalists, developers and bloggers invited, it gave us the chance to interact very easily with the speakers and products. On another note thanks to Olga from Nokia South Africa for inviting me even though she knew I’m a Sony Ericsson fan !
