3GSM Diary: Nokia gust, 'good clean' phones and the froven

You'll have heard about people being blown away by corporate presentations. (Very rarely, admittedly.) Monday saw this almost happen in a very real sense at Nokia's packed out press conference au bord de la mer, as they say in Cannes (or maybe Only Fools and Horses - must find a phrase book).

Sure, we were distracted by the CEOs of arguably the two biggest companies in mobile talking the talk but we were one final gust away from a huge marquee - lighting rigs and all - falling on the assembled hacks.

Such a dreadful loss was narrowly avoided as the chill winds sweeping the Cote D'Azur (it wasn't glamorous, really) abated. Still, those that looked on undistracted at least learnt Messrs Ollila and Sarin can again share a smile or two. Which is fairly scary for some of their rivals.

I'm sure when it comes to talking 'infotainment' services, as Vodafone and others increasingly do, both of these leaders have in mind some good clean fun. Well, here's for a new word - or words - in mobile cleanliness: 'hygiene factor capable'. As in: "We expect 30 hygiene factor capable handsets by the middle of the year."

Still with me? These words came (reportedly) from the mouth of an Ericsson VP, sensibly explaining that not only will 3G phones be a mass market reality by mid-year but that they will be models with adequate battery life, the ability to hand off between W-CDMA and GSM networks and so on. That's why they're hygienic and the antithesis of all those dirty old handsets, plaguing many a roll out to date.

And while I'm talking extremes, consider for a moment the Polara. Any idea what it is? It's not a phone, not a PDA, not even a fancy watch with a phone, PDA and GPS navigation device squeezed in. If I said it is made by Whirlpool, would that help? It turns out the Polara is a kitchen appliance that acts as a fridge during the day and an oven at night - or any other time when its lazy-assed owner decides to heat up that TV dinner, on the way home, using a mobile phone.

Let's call it the froven. (Let's not call it the ovidge.)

It got a mention today because it runs using middleware from IBM. The computing giant has signed a deal with Nokia and been touting its WebSphere software, used in embedded devices, voice portals, by service providers and by companies linking back end systems to sales and field forces, for example. Daimler Chrysler, Pfizer and Ricoh are three early-exploiters of this partnership, using the Nokia Communicator as the client device.

The trouble is, how hard is it to stand out in a crowd such as 3GSM when you're shouting about this kind of thing (and the services that will make it all the more of an earner)? Time to airlift in some of those frovens.

And to end on another note of journalist woe, consider the plight of those stuck in the press centre sans internet access late on Monday. At a gathering of expertise in networks who would have expected anything less?