Leader: Nokia - PC maker?

Yesterday handset giant Nokia announced more new phones. Same old stuff, different day? Well, not quite. These handsets are different.

Long gone are the days when Nokia did 'phones'. Phones. You remember them. You used them for voice calls and texts if you were lucky. Nokia's latest batch of devices are the biggest indication yet of the company's ambitions to go beyond phones and into consumer electronics.

The two devices in question are the N71 - generally acknowledged as a solid stab at blending a phone and an iPod-style device with browsing and video - and the N92, a phone-cum-portable TV with flip-up screen. The N71 sports Nokia's latest web browser, the N72 a super high-end screen. (See the photos of these two handsets below.)

As Anssi Vanjoki, Nokia's EVP and GM of multimedia, said when announcing the pair: "Nobody buys a product like [the N71] because it can make a phone call."

The word 'phone' has also disappeared from Nokia's lexicon. No, these two weren't described as phones, they were "personal multimedia computers".

It's not the first time Nokia has shown how far it can go from pure-play phones. The 770, for example - a Linux-based tablet device - has no voice functionality at all.

And this week's new handsets were accompanied with an announcement that Nokia has designs on being a 'digital home' player, releasing phones that sync with PCs and printers, TVs, hi-fis and the like.

It's a nice dream but we'll need at least 12 months before any of this technology is worth using. Take mobile TV, for example. Clips and downloads aside, there's no real commercial services for DVB-H (the standard for mobile TV Nokia is using) devices and despite a number of ongoing trials, European operators are yet to firmly announce plans for any such offering.

However, Nokia is very much living in interesting times with its PC wannabe devices.

Unlike PCs, phones are affordable to everyone in the richer western countries and for some high-growth economies phones are leapfrogging computers to get citizens online. Take Slovakia's Flash OFDM rollout - phone broadband speeds are leapfrogging those available through xDSL in the country and, once natural tech churn puts web-capable devices in people's hands, who's to say phones won't become Slovakians' internet access point of choice?

The drive towards mobile email - don't forget Nokia has staked its claim there too - has proved there's a huge drive from business to get more PC functionality on phones. Recent launches from O2, with i-mode, and T-Mobile, with Web n walk, indicate operators think consumers want the same thing.

And, according to various experts, phones and smart devices get the drop on PCs with security too.

So the PC is dead, long live the super-smart phone? Of course not. Phone screens can only go so large and who wants to be viewing spreadsheets or long scrolling web pages on a three-inch-square screen? There's the keyboard issue too - jog wheels are all very nice but as any mobile exec will tell you, hell on the thumb. And then there's the battery problem - phones just don't stand up so well to PC-style usage.

No PC killing here then. The mobile's form factor works against that. Yet there's a great big base of consumers and business people alike across the world who for convenience or economics' sake will be keen to get their hands on a genuine PC-multimedia-phone - or whatever they end up being called.

The N71

The N92