Mobile Phone Blog:

Ooh, exciting things are happening over in Finland. The Nokia N900 (a phone I’m genuinely chomping at the bit to get hold of) is signalling a sea change away from just using Symbian for their smartphones, but a new product from them is signalling a sea change away from them just making phones. Yep, it’s been rumoured as happening for ages, but now it’s 100% official, according to Nokia’s own blog.

Nokia have made a laptop.

Say hello to the Nokia Booklet 3G.

What we have here is, in fact, a netbook. Now, normally, I wouldn’t do a blog post about netbooks since, y’know, they’re not phones, but come on, it’s Nokia. This is massive news, this is. But what can you expect from the Booklet 3G?

Well, you’re looking at a 10″, HD ready, glass screen (my sister’s just bought a laptop with a glass screen, and it looks effing phenomenal, not that I’m jealous, or anything… but, anyway, you can imagine I’m a bit jazzed by the Booklet 3G having one, too), a front facing camera for video conferencing, and the whole thing runs on an Intel Atom processor. Oh, and in terms of all things HD, it’s also got an HDMI port, for displaying things on a big HD display.

Of course, expect it to easily sync up with your Nokia phone, too. That much should be obvious. And for my money, looking at the design, I reckon it goes rather nicely, aesthetically speaking, with the Nokia 5530.

All that’s rather impressive, but we haven’t got to my favourite bits, yet…

First up is the design, because you’re looking at a gob-smackingly gorgeous aluminium body, and the whole thing weighs just over a kilo. And then, there’s the battery life, and I’m a bit shocked about this, since Nokia claim that with normal, everyday use, the Booklet 3G can last up to 12 hours on a single charge. That’s a bit bleedin’ impressive, that is.

And finally, we come to connectivity, and again, it really is rather impressive. Built-in WiFi comes as standard, obviously, but even cooler than that is something we really should’ve expected, considering who’s making the Netbook 3G. Yep, you get HSDPA/mobile broadband built in as well. And finally, something I really wasn’t expecting, but is, again, something I should’ve considering it’s Nokia making it: the Booklet 3G comes with GPS built-in as well.

Oh, and there’s one other thing I haven’t told you yet. See if you can spot what it is, from the official Nokia product video:

Yep, that’s right. It appears to be running on Windows 7, not, as many current netbooks do, Windows XP (which is exciting news, although I have to say, I still prefer XP). All in all, then, this makes the Nokia Booklet 3G more or less the most advanced netbook in the world. The question is, though, will it sell?

Hmm, I suspect the words “oh”, “hell” and “yes” will be involved in the answer…

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