Nokia Considering Building Laptops

Nokia, the number one manufacturer of mobile phones worldwide, is considering entering the laptop industry, according to an interview given by Chief Executive Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo to Finnish national broadcaster YLE on Wednesday.

"We are looking very actively also at this opportunity. We don't have to look even for five years from now to see that what we know as a mobile phone and what we know as a PC are in many ways converging. Today we have hundreds of millions of people who are having their first Internet experience on the phone. This is a good indication."

Nokia has been making Internet tablets for some time, such as the N810, so this wouldn't be as big a stretch as you might think. Plus Nokia is such a major player in mobile devices anyway, it could leverage that for deals with carriers (for subsidies, such as done with some netbooks), parts manufacturers, and the like.

It's unclear from the information available what OS would be on the laptop, but Symbian would not be a stretch either. Let's not forget that Psion's old netBook (which it is trying to use as the basis for a trademark) ran EPOC which eventually became the basis for Symbian.