Designing the future
"When an object can be of any shape or size, what shape or size should it be?" -- carried one of the slides presented by Jan Chipchase, human behavioural researcher, Nokia, at the annual event, Nokia Connections 2007, in Singapore last month. He was speaking about research methods and how that affects phone designs.

Jan and his 250 colleagues made up of industrial designers, materials experts, physiologists, sociologists etc. work at Nokia Design. Two things amazed me during his presentation; the first, the number and the type of people involved in Nokia's designing team and, secondly, I had no idea that Nokia actually has employees who follow people all over the world and study human behaviour.

During his interesting presentation, Jan mentioned about their research in India and the literacy factor there. "If you can't read and write, how do you manage your contact information?", asked Jan. "But what amazed us is that people were managing their contact information and they were using the mobile phones; we just didn't understand the intimate details of how they were doing that," he added.

The team spent a lot of time in documenting what they do, how they manage their contacts and based on that study they redesigned some of their phones such as the Nokia 1100, 1110 with preview modes and better iconic support for the address book.

I should say that we were lucky enough to see Nokia's Senior Design Manager, Innovation & Insight, Rhys Newman's presentation where he shared an internal film of future products and communication processes that Nokia uses in trying to shape their decision making process.

"Nokia Design tries to make the future tangible and meaningful and we are prepared to get it wrong," said Rhys. "When we think about future, it's not just picking a technology or design, it's about shaping all those things and making sense and meaning," he added.

It all comes down to a very simple question, "Who is the most important person in your world?" and within this question lies the key to the future. Because, the way people communicate with the most important people will shape the future phones.

Mobility and internet
The fusion of mobility and the internet is another point the event focused on. The company is providing platforms that will enable mobile life and internet culture.

Speaking at the event, Nokia's Executive Vice-President and Chief Technology Officer Tero Ojanpera emphasised how the next big challenge was to bring new internet services to those who had never seen the internet before.

"Today there are 900 million Nokia phones out there and 10 more are being made every second. We are transforming the devices these people are using," he said.

"We are making the mobile phones not just communicating devices but multimedia devices and are creating new platforms to build services based on the internet platform and let people innovate on it," he added.

Nokia believes that many people in developing countries who haven't seen a credit card will have their first experience of banking through the mobile.

Maps, search, widsets and transaction applications were also unveiled by the company at the event.

Nokia recently launched mobile education in China where users could learn English on their handsets.

Nokia has already partnered with Flickr, Yahoo's photo-sharing website and community, so that users of the Nokia N-series can truly point, shoot, upload and share with the community.

Ojanpera said Nokia products with WiMAX can be expected in the first half of 2008.

The new Nokia N800 Internet Tablet was unveiled at the event that enables users to have portable internet access from home and on the go, with hi-resolution wide screen display.

Music, games, maps, TV and more
Nokia introduced music and games on its handsets quite a while ago and now the mobile phone giant is focusing on enhancing these end-user experiences along with introducing navigation aids and television on its mobile phones.

Talking about Maps, at Nokia Connections the Nokia 330 auto navigation was unveiled, which gives you a turn-by-turn audiovisual directions based on the Route 66 Navigate 7 application. This 3.5-inch full colour touch screen display with built-in GPS receiver makes your destinations easy to reach with quick address look-up.

Driving and talking on the phone could never get better. With the Nokia Bluetooth display car kit CK-15W, making and receiving phone calls while driving is just a piece of cake. With its intuitively designed Nokia Navi wheel input device, it's really easy to scroll through functions, access phone books and activate voice dialling and many more.

Three new Bluetooth headsets, BH-803, BH-602 and BH-604 were launched at the event along with three new handset models -- Nokia 3500 Classic, Nokia 6267 and Nokia 6121 classic.

Mobile TV is definitely one of the hottest topics these days. At the Nokia Connections, the company presented live demos and announced its collaboration with MiTV Corporation Sdn Bhd to bring commercial broadcast mobile TV services by using Digital Video Broadcast-Handheld (DVB-H) technology to Malaysia. From this, it is obvious that Mobile TV is not far away from any country.