Nokia offers vision for services, applications

Seeking to bridge "the now to the next," Nokia has set its sights on Internet services, next-generation wireless technology, and mobile application development.

Among the company's efforts include the impending beta release of Point & Find, a technology for finding information and services on the Internet by pointing a camera at real-world objects. The upcoming beta release lets users watch a film trailer, read a film review, or find a nearby cinema to buy tickets by pointing a camera phone at a movie poster.

In the wireless radio technology space, the company is focused on LTE (Long Term Evolution of Universal Terrestrial Radio Access Network), said Jim Harper, a Nokia senior technology marketing manager. LTE requires fewer network elements than earlier-generation networks, and it requires no circuit-switching, he said. It's being proposed as a competitor to WiMax, a technology that Sprint has begun rolling out in the United States this fall.

[ Does WiMax deliver? Find out in the InfoWorld Test Center's road test: "Does WiMax work in the real world?" ]

In the development tools space, Nokia is positioning its Qt (pronounced "cute") application development framework as a platform for building applications to run on different types of systems. Applications also can be developed once and run across various desktop OSes, said Dilip Kenchammana, a Nokia product line manager.

Another focus is cognitive radio, in which a device can dynamically jump between frequency bands to increase bandwidth capacity, for purposes such as sending audio bits or data.

Nokia has also previewed several research projects, including:

* A videoconferencing pet, which features a mobile unit that can, for example, let grandparents catch a glimpse of their far-away grandchildren. It acts as a physical avatar of the caller.

* Mobile 3-D video, which provides immersive video experiences and rich communication.

* Mobile Millennium, which offers a next-generation real-time traffic data platform that uses GPS-enabled phones to gather data on traffic.