Nokia may unveil a new game-changing product tomorrow, according to a rather secretive invitation received by IT Wire.
There are so few details about what’s planned that it makes Apple look like an open, transparent company. All we can glean is that a “new market disruptor” will be demonstrated in Australia by Nokia’s product and technology marketing manager Kurt Bonnici, followed by a hot link to CEO Stephen Elop’s keynote speech in Singapore.
Nokia may have innovated in the past, but we can’t help but wonder if this is just a ploy to drum up at least a few journalists for a fairly bog-standard event.
There’s little clue about the type of hardware that’s coming. It could be a smart phone, or a dumb phone, or a tablet, or some kind of market-disrupting death ray deployed from an extinct volcano above the Arctic circle. Fingers crossed for the latter.
Will Nokia Windows Phones disrupt the market? We’re rather sceptical of the notion, and in any case Mango handsets aren’t expected to go on sale until much later in the year, and are supposed to land in Europe first.
Symbian? Okay, Nokia, you’ve promised to support it until 2016 but its market-disrupting days are long gone. We’re not exactly sure what that leaves. Although MeeGo had potential it seems to have gone the same way as Symbian.
Hang on… perhaps Nokia settled its patent dispute with Apple with a secret deal which allows Nokia to load iOS on to its smart phones. Maybe Android isn’t such an abhorrent thought after all. Perhaps Nokia has done extensive research and found out that the ideal shape for a tablet isn’t flat and rectangular. (It would save it from being sued at least.) Maybe it will unveil a phone that can be operated via telekinesis. Who knows?
Place your bets.