Nokia announces 10-inch netbook

About two months ago, Intel and Nokia [ticker:uk_140989 announced] a strategic partnership without mentioning any concrete products. The first product announcement followed today: With the Booklet 3G, Nokia will offer a 10-inch netbook (and its first netbook altogether) – equipped, of course, with an Atom processor.

While Nokia only plans to reveal the exact configuration, price and availability details of the Booklet 3G at Nokia World, which starts on the 2nd September, the vendor has already published some key data. The Booklet 3G's silver-black aluminium housing measures is just 2 centimetres in thickness and at 1.25 kilograms is similar in weight to other 10-inch netbooks. However, it is said to offer a battery life of up to 12 hours, which only few other netbooks manage to achieve. The display sits behind a glass screen and is likely to offer more than the usual resolution of 1024 by 600 pixels – Nokia advertises it as being "HD ready", which usually means 1366 by 768 pixels. The Booklet 3G connects to external displays and flat screen TVs via HDMI. As expected, it offers WLAN and Bluetooth as well as a HSPA-enabled UMTS modem with integrated A-GPS module (Assisted GPS).

Nokia intends to combine the latter with its proprietary Ovi Maps (formerly Nokia Maps) navigation software; whether this will involve a standalone application or a web service in the browser is yet unknown. The remaining Ovi services including the Nokia Music Store and the Ovi suite for synchronising Nokia mobile phones are also included. Incidentally, the Booklet 3G doesn't use Linux, but the Microsoft Windows operating system typically found in netbooks, contrary to what we might have come to expect after the numerous official statements the respective vendors have made about Moblin (Intel) and Maemo (Nokia).

(trk)