Nokia CEO Hints at Netbook Opportunities

OK, we’ve seen lots of speculative blog and article titles like this one from CNET…

Nokia considers entering Netbook market

But, CNET’s article has a lot more validity than the items that preceded it because it notes an Economic Times piece that quotes Nokia’s CEO as saying that Nokia is looking at the Netbook market to see what kind of opportunity is there.

Well, ok, that quote doesn’t actually say Nokia is considering building selling a netbook. But, the quote is as close to the source as you can get and the word “netbook” was actually uttered.

Although Nokia’s Internet Tablet products pre-dates the netbook phenomenon, it will have an uphill battle in entering an already crowded market dominated by Acer and Asus with strong competition from big-name firms like Dell, HP, and Lenovo. Nokia’s biggest problem may be choosing an appropriate operating system. They could choose Microsoft Windows like everyone else. But, how would they differentiate their product if they use Windows? They could use Symbian S60 as they do with their high end smartphones. But, S60 is probably not a good fit for netbooks. They are most likely to use a Linux based OS as they did with their Internet Tablets. But, although Linux was the original netbook OS of choice, it has been smothered by Windows on netbooks.

My recommendation to Nokia is to go with Ubuntu Netbook Remix (UNR) despite Linux’s lackluster netbook market performance If they can tweak the boot time to sub-10 seconds (or even 5 seconds), they might have a contender.

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