Nokia Wants You To Design Their Phones

Reuters reports that as the Internet goes mobile and companies like Apple and Google find cool ways to embrace the trend, the mobile market leader is rewriting its product development rulebook—and instead of working in secrecy and isolation, it wants to start sharing:

“Nokia has invited bloggers and tech-savvy media specialists to brainstorm on future mobile products.” Nokia wants to explore more ideas like the Nokia Morph concept, which imagines a stretchable, flexible, solar-powered, self-cleaning device which also has a sense of smell, the report said. (That one was developed by Nokia Research Center in collaboration with the Cambridge Nanoscience Centre in the UK.)

“For Nokia this is probably the biggest throw of the dice since they entered the cellphone business,” said Ben Wood, research director at CCS Insight, who has followed the Finnish firm since 1994, in the article.

It’s actually not a bad idea; you could argue that post-iPhone, there’s no real consensus on what a phone should look like or how it should work, and it’s certainly expensive for vendors like Nokia, Motorola, LG, and so on to spend untold millions on product development that turns out to be a total dud.

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