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Cellphones becoming ‘laptop in your pocket' |
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Wednesday, 18 May 2005 |
Cellphones
becoming ‘laptop in your pocket'
Globe
and Mail - Toronto,Ontario,Canada
In Burnaby, B.C., sits a futuristic-looking building with soaring
ceilings and spacious rooms of metal and glass, broken up by columns made of
giant, rough-hewn local logs. Is it a museum? No. A private mansion? No. It's a
Nokia Corp. research and development lab, and if you try to get a peek inside
you will get the same reaction that film crews do when they ask to use it as a
movie location: Not a chance.
If Nokia were the U.S. military, this lab would be part of its Area 51, the
top-secret research facility that helped develop the Stealth fighter and other
high-tech weaponry. In Nokia's case, the lab helped develop the new N91 phone,
which has a built-in hard drive and can be used as an iPod-style music player.
Nokia hopes that it too becomes a weapon, in its fight to dominate the future of
the cellphone.
The Burnaby lab is so secret that Brad Lowe, manager of R&D in the music
division, won't even say how many people work at the Nokia centre “for
competitive reasons.” All he will say is that the number is “in the hundreds.”
There's no question the cellphone maker has a lot riding on its new products.
The Burnaby lab is one of 12 R&D centres around the world, and more than 20,000
people, or about 40 per cent of Nokia's work force, are employed in R&D. Last
year alone, the company spent €3.7-billion ($5.9-billion) on research.
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Last Updated ( Saturday, 21 May 2005 )
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