Nokia phones may use smell, solar power

By Lucas van Grinsven, European Technology Correspondent

HONG KONG  - Shooting video with a mobile phone may seem cool today, but imagine a phone that could capture the smell of a foreign country to bring home and release to your friends.

Or what about a mobile that never needs to be charged because of solar cells hidden under its surface.

Don't expect such phones to be in the shops next week, or even next year, but these are some of the ideas Nokia, the world's biggest handset maker, is researching.

"Sensors will be big. Sensors that will detect movement, location, altitude," Tero Ojanpera, Nokia's chief technology officer said in an interview on the fringes of two conferences here.

And smell is a feature that could one day be part of a mobile phone. "As a mass-market application it's pretty far out, but there are certain ways of releasing a smell. I believe this is possible," Ojanpera said.

Nokia is not packing features into its phones for the sake of it, he said, in response to the endless debate as to whether or not consumers really want the telecommunications equivalent of a multi-purpose Swiss army knife.

"It's not just about packing in features, like a screw driver and scissors that have nothing to do with each other."

"Fundamentally, I think the concept of a Swiss army knife is wrong. It's how we combine (related) capabilities. You can play music as an MP3 player, but you can also download music and embed it with video that you just took. How they will interact we don't even know today," he said.

BETTER, NOT BIGGER



In the more immediate future, consumers can expect better versions of the phones they are already familiar with, Ojanpera said. 100 gigabyte hard disks, high-definition video cameras, high-detail displays, surround sound and a built-in movie-projectors are all possible by 2009, he said. Those features will first appear on the most expensive handsets which will cost more than desktop computers.

However, Nokia is not just aiming its technology at the wealthy, Ojanpera said.

This year another 500 million people will become mobile phone users, and most of them live in emerging economies where there is not always electricity from a socket in the wall to charge a phone.

"The next billion subscribers after the 3 billion subscribers this year will probably come from areas where electricity is not a given, he said."

As an alternative, Nokia looked at fuel cells, which generate electricity from liquid in cartridges through an electro-chemical process, but decided this was impractical.

"We looked at fuel cells, but we've come to the conclusion that usability is not really there. It's not so much a technology issue but a usability problem," he said.

"Then there's solar energy, but I don't think it will fly until it's integrated into the phone, in some way under the surface. We're studying how to do that," Ojanpera said.

Nokia is also looking at the energy consumption of the various applications on phones. "We need to focus on total energy management. When do you power up the chip for video processing, the radio," he said.

And all consumers looking for standby times longer than the current maximum of around two weeks can expect to be able to charge their phone less frequently in future. "They (standby times) will improve," he said.

Nokia is working on practical solutions for practical problems, Ojanpera said. "I'm telling the researchers: 'Don't sit in Helsinki. Go do things with people'."