Finland based mobile phone maker Nokia on Wednesday challenged the iPhone maker Apple, by bolstering its smartphone line-up and announced a new location-based service "Lifecasting" with social networking site Facebook.
The deal with Facebook will allow Nokia users to update their location and status directly to the social networking site via a Nokia Ovi account. The first phone to support the service will be the ‘N97 mini’, which will start shipping to retailers in October at an estimated price before taxes and subsidies of €450 and comes with features such as a QWERTY keyboard and a fully customizable home.
This entire offering is supposed to be an effort to cope up with the fact that recently the company has witnessed a drop in its profit margins over the last few quarters as handset demands has slumped, and at the same time Nokia lagged Apple's innovativeness as the focus of cellphone businesses shifts to services and software. Nokia has been looking for business opportunities in offering services like music downloads or games to cellphone users as the handset market mature, but so far its offerings have been very limited.
Its new Booklet 3G netbook computers, is expected to be available for about 575 euros and run on Microsoft's Windows 7 operating system.
With the move to making laptops, Nokia is crossing the border between two converging industries in the opposite direction. (Apple, which entered the phone industry in 2007 with the iPhone)
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