I am very excited and impressed by the folks and work that is coming out of Nokia Research Centre. The kind of products(prototypes) that they are rolling out are amazing and at times just mind blowing.
A little old news by now but nonetheless a very significant release is the release of a mobile web server (called Racoon) running inside a Nokia phone ( like N80, E60, N93 & N95 etc). The thought of putting a mobile web server in a phone is wierd at the first glance but it really opens up endless possibilites. Check out this post by Symbian Guru on potential applications and use.
A very nifty and powerful application using the web server is the Contacts Browser Plugin released by NRC. Check out this description from their website about the usage of Contacts Browser Plugin.
“So there you are browsing the web with your PC looking for a place to eat
With the help of modern search engines you find the contact information easily. So what do you do next? You grab your phone and start entering the number you have found manually to your contacts. After entering the information you probably call the restaurant to reserve a table or send an SMS to your colleague.
What if you could simply just click the number and select what you want to do?
This is what Contacts Browser Plugin allow you to do. For this you should have Firefox with GreaseMonkey, an S60 phone (3rd Edition) with Racoon and Python for S60 installed .
Lets assume that you want to book a table at a Restaurant . First you find the web page, for example with Google search in your Firefox. Then you click the phone number, which brings up a pop-up containing the phone number and you click on it
Clicking the call-button will initiate the call from your S60 phone lying next to your PC.
For full details on how it works refer to the project page at NRC.
Now something like this is just mind blowing,infact nothing short of a magic(Just like what Sir Arthur said any sufficiently advanced technology should just be like magic). I think these are baby steps towards nokia’s new strategy ( “Mobilizing Internet” ) to completely redefine themselves.
Today Nokia made another release called the Nokia Computer Vision library. Pretty cool ! New user interfaces ( building blocks of which would some of these libraries) are going to be extremely important in how we interact with an mobilized internet.
mtrajan.com 