Nokia to make laptops? Kinda crazy, but just might work

The Finnish phone giant makes some of the best handsets I've ever laid eyes on, and now its CEO says the company has its sights set on a new market: notebook PCs.

Reuters reports that Nokia CEO Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo made the remarks during a an interview Wednesday on Finnish TV network YLE. Kallasvuo reportedly stopped short of committing to a Nokia laptop in, say, the next few years or so, but he did say that the company is "looking very actively … at this opportunity."

"We don't have to look even for five years from now to see what what we know as a cell phone and what we know as a PC are in many ways converging," Kallasvuo said. Very true.

While it's not unheard of for PC manufacturers to jump into the cell phone business—you've got Apple, of course, as well as Dell, HP, and now Acer—you don't often see a cell phone manufacturer dive into laptops.

Palm kinda, sorta dipped its toes in the water with the Foleo, although the (ultimately abandoned) product was billed more as a smartphone "companion" than an actual notebook PC. Nokia itself did a little dabbling with its N810 Internet Tablet—again, not quite a laptop, but the gorgeously designed device probably got some wheels turning.

Personally, I've been a big fan of Nokia's feature-packed (if pricey) handsets (witness the old N95, or the recently announced N97, not to mention the drool-worthy E series business handsets), so I'd been particularly keep to see Nokia take a crack at a laptop—or a netbook, even. Maybe with ARM processors under the hood, running on a beefed-up version of the mobile Symbian OS, or a slimmed-down version of Windows, or even Google's mobile Android platform.

Again, no definite word here on whether the big brains at Nokia actually will try their hands at notebook PCs … but if you ask me, they should. And soon.

Related:
Nokia considering entering laptop industry: CEO [Reuters]