Nokia focuses on the future

Finland may be famed for its long, dark winters, but it's also home to some of the brightest new ideas in mobile technology. Nokia, the world's biggest mobile phone maker, is based in Espoo, just a few miles outside Helsinki.

Engineers and researchers beaver away in a vast mini-village of glass buildings with triangular roofs to allow the snow to slide off and networks of sky bridges so employees can cross between buildings without having to face the Arctic chill.

Nokia – which makes four in ten of all the mobile phones sold worldwide – is facing stiff competition from the likes of Apple's iPhone and Google Android devices, and in an effort to wrest back the initiative, the company is focusing on the next generation of mobile handsets and services. The company has spent around €40 billion on research and development over the last two decades, and clearly sees its role as a pioneer, pushing the boundaries of technology, seeking new solutions to problems.

Oskar Korkman, the man in charge of consumer trend analysis for Nokia, says he has the best job in the world. He uses ethnographic research and analysis to better understand how human needs, wants and interactions can be catered for by mobile technology.

“Social networking is not delivering on the need for intimacy that people have in their daily life,” he warns. In a world of global citizens, there remains a desire for local relationships and local knowledge, he says.

He believes our fragmented social groups, or the need for people to move or travel for work, has bought with it "a desire for richer forms of digitally mediated intimacy".

Indeed, says Korkman, over the next five years, mobile communication will become both easier and more invisible. He envisages a future of multi-sensor interfaces that respond to everything from gestures to the emotion in a user's voice. "It’s about taking away the technology and making it almost real," says Korkman.

In time, he believes, we may even be able to send virtual kisses over the airwaves. "The vision is that you would have nothing but air between you,” he says. "Although you are remote from each other, you will have the idea of being together."

Social networks such as Twitter and Facebook are fundamentally changing the relationships and interactions between people, says Korkman. We now have multiple identities which we share with our different groups of friends and acquaintances, and this in turn has created a desire for social experiences even in the most transient of moments.

"If you were stuck in a traffic jam, your mobile phone could connect you to the people around you on a superficial level, letting you play games to pass the time. The purpose it to create a short, temporary interaction or connection with others."

Privacy and security, though, remain key. "You can't push things on people who don't want it," he says.

If Korkman's job is to identify the yet-to-be-fulfilled wants and needs of users, then Henry Tirri's is finding the technological solutions that can realise these ambitions. Tirri is head of Nokia's Research Centre, and is breathlessly enthusiastic about the potential of mobile devices.

He's particularly excited about haptic interfaces, which provide physical "feedback" to users. "It's partly about fooling your senses," he says. Nokia is working on new forms of haptic technology that can help to provide an augmented sense of reality. "There's a lot of gesture-recognition, a lot of pressure sensing."

Smart ecosystems will sit at the centre of our mobile lives by 2015, says Heikki Norta, head of the company's lifestyle products business unit. "It means we'll be able to live a more spontaneous life, never missing an opportunity, because mobile devices and services will learn to anticipate our wants and needs."

But Nokia isn't just catering for Western audiences; many of its future-gazing projects are firmly focused on emerging markets such as India and South America. “We don’t think the web is just for rich people,” says Mary McDowell, Nokia's chief development officer, as the company tries to "bring the next billion consumers into the world of mobile technology”.

This is where software and applications are already proving their worth. In China, an app called Mobile Job Hunt is providing migrant worker with text message updates of the latest job listings for $1 per month; in Africa and India, farmers are able to get weather reports on their mobile phones, and share information about the latest wholesale prices for grain and other goods to ensure they are getting the best rates for their produce; and Nokia Money seeks to replace banks in countries where the financial systems are corrupt, or in rural areas where facilities are non-existent.

"Our physical locations will eventually be supplemented by digital information," says Norta. "We see new technology emerging that will make our lives less time and place dependent."