Consumers may have greeted Nokia's Booklet 3G with an emphatic "meh," but the pricey netbook is gaining traction among businesses.
Heikki Norta, head of Nokia corporate strategy, told a seminar that companies are showing a surprising amount of interest, even though the device is aimed at consumers, Reuters reports. He didn't say whether Nokia considered the Booklet 3G to be a success at the consumer level.
I've approached the Booklet 3G with a level of skepticism, mostly because it bucks the trend of netbooks built with cheap plastic parts, opting instead for an aluminum chassis in a slim frame. Technical specifications and features are a mixture of praiseworthiness and mediocrity. There's a 16-cell battery for 12 hours of battery life, GPS, HDMI and access to Nokia's Ovi Store for apps, but you're stuck with an Intel Atom Z530 processor, 1 GB of RAM and a 120 GB hard drive, which is even less than most netbooks.
For the added luxury of the Booklet 3G, you'll pay $600, unless you're willing to get a $300 subsidy from AT&T in exchange for two years of $60-per-month 3G service.
What's surprising is that Nokia actually thought this premium netbook would do well with consumers, and in a down economy, no less. With built-in 3G coverage, the Booklet 3G seems tailor-made for business travelers. A consumer, by comparison, might opt for a cheaper netbook or comparable notebook and stick to places with free Wi-Fi. It just seems to me that a main reason for netbooks' rise to popularity is their price as well as their size.
Maybe the Booklet 3G's popularity among business users would explain a rumor that Nokia is already developing the next version. If businesses are as interested in the netbook as Nokia lets on, I could see security features such as a fingerprint reader, data encryption and secure input/output doing very well.
