Businesses dig Nokia’s Booklet 3G netbook

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.