nokia

Looking to get away to Paris this winter, but concerned about the cost? Worry not; for the price of a pair of lab safety goggles, a cardboard box and an HTC Magic (even better if the HTC magic comes in a large cardboard box), this DIY augmented reality headset can transport you anywhere in the world, just as long as the Google Street View team has been there first.

What happens when a mobile phone company makes a netbook? You get a "mini-laptop" that's connected to the brink. (The epically failed Palm Foleo notwithstanding, of course.)

Nokia's Booklet 3G has (duh) 3G HSPA connectivity, a SIM card slot, and WiFi. Its super-thin 0.8-inch-thick, aluminum-encased body houses an Intel Atom processor, an HDMI-out port, and an SD card reader.

Nokia jumped into the crowding, iPhone-inspired geniusphone market today with the N97, which they gave the New York press a peek at last night. The 3G phone sports a full-body touchscreen (alas, resistive, not multi-touch capacitive) that when in landscape mode slides up, Sony Xperia-style, to expose a full QWERTY keyboard. (It offers virtual keypads and keyboards on the touchscreen, too.)

Nokia recently hosted a cocktail party to introduce journalists to its chief designer, Alastair Curtis. The Brit's formal slide presentation was a carefully crafted marketing piece, hammering in his Finnish employer's slogans such as "beautiful to use" and "connecting people." And he provided a bright glimpse into the company's future plans in response to our questions.

The revelations started when Curtis described Nokia's record in America. "The U.S. hasn't been Nokia's strongest suit," he conceded. But the company aims to change that, having just completed a fact-finding trip around the States, where Americans were "talking about music, talking about gestures, talking about what they want for the future."

Talking about gestures?

Ready for a rat's nest de-tangler? Nokia's Ovi.com service, set to debut in a few months, intends to reach into the myriad of digital files on your computer, sync them to an online portal, and make them available on your Nokia phone -– any time, from anywhere.

Nokia indicated today that it intends to release a bunch of new phones through U.S. carriers in the next few months. The Finnish manufacturer sells 40 percent of the mobiles worldwide, but only accounts for about 10 percent of the U.S. market. But a daily paper in Finland quoted a Nokia chief designed as saying that the company plans to ramp up its U.S. presence.

As part of a new design exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art in New York city, Nokia and the University of Cambridge revealed a potential phone of the future, called Morph. Why "Morph"? The gadgets flexible materials would enable you to twist it into different shapes, you could even wear it as a bracelet.

Nokia's timing couldn't have been any better when the revised and enhanced U.S. version of its flagship N95 smartphone (the N95-3) went on sale last week-just days after the iPhone's 1.1.1 firmware update officially shut down third-party apps and rendered useless many iPhones that had been unlocked.

Imagine a gadget that fits in your back pocket and lets you surf the Web anywhere, write documents, make VoIP calls, watch movies, and listen to your entire music library. That´s not exactly what Nokia had in mind when it released the 770 ($360; nokia.com), a PDA-size Internet tablet with Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. But because the device has an open-source operating system, anyone can build new programs for it, endowing it with nearly endless functions (we´ve nicknamed it the HackBerry).