Nokia promises WiMAX handsets in 2008
Nokia’s president and CEO Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo is just doing his keynote speech at Nokia World, and he’s just said that the company will bring out WiMAX-enabled handsets in 2008, which would be able to hook into citywide Wi-Fi networks using the technology.
Also, the company predicts that this year alone, 970 million mobiles will be sold globally – this is from all manufacturers, not just Nokia – and that 65% of these are people upgrading to new handsets. Kallasvuo also said that Nokia reckons the number of people with a mobile phone will break the 3 billion mark sometime next year, and will pass 4 billion in 2010.
Other than that, he basically gave an overview of what Nokia is up to, which covered existing announcements (e.g. working with Flickr and the new Music Recommenders community), and an interesting snippet about Mastercard running a trial with Nokia to let people pay for stuff in 32,000 shops by touching their phones to a reader. Oh, and he also said Nokia is seeing the first opportunities to use GPS for photo-sharing, gaming and messaging applications.
