Nokia Teases…Something for November 18
Last year, Nokia entered into talks to sell its smartphone division to Microsoft, a sale that was completed just a few months ago. While it’s easy to say simply that “Microsoft bought Nokia,” since Nokia was primarily known as a smartphone maker, the truth is that the rest of Nokia still exists, separate and apart from Microsoft – and apparently, they’re making something new and different that’ll be revealed tomorrow.
This morning, Nokia published the following Tweet:
Guess what? We’re up to something. http://t.co/AFq4dUFI9S #thinkingahead #Slush14 pic.twitter.com/sqERYpz0Vc
— Nokia (@nokia) November 17, 2014
“We’re up to something” isn’t much of a hint. However, the Tweet itself links back to Slush 2014, a tech startup conference in Helsinki that’s going on this week. It’s not much of a stretch to figure out that whatever it is Nokia’s cooking up will be unveiled at Slush tomorrow.
Now, what might it be? We can see a black box of some kind, with rounded corners. It looks a whole lot like an Apple TV or Roku – some kind of media streaming doodad, perhaps. Of course, the only reason it looks like that is because media streaming set-top-boxes have become so featureless and bland that they themselves are completely indistinguishable from simple boxes. That means that the product Nokia is teasing is either that little black box, or something inside that little black box. Super.
There are a few reasons I don’t think it’s a media streaming box, but that’s mostly just down to guesswork on my part. Mainly, it seems to me as though the media streaming field is already pretty crowded from the likes of Apple, Google, Roku, Amazon, and Microsoft. Why would Nokia bother jumping into this field to compete with a bunch of products that – essentially – all do the exact same things? The only crucial differences between a lot of them are a few streaming apps here or there, and the operating system flavors that are available. Other than that, it’s all a lot of the same.
So, for my guess, I’m betting that whatever Nokia is teasing isn’t a media streamer. I can’t begin to imagine what it might actually be, but I’m going to go out on a limb and say it’s not one of those.
Any ideas? Let us know in the comments, why don’tcha?