Before they teamed up with Microsoft to offer Lumia handsets with the Windows Phone OS, Nokia was putting all of its eggs in the Symbian basket. Symbian is Nokia’s old operating system, which unfortunately became outdated with the advent of iOS and Android, forcing Nokia to mostly drop it from their repertoire. Last week, a video about Nokia Air appeared – which isn’t what is, but what could have been. Nokia Air is – or was – Nokia’s vision of the future, a service which lets users ‘experience everywhere‘ by connecting devices to the cloud.
“Apps don’t require downloading, installing or updating” says the narrator of the new Nokia Air promo. The idea is that, as your phone is constantly connected to the ever-present cloud, which stores all the updates and apps that you could ever wish to ‘download’, so your gadget can access them whenever and wherever you are. Whether Nokia Air will ever actually see the light of day, we don’t know; while the feature was designed as a part of Symbian, that’s not to say it won’t be revived for a future Lumia handset – though it looks doubtful, considering Nokia’s current preoccupation with Windows Phone.
It’s interesting to note that Nokia Air may well have been imagined long before Apple got their hands on the iCloud, though. The iCloud, as we all know, is what ties all of Apple’s products together; just like Nokia Air, you can access data and software from the cloud on your iPhone without having to download a thing. It also means that the content you access with your iPhone is the same as the content you can access on your iPad or your Mac, and it’s all thanks to the iCloud.
Did Nokia get there first? Apple is well-known for thinking up the latest innovations years before it’s actually announced; there are numerous websites stocked with rumors and sources willing to claim that the idea for the iPhone was actually born years before the original iPhone was introduced to the world. It’s entirely possible that Apple’s think tank came up with the notion of the iCloud long before such technology was possible, but Nokia certainly appears to have been onto the ‘Air’ technology for quite some time.
Either way, Apple has well and truly pipped Nokia to the post, which is a shame; Nokia has potentially missed out on a major innovation, and while they’re just managing to claw some consumers back, Nokia Air could really have given them the edge. The iCloud is an essential part of Apple’s offering; a ‘game changer’ of similar stature would give Nokia a welcome boost. If it has been left at the door by Nokia, all we can do is hope that they have some other swish innovations in the pipeline; but for now, it looks like it’s so long, Nokia Air.
==== About the Author ====
This was a guest post by Simon from Best Mobile Contracts, the leading phone comparison website in the UK.
