Thanks for your comments.

I do believe that Nokia is serious about at least dipping its toe into the waters of the notebook field. Why else allow this news to break?

That said, I’m about as convinced of its likely success as you are, particularly regarding the use of Symbian – or a variant – as an OS.

Nevertheless, from the perspective of the average consumer at large, either resigned to or even oblivious of the shortcomings of Symbian (heaven knows there are millions of them as Nokia handset shipment figures demonstrate!), a Nokia notebook would be just another brand to choose from on the high steet. A well known and high profile brand at that.

Such consumers might even include myself, needing little more than a very cheap computer with basic word and spreadsheet features and maybe wireless broadband access. It doesn’t have to be fancy and neither does the price.

So, it may not sell in numbers to give Acer, Dell and the others sleepless nights and, yes, it might make for a financially messy disaster story if Nokia were to aggressively chase a market of it clearly has little or no understanding.

But, given their commitment to Symbian and well publicised desire to converge the computing and mobile communications fields as far as possible, it does make sense for Nokia to at least contemplate becoming a PC player.

Timing is key, though, and Nokia may be reacting in a knee-jerk fashion in response to heightened competition in the smartphone sector, as well as the need to provide as many channels to market for its investments there (Symbian) as well as in Internet services (N-Gage, Qt, Ovi, etc), rather than going into the market because it feels it genuinely has something compelling and innovative to sell.

So they are going to threaten head-on Microsoft, Dell, Lenovo and HP for example – do you seriously think that Nokia has the where-with-all to start and take on that war in commodity markets when they are struggling to find a place and win battles in their new value-added markets? They are already spread too thin.

Unless they plan to build from scratch a whole new generation of users on their new Notebook (say in Africa or India) they don’t have a hope in hell.

Let’s just try to make phones first that have better than impoverished usability, and that may mean ditching Symbian for a start.