Or conversing while driving with a hands-free kit that links up with your handset as soon as you step into your car. Or scribbling messages or doing colored sketches on special paper with a "digital pen" and transmitting them to a Bluetooth-enabled cellphone.
There’s more. Transfer images from your mobile via Bluetooth to a gadget and project them on a compatible TV or video projector. Or store images in what looks like a small rod with a peephole and send them, wireless, to a PC or handset.
Call these things extensions of your mobiles. For Nokia, they’re "enhancements" – forget "accessories" – of the mobile experience.
The Finnish telecoms giant is serious about these offerings. Timo Sivula, head of the Mobile Enhancements Business Unit of Nokia Mobile Phones Asia-Pacific, says these gadgets represent a "new thinking," a sort of "stepping out of the box" – particularly for the "imagewear" like the medallions, the goal being to complement the Nokia phones and satisfy user demand.
Imagewear
Take the Nokia Medallions I and II. Sivula says these imagewear products allow mobile users to "express themselves in a fashionable way." "It’s about me!" he quips.
"Hunt down your alter ego. Capture it in a photograph." That’s how the Nokia website plugs the medallions. These wearables have a steel casing and 96 x 96 pixel color display, but different form factors — Medallion I as a choker in steel chain or matte rubber, and Medallion II with leather straps for wearing around the wrist or neck.
Via infrared, one can upload images to the medallions — they can store up to eight images — from a compatible Nokia phone. A touch of a button reveals a timepiece, and there are controls with which to browse or delete images.
Judging from the medallions’ London launch, Sivula says the wearables mark "the beginning of a new concept," for which Nokia is "very positive."
Stay connected with kith and kin or simply view your favorite pictures in a slideshow format via another Nokia "enhancement" – the Image Frame, which blends advanced technology with a traditional object, the picture frame. You can transfer digital images from a compatible Nokia phone to the Image Frame, which can store up to 50 images.
The car kit phone boasts of speaker-dependent voice dialing and voice commands, external antenna connection, wireless downloading of contact info and voice recording, among other features. Nokia showcased the gadget installed in a BMW during the regional media launch here last week.
Another innovative "enhancement" is the Nokia Digital Pen, which allows a mobile user to send a personalized note or colored drawing via MMS to a compatible phone or e-mail address. Better still, one can store his personal notes on a compatible PC via Bluetooth. It comes though with special paper.
• Nokia Observation Camera. Install the gadget in your home or office, inside a warehouse, garage, a summerhouse or elsewhere, and it allows you to keep an eye on these places. You simply request a picture via text and the image is transmitted to any MMS-capable, user-defined Nokia mobile phone or e-mail address.
The Observation Camera captures and transmits pictures when triggered by a motion sensor. It can be programmed to take images at a designated time interval.
• Nokia Wireless Boom Headset. A stylish wireless headset using Bluetooth technology which can be switched conveniently from one ear to the other.
• Nokia Wireless Audio Adapter. This lightweight tool allows wireless connection between a headset and a non-Bluetooth-enabled phone. It is attached to the Pop-Port connector.
• Nokia Kaleidoscope I. With this small device, you can upload digital images and carry them with you, or even share them via infrared. It has a virtual 32,768-color display and stores up to 24 images at a time (compatible multimedia cards allow extra memory).
Nokia targets the rollout of these "enhancements" in the first and second quarters of 2004, except for Medallions I and II which will be available this quarter.