Nokia Launches High-End Netbook

Nokia made good on its promise to enter the U.S. netbook market with the introduction of the Nokia Booklet 3G, which will will be available at Best Buy beginning next month and will be subsidized by AT&T.

The new, lightweight device is intended to broaden Nokia's footprint in the mobile enterprise space beyond smartphones and indicates the growing importance of the form factor known as mobile Internet devices.

The company is betting in large part on the ongoing growth of cloud computing, crafting a device that is more adapted to mobility and Internet connectivity than to large amounts of storage and processing power.

The device includes embedded 3G/HSPA broadband and WiFi capabilities, and promises 12 hours of battery life, which is especially critical for the road warrior enterprise customers Nokia hopes to attract.

The device runs Windows 7 on an Intel Atom processor and the company boasts that, in contrast to most netbooks on the market, it's "a full-function PC." It includes an HDMI port for HD video out, a front-facing camera for video calling, integrated Bluetooth and an easily accessible SD card reader. It also comes with several features from the company's Ovi app store built in, including maps and GPS.

Nokia seems eager to set the device apart visually from competing, more impoverished-seeming netbooks, delivering it in an aluminum chassis that weighs less than 2.76 pounds, measures slightly more than 2 centimeters thin, and includes a 10.1 inch HD-ready display.

The netbook will retail at $299.99 if customers buy it with a two-year plan from AT&T, but will otherwise retail at close to $600, or more than three times the price of a comparable Lenovo or Acer. The higher price reflects the use of Windows 7 as well as that expensive chassis Nokia built.

But the Booklet 3G is clearly not so much intended for consumer adoption as enterprise use, where price points for high-end laptops tend to be much higher than $600.