A Finnish site, along with my friend Stefan, has dug up a number of interesting Nokia patents, possibly hinting at things to come. You may recall, a while back we realized that Nokia was quickly running out of Nseries model numbers. There are, currently, less than a dozen left, which likely won’t last Nokia through the end of the year, at the rate they announce phones. Nokia is aware, and as such has patented a number of potential replacements for the Nseries and Eseries product lines.
Both Xseries and Cseries have been patented, along with a brand called ‘Booklets‘, which could be the oft-rumored netbook line (though I personally don’t think Nokia’s working on a netbook in the common sense). Also interesting is that the company has trademarked nearly every feasible Eseries model, from E53 all the way up to E99.
There are two additional interesting patents, one for Nokia Money and one for ‘Llo‘, which could mean anything. The money one is interesting, describing a system for using phones to transfer money from one account to another – microtransactions, most likely.
Personally, I’m rather disappointed to see new -series monikers being patented. I, along with plenty of others, had hoped we would see Nokia begin dumping the arbitrary model number system to adopt the more consumer-friendly real-name scheme, similar to the Surge. We all know that every Nokia phone has an internal codename, such as Tube (5800 XpressMusic) and Charlie (6630). Why not just use those?
In any case, you can read through the full patent list at IntoMobile.com. What do you think? Any guesses as to what these various patents are for? Nokia World is coming up in less than 60 days, so hopefully we’ll get some better clarification there.
