Microsoft Corp chairman Bill Gates says that the company is currently in preliminary talks with Finnish mobile phones giant Nokia Oy on joint development of future communications technologies. During his flying tour of Europe Gates commented: We will be able to get together in terms of creating some new products, there is some good discussion taking place along those lines. Lauri Kivinan, head of corporate communications for Nokia said the two companies were looking to exchange views on future trends and had begun discussions on possible common areas of interest. Kivinan said the companies were hoping to develop new products based around the third generation of mobile phones using a GSM core and a radio interface based onthe near complete CDMA, Code Division Multiple Access standard backed by Nokia. However Kivinan stressed that Nokia was talking to a wide variety of different companies and that no deal had yet been signed. He added I think the market for new communications products will really open up with the next generation of mobile phones in 2002 or 2003. Gates said he envisaged people five years from now using a tablet size PC which could be connected to a wireless network to access a wide variety of different types of data.
