You know what happens when we see a video pop on Nokia Conversations (Nokia’s official blog) featuring a senior VP from Nokia’s smartphone division? Everything stops — who knows what might be revealed during an informal, semi-scripted chat. When asked about Nokia’s future smartphone technologies and experiences, Jo Harlow, SVP of Smartphones dives right into a discussion of augmented reality as a means to enhance existing Nokia services like the Ovi Maps experience. She then shifts to an entertainment perspective since “everyone’s talking about 3D.” As she sees it, there’s an opportunity for mobile to be earlier to 3D than typical television development to mobile. That means content, specifically 3D games, which Jo says “could be very, very interesting in terms of enhancing that experience.” One can only imagine that what interests Nokia’s Senior VP of smartphones will ultimately interest manufacturers on the way to retail.

Well, it’s Thursday. You know what that means: it’s time for another new revolutionary display technology that will offer better image quality at lower costs and with reduced energy consumption. Today’s breakthrough is LPD, or Laser Phosphor Displays. They rely on a screen covered in phosphors, much like a traditional CRT , but instead of a scanning beam of electrons those pixels are excited by a series of lasers.

Sorry to burst your warp bubble, bucko, but that text message you received the other day from a cellphone user in the year 2016 was just some stupid bug. According to non-official sources (MS has yet to comment), some mobile users are receiving text messages sent after 1/1/2010 dated as though they were sent from the future, specifically 1/1/2016. The latest reports state the most widely-affected user group are those using Windows Mobile 6.1 and 6.5. The folks at WMExperts have posted a homemade .cab file that purportedly fixes the bug, but again, nothing official from MS or handset manufacturers just yet. [ WMExperts via Pocket Now via BGR ]

Entered into the International Competition of Architecture , this CGI rendering of Stockholm library shows the kind of future we can look forward to: one where technology and books can co-exist peacefully. [ CGSociety via Sub-Studio ]

Acer’s far from being a major player in the smartphone space, but to call it irrelevant would be grossly inaccurate. Up until now, however, the outfit has relied largely on Microsoft’s mobile OS to power its phones, though even it seems shocked by the warm reception the Android-powered Liquid has received. According to the company’s own Aymar de Lencquesaing, Acer recognizes that “there is definitely momentum behind Android,” and he continued by stating that “the pace is faster than most would have anticipated one year ago.” He went on to proclaim that the company was apt to pump out 8 to 10 phones in 2010, with next year’s lineup being “much more balanced” in terms of the amount of Windows Mobile vs. Android handsets. Look out, world — Google just might take over another huge portion of your life while you’re fixated on the next great Black Friday deal

When Nokia talks about the future it’s generally a good idea to pay attention. After all, even with diminishing market share , a split Maemo and Symbian smartphone strategy, and less than stellar financials , the company remains the world’s leading supplier of handsets with a proven ability to innovate. So take notice when Nokia’s head of corporate strategy, Heikki Norta, describes what life will be like in 2015 in a video littered with high-tech devices driven by finger-based UIs. Of course, five years is generally only enough time for the nascent technologies we see today to mature enough for mass market acceptance — in other words, readers of Engadget won’t find anything mind-blowing in a presentation laced with liberal doses of augmented reality , pervasive connectivity , dual-display clamshells , and as always: micro projectors and laser keyboards .

This cool dual-display handheld netbook concept is one of several devices Nokia imagines we’ll see just a few years from now. Check out this video they just presented at their Way We Live Next 3.0 event in Finland. The twin-screen netbook concept splits into a smaller handset when you’re on the move, and can also act as a computer, GPS, and TV-connected media center. In the video, Nokia also uses it to demonstrate how it sees cloud-based services being used. When you’re in an area with fast wireless broadband, the device could use remote servers to help crunch streaming video and sync data, but it would also be self-sufficient when you’re not. Cool stuff, but 2015 is but 5 years away, Nokia.

Over at the Taiwan Broadband show , Ericsson’s vision for the portable computer of 2020 uses a pico-projected screen and laser-projected keyboard. And though they’ve got a rough prototype (pictured), they imagine it ultimately squeezing into this bizarre spider-leg tripod design: It’d have essentials like wireless broadband connectivity and a battery, but I’m hoping that we’ll have cooler stuff than a laser projected keyboard by 2020. Their time has come and gone already, no? Less of that, more interactive holographic display technology, please.

There ain’t much to glean from Shigeru Miyamoto ’s recent sit-down with Popular Mechanics , but in the never-ending quest to learn more about Nintendo ’s next-generation Wii , a few tidbits of interest have been highlighted. Miyamoto, who is responsible for creating the likes of Mario and Zelda (amongst others), spoke at length about current titles, the future of video games as a whole and on his view of the not-yet-named Wii 2. In answering a question about the future of motion-sensing in the Big N’s consoles, he ran off topic a bit and noted that “it would be likely that we would try to make that same functionality perhaps more compact and perhaps even more cost-efficient” when speaking about future hardware (which honestly may have been talking strictly about accelerometers). Of course, this is about as predictable as it gets — hardware tends to always shrink and get cheaper as technology improves — but hey, there it is! Now, let your imaginations do what they were born to do. [Via TechRadar ] Filed under: Gaming Nintendo’s Miyamoto: next-gen Wii hardware could be “more compact, cost-efficient” originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 23 Oct 2009 14:19:00 EST.

Welcome to Computopia—a 40-year old Japanese vision of how robots might become a part our everyday lives. Complied by Shōnen Sunday magazine, these illustrations depict robots performing surgeries , teaching in a classroom and beating kids for their insolence. Interestingly enough, there are several technologies depicted in the series that have actually come to fruition (although they are heavily cloaked in a LSD meets The Jetsons meets Lost in Space kind of style). See if you can pick them out of the gallery posted at Pink Tentacle. [ Pink Tentacle ]