Intel and Finland's Nokia, the world's leading mobile phone maker, said on August 24 that they had opened a joint research laboratory on Finland's northwestern coast.
Intel, whose processors power nearly 80% of computers worldwide, said the center would "employ about two dozen research and development professionals."
The center is hosted at the University of Oulu, which said the lab's research activities had "started gradually in August."
Intel said the lab would work on developing "interfaces that are more similar to interactions in the real world," with the aim of making the use of a mobile phone "more natural and intuitive, in the same way that modern games and movies are more immersive through the use of realistic 3-D graphics."
The company added another potential area of research "could look into technologies that allow displaying a 3-D hologram of the person you are talking to on the phone, a capability only found in science fiction movies today."
Nokia has been struggling in the smartphone segment, losing market share to Apple's iPhone, and posting a quarterly net profit down 40% in July. It is set to launch its already delayed Symbian 3 platform by the end of the year.
Copyright Agence France-Presse, 2010
