Nokia CEO Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo has hinted that the Finnish handset giant could soon enter the laptop market, reports Reuters. In an interview with Finnish national broadcaster YLE yesterday, Kallasvuo said the firm was “looking very actively” at the opportunity. His comments appear to confirm long-running speculation that the world’s largest handset vendor will diversify into laptops. “We don’t have to look even for five years from now to see that what we know as a cellphone and what we know as a PC are in many ways converging,” Kallasvuo said. The vendor is rumoured to be developing computers based on ARM’s new ‘Sparrow’ processor for netbooks and Mobile Internet Devices (MIDs) and is reportedly looking at a 2011 launch.

Such a strategy by Nokia would be seen as a response to the raft of laptop manufacturers moving into the mobile handset space. At last week’s GSMA Mobile World Congress, Acer, the world’s third-largest PC maker, announced a series of smartphones, while rivals Hewlett-Packard and Lenovo are already active in the handset space. Reuters notes that strong profit margins in the smartphone industry have attracted PC brands, but the attraction of the low-margin computer industry is less obvious. “Nokia may be nervous about entering a market segment that is already heavily commoditised, but it would be in a position to exploit its enormous scale in manufacturing, supply chain and distribution,” Ben Wood, research director at CCS Insight, told the news agency.