The world's top cellphone maker Nokia is looking to get into the netbook game, its Chief Executive Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo said in an interview to Finnish national broadcaster YLE on Wednesday.

It’s not the first time Nokia is entering the computer market. MikroMikko was a Finnish line of microcomputers released by Nokia Data from 1981 through 1987. They were especially designed for good ergonomy. Nokia would eventually leave consumer electronics behind in the 1990s. But the telecommunications expertise it developed from the 1960s onwards would become the core of its future work.

"We are looking very actively also at this opportunity," Kallasvuo said, when asked whether Nokia plans to make laptops. Industry has rumoured about Nokia's possible plan to enter the PC industry since late last year, but Kallasvuo's comment was the first official admittance of such plans. "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.

According to sources at Taiwan notebook makers, Nokia is currently in talks with Taiwan notebook makers and EMS companies for cooperation on its plans. The sources have pinpointed Compal Electronics and Foxconn Electronics (Hon Hai Precision Industry) as the top-two potential partners. Contrary to Nokia's strategy of outsourcing mostly OEM orders for its handset business, the company is considering a joint design manufacture (JDM) strategy for its netbook products, the sources noted. Nokia currently has not yet decided whether to adopt Intel's Atom and Qualcomm's Snapdragon platform for its netbook, but since both Compal and Foxconn are capable of manufacturing netbooks based on either platform, the choice of platform should not influence the company's choice of partner. Compal and Foxconn both declined to comment.