Nokia Develops Lightning Sensors For Mobile Phones

Okay, don't get me wrong, I love Nokia and their ingenuity. Eight years ago, during the start of the cell phone boom, I was a Nokia fan. I couldn't even think of wanting any other phone than Nokia. Nokia seems like a fashion icon, especially when their phones were used in Charlie's Angels. That was before I fell in love with Pocket PCs. But I'm not here to discuss about Pocket PCs, I'm here to talk about Nokia's pending patent on lightning sensors in Mobile phones.

Nokia was the one who first developed camera phones with the Nokia 7650 and I have to say that hands down, their mobile phones has the best camera feature. Next, they added a radio feature---wait, I think the radio feature came first, THEN the camera feature.

And now, according to Yahoo news, Nokia is trying to get a patent for a Mobile Lightning Sensor. What's that you ask? Well, with this patent, new phones from Nokia would measure electromagnetic noise created by lighting and would not only be able to detect lightning but also determine where and how far a recent lightning occurred.

Well, kudos to them for thinking up of another great innovation, but who the heck needs a lightning sensor? Sure, for those people whose job depends on the weather, but who else? Would people actually buy the phones with lightning sensors so that they could boast to their friends? If a friend came up to me and say, "look at what my mobile can do" and give me a walkthrough of the lightning sensor, I would probably look at them with disdain and say, "so?"

Barry Levine of newsfactor.com writes in his article, "The ad campaign could almost write itself. A couple stands under a threatening sky and the woman holds up her phone -- but not to send a text message or call her friends. 'You can play music on your cell phone,' the voiceover says somberly, 'or take pictures, play games, even make phone calls -- and now you can detect lightning.'" Well, I just had a funny image. What if the woman does hold up her phone and then lightning actually struck her?! Oh, I see a spoof of that commercial already.

Now, if Nokia could just direct their engineers into integrating more useful programs into their phones rather than the lightning sensor. I could think of a dozen other sensors that I think Casio already integrated with their wristwatches. A pacemaker, or a pedometer will be a lot more useful than lightning sensors.