A phone in a pot

If you’ve read my last piece on Nokia’s futurologist, Leo Kärkkäinen, you’ll have seen the company is looking into medical diagnostics.  If you haven’t read it now’s your chance.

You back with me?

Good. The company has been speaking to the news agency AFP about the research it has spent its money on (5.6 out of its 51 billion euros sales revenue in fact) and come out with some amazing potential future products.  Some believable, such as the medical piece, some less so.

My personal favourite is the one AFP picked up on, that mobile phones will be grown in pots.  Now I’m a classical hippy and love that renewable materials are being used but how exactly is the company going to do this?

Hats off to the company if it’s working on the DNA sequence that would help produce a phone.  It’s taken four billion years of evolution to reach today’s biodiversity and the first synthesised life form was only recently created – and a single cell at that.  Multicellular organisms took many millions (if not billions) of years to evolve and will be a lot more difficult to create in the lab.  Lets not even think about one as complex as a phone.

If this is the case it does give new meaning to the cell phone.  Sorry, having built the pun I couldn’t quite resist it.