Finnish mobile phone maker Nokia seems determined to extend its area of interest on the mobile device market to new mobile computer machines, other than the smartphones we already know to have pushed the company on top of the computer maker list for last year. As we reported yesterday, Nokia intends to start work on a laptop device, although it will not be entirely a classic laptop machine.

A prototype of said device has been spotted during the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona last week, and now it has been confirmed that the company has plans to enter the laptop area of the market. Nokia's Chief Executive Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo stated in a recent interview with the Finnish national broadcaster YLE that the phone maker considered this an opportunity to extend its reach.

The company was rumored to be planning on making this move a long time ago, but no confirmation about such plans came from its representatives until now. Although the market segment the phone maker would target seems to be somehow crowded, Kallasvuo states that the line between PCs and smartphones is continuously fading away, which opens the gate for new devices.

“Today we have hundreds of millions of people who are having their first Internet experience on the phone. This is a good indication,” Kallasvuo said. The prototype of the netbook that the company could unleash to the market shows it as some sort of a hybrid device that bears both laptop and smartphone functionalities and capabilities, and it is expected to become available sometime in 2011.

On the other hand, considering the fact that more and more PC vendors seem attracted to the smartphone area, and that these handsets tend to become increasingly powerful, while PCs seem to shrink, it is no wonder that Nokia has decided to step in with a device that can be considered both a smartphone and a netbook at the same time.