Nokia have come up with a winning strategy for the modern mobile marketplace – screw all the fiddling with keypads and from factors, just build something from the future and sell that instead. That’s the idea behind Point&Find aka the world’s first tricorder: point your phone camera at anything and it’ll tell you what it is.  It has an internet connection and can take pictures – so why not?

Some of you are snickering “April Fools’, suckers”, but if that’s the case they’ve got an entire site, downloadable software, and a believable beta system.  “Everything ever” will have to wait a while, but the prototype works with movie posters – snap the cinema billboard and it’ll hook you up with reviews or tickets.  It’s a very clever test: movies have mass market appeal, while posters are standardised, two-dimensional, and people will always picture them from around the same angle.

If it’s real, it would be simple to add a new class of objects every time you work out how to do so, and that wouldn’t even be a problem with people complaining about limitations.  Instead you’d get a surge of activity (and a swarm of new users) for everything you add, including simple stuff like restaurants (just picture the name). Even in beta it’s bringing us into the future.  Because if it stops even one person from seeing Race To Witch Mountain, it’s made the world a better place.