Living in New York, I had an opportunity last night to meet two visiting Nokia executives who were coming in for an announcement of new features for 2006 and a mingle with the press.

Janne Jormalainen has been quoted in most every news story about the Nokia 770 — as the vp of convergence products/multimedia , he’s the 770’s chief spokesperson and, from my perspective, that makes him something of the chief revolutionary. Ari Virtanen I’m told will be filling Janne’s position in future — heir to the revolutionary throne, as it were. These two flew in to New York a day early for Tuesday’s bash and graciously took the time to meet with me directly after their long flight, long customs battle, and longer taxi ride into the city.

Not being a mainstream journalist, I’m not confident enough of my notes to put quotation marks around every remark, or even in some cases as to which Nokian was speaking. I wasn’t trying to extract “news” from them (nor am I qualified to), so much of our conversation was my seeking to understand the Nokia 770 phenomenon.

I did uncover some new information, however, which I should pass along — and there is something afoot tonight in New York that will be announced — Could it be a Nokia store in New York? a phone/770 package? a 770 partnership with a NY-area/national broadband supplier? — whatever it is I couldn’t say, since all lips were sealed on the matter of tonight’s news. But since Janne and Ari aren’t going on to San Francisco for a meet-and-greet session there, my guess is they’ll announce a Nokia store in New York. Then again, maybe it’s strictly a what’s-on-tap-in-2006. (Guess we’ll find out tonight what kind of prognosticator I am.) Added later: Well, when I was told on Monday that there would be “a big surprise” for those who attended Tuesday’s press event, I thought the surprise would be a news announcement and not free Nokia 770’s for attendees. Still, as Reggie reports on the itT front page, “Nokia is also talking to US broadband providers to bundle the Nokia 770 with their products” so that suspicion proved out anyway.

I asked about the CompUSA connection — how did this come about? I’ve been thinking of Nokia as a company that sells more phones through telcoms and not so much through the consumer retail channel, but Janne said Nokia has connections with a number of major retail chains and, if I understood him correctly, the 770 will show up on their shelves, too, sooner or later. Speculation last summer, however, was that Nokia wouldn’t be able to manage well in this channel and the device was really intended for bundling with broadband contracts, the way cellphones are with mobile plans.

Contrary to that expectation, the 770 seems to fit smack dab in the middle of Nokia’s definition of itself as not a phone company but a “communications” company. Ari Jaaksi in his blog wrote about how cellphones freed voice communication from being stationary, tethered to one spot — big thing too; we define them as “mobile” phones instead of “personal” phones, say, or “always available” phones. Ari’s point is that a phone-internet tablet combination does the same for the web. Information from the web is now mobile, just as voice communication is.

So the 770 has been conceived as a way for Nokia to deal with this other type of communication, the kind that travels via IP, and which we might usefully break into familiar categories like web pages, mail, news feeds, internet radio and, as it develops I would guess, video. Subtract the games, clock and calculator in the application manager and you just defined the 770. Oh, and add in VoIP and IM (and text messaging?), and you’ve got Internet Tablet 2006.

Two peripheral developments inform this direction — the Wi-Fi phone and the Nokia store. Six Nokia phones (announced or out) can make Wi-Fi calls, and Janne flatly said this would be the norm in their higher-end phones. In this light, the 770 becomes the flip side of the equation, the communication device that understands/copes with IP-transported data as its primary role. The low-end Bluetooth phone is then a sort of 770 accessory. The goal is not to segregate communication by type, or delivery, but to expand to cover as broad a scope as possible (or practical).

Ari took pains to explain the role of the Nokia store as not the normal type of retail outlet so much as a facility for educating the Nokia-device owner (or potential owner) in a way you could never expect a salesclerk at, say, CompUSA to. I was still coming out of my not-so-retail view of Nokia but Janne said that the Nokia brand was the fifth most recognized in the world, indicating this was one way of capitalizing on it (and further building it, I would say).

We talked about other things — especially how Nokia sees collaboration with the Linux and open-source developer community (-ties, perhaps I should say, and not to omit users from the mix) as central to how the company expects to cope with the increasing demands of moving into additional markets and releasing upgrades and new features ever more rapidly. This consumer-developer connection we’ve already seen to an unprecedented degree with the 770. Ari noted, in a way that indicated no sensible person would disagree, “The business world has changed. You can’t do it with a proprietary system any more.” Even Linux, he noted, is just another closed system if you don’t work with — meaning full give-and-take — the open-source community. It can’t all be “take” — using the source code but not contributing back to that community (money, developers and code in Nokia’s case).

A couple sticky points — the best they could offer as a defense for the current shortage of devices is simply how difficult it is to project demand for a new product (and in this case one so unlike any of their other products). “Quite frankly,” Janne said, “We can’t make enough.” This projecting also accounts for the somewhat limited rollout, revealing a desire to focus on the countries where they knew the demand would be greatest. Expansion to other European countries, to Canada, and to Asian markets would occur next year, Janne said (though I can’t say now whether he qualified that with a word like “probably”).

Apart from its open and collaborative aspects, Janne revealed that the most remarkable features of the 770 stemmed from its core design requirements — that it had to display 800 pixels if was going to succeed as a device for the web and that it had to be portable, e.g., pocket-size. From there it was a matter of making it affordable (and holding down power consumption, I expect). “Sometimes, the most difficult decisions are what to leave out,” Janne said.

To me, perhaps the most gratifying thing said in the hour we talked was the almost fierce way Janne answered one of my questions. “It can grow into a significant business for us,” he said. “We are in this for the long haul.”

That’s just what I’d expect from a revolutionary.