ANSSI VANJOKI, a man who knows how fast the world moves (in more ways than one), is late. Stuck at Heathrow, stuck at Paddington, stuck in traffic jams struggling across London to get to our designated meeting in a rented suite at the stock exchange. If only he had his trusty motorbike . . .

“I’m so sorry,” he says, speaking in his singsong, Finnish- inflected English, “our plane had to circle for half an hour at Heathrow.” He gives a big smile and a bone-crunching handshake. Tall, trim, pale and blond, wearing a dark suit and blue tie clipped to his shirt with a gold tiepin that spells out “100%”, he looks like a ski instructor part-timing as a sales rep. “But driving over, I thought of this,” he says, picking up a small, black plastic box, “it’s a story for you.”

The box, it transpires, is a portable GPS (global-positioning system) that he attaches to his phone when navigating through foreign cities, and which allows him to download maps and get spoken instructions on how to get to his destination. Without it, he would have been even later.

Ah. Vanjoki, head of multimedia at Nokia, Finland’s world-leading mobile-phone maker, is clearly someone who spends a lot of time thinking how to make technology attractive to Luddites like me. That, after all, is how his company has taken a 35% share of the global handset market. But nothing stands still and Nokia, with competitors piling in, faces a challenge in maintaining its €29.5 billion (£20 billion) revenues.

So late last year it reorganised into four business divisions, creating a brand-new one — multimedia — given to golden boy Vanjoki, previously executive vice-president, mobile phones. Vanjoki, 47, is expected to provide the next generation of Finnish leadership when Nokia’s current chief executive, Jorma Ollila, steps down. For now, he has to persuade the rest of us to buy the next generation of mobile phones.

It’s clearly a task he relishes. Finnish managers, by tradition, are a conservative bunch, but Vanjoki is a breed apart. He even managed to attract international headlines two years ago when he was stopped for speeding on his motorbike in Helsinki — 42mph in a 30mph zone — and was promptly fined €30,000, the world’s biggest-ever speeding fine. In Finland, you see, speeding fines are means-tested, and Vanjoki is a big earner. It is not, he tells me later, an incident he is particularly proud of.

Anyway, here he is, new business division, new challenge, trying to persuade me that I, too, will soon want to swap my bog-standard mobile for one of Nokia’s all-singing, all-dancing television/phones (my term, not his, but I am determined to keep this simple).

“OK,” says Vanjoki, attempting to explain it with the kind of unflappable stolidity that only a blond, blue-eyed Scandinavian can offer. “The whole idea is encapsulated into one thing: the concept of virtual presence, removing time and place in the activities that we do.”

Huh?

“I can get close to you, close to my family, close to any group, independent of time and place, with the help of the technology. So, for instance, I travel a lot and feel bad about not being with my kids. Now with the technology, by playing a game with them over the network, I can engage with them.”

But most people aren’t multinational executives missing their kids.

“No, but it gives you closeness, and there are many situations when you are not close. You can take pictures, you can take video clips of what you’re seeing right now. To share that immediately with your loved ones, then give them a call, that’s really about sharing feelings and emotions. You are going to be offered the possibility of doing that, and it’s not going to cost you an arm and a leg like it does right now . . .”

And, he confidently predicts, we will leap at the chance.