A press release is all well and good, but a high profile handset doesn’t really land until it has splashed its wares all over YouTube. New details gleaned from this lovely little demo include, a tailor made version of the S60 OS complete with flashy transition animations, auto rotation and a form factor that looks like an exact cross between the XpressMusic 5800 and the N800 internet tablet. But enough gassing, have a look for yourself - try not to faint.
Author Archive for Fraser MacInnes
Wow! It looks like that countdown we came across yesterday actually was masking something really big. Nokia has announced the N97 and it looks like a corker. We hate to gloat, but our prediction was right - back of the net!
Parrying the iPhone, the G1 and the Blackberry Storm, the N97 is a full touchscreen handset with a slide out QWERTY keyboard. There’s also a towering 32GB of onboard storage which is expandable by a further 16GB via microSD. Nokia is also taking care of one of the often overlooked aspects of high end smartphones by stuffing the N97 with a battery that promises up to 37 hours of music and 4.5 hours of video.
There’s also A-GPS, a 5 megapixel camera with Carl Zeiss Tessar lens and dual LED flash, GPS, HSDPA, Wi-Fi, USB 2.0, stereo Bluetooth and a 3.5mm headphone jack.
Of course this pretty little package will not come cheap weighing in at a wallet crushing 550 Euros (£466) when it launches in the first half of 2009. More on this as soon as we have finished watching Nokia’s live direct feed keynote from Nokia World.
If Apple can breeze merrily into the smartphone market, and make it look easy, then surely there’s nothing to stop Nokia going the other way and having a pop at the laptop market. UBS analyst Maynard Um wrote in a recent report:
“…We believe the likelihood of this occurring has increased, although commercial availability is unlikely for 6-9 months. Given the rise of net-books/dongles sales, convergence between high-end mobile phones and laptops, and forays by computer manufacturers (Apple, HP) into smartphones, we think it is only a matter of time before Nokia launches notebook type devices,”
So that’s a prediction for next year then, any takers? Call us pedantic but we have to say it seems more likely that Nokia would enter the netbook or UMPC PC market (whatever you want to call it) with something to bait the all conquering Asus Eee PC line. Even so, we wouldn’t say no to a 3G/WIMAX enabled Nokia laptop all the same.
Maybe this will mean Nokia will stop referring to the N96 as a ‘multimedia computer’.
(Via Wireless Week)
So the G1 can do multi-touch, but can it do automatic screen orientation? Actually, yes it can. The benefits of having such an open OS are starting to show on the first Android handset, so who knows what the G1 will be up to in the next six months.
It just seems odd that HTC and Android left these fairly obvious (and very useful) features up to the development crowd to implement, rather than tool the thing up to the teeth from the start. Still, at least this sort of wriggle room exists on Android based handsets - better late than never…
There are several certainties in the gadget world, and one of them is that countdowns mean announcements. So just what does Nokia have up its sleeve for tomorrow at about 9: 30 am?
The timer, which has appeared on the Nokia Europe and Nokia Middle and East Africa pages, bears no obvious clue as to what it is counting down to and when clicked, it loads this page, which simply prompts you to sign up and offer up some rudimentary details.
Forgive us for getting all inspector Cluseau on you but the only thing we can decipher in terms of a hint is that the timer is a white clock against a shiny piano black background, much like the trademark Nseries stylings.
Could Nokia be set to announce a new Nseries device? Maybe one with a full touchscreen user interface? Perhaps that’s a guess too far, but Nokia is surely planning on making at least a bit of a splash at its very own trade event, Nokia World, in Barcelona this week.
Until tomorrow morning…
The QWERTY slider is a pretty under represented physiology in Nokia’s gene pool, so these leaked pics from Daily Mobile of the forthcoming E75 have us drooling like the gadget equivalent of Charles Darwin.
The device sports a decent 2.4″ screen and a roomy looking alphanumeric keypad. The QWERTY slides out from the side which suggests to us that the E75 may have some automatic screen orientation gubbins locked away inside, by way of an accelerometer. Or at least, that’s what we are hoping.
Besides the attractive silver bezel that frames the front of the device and the mention of a 1.3 megapixel camera on the back, there’s little else we can guess at specs-wise from these shots. More info will follow soon, hit the jump for more pics.
In this carbon counting age of keener environmental awareness, the disposability factor of mobile phones is an increasingly important issue. In fact, there are now plenty of ways in which you can recycle mobile phones and it seems that many of you are already firmly locked in to the good habit.
So which handsets have mobile users recycled the most? According to ReCellular it’s a tie between the Nokia 6010 and the Motorola RAZR V3. Now there’s a decent pub fact to save for Friday night (if you are hopelessly geeky like us)
As to those kings of green, it’s probably more of a reflection of the popularity of each of those handsets than anything else. That and the fact that they both failed to endure in the hearts and minds of mobile users long enough to earn a coveted permanent residency in sock drawers up and down the country.
It’s encouraging to hear, though given the increasing prevalence of expensive smartphones such as the G1, the Blackberry Storm and the iPhone, chances are the trend will be to hold onto to replaced handsets even longer in the future, rather than recycle them.
(Via textually)
According to a new report, Microsoft is ready to take the smartphone set by the scruff of the neck and its hiring some muscle from NVIDIA to help bully the competition.
Coming from the Inquirer the report reads:
“What do you get if you take an iPhone, remove the clean UI, user friendliness, nice industrial design, battery life, cachet, functional OS, and in general everything else that makes it worthwhile? The new Microsoft phone, powered by NVIDIA.”
It’s a churlish take on the situation but the core of the claim is that the Redmond leviathan will unveil a G1/iPhone baiting device at February’s 3GSM conference in Barcelona next year.
Continue reading ‘Microsoft and NVIDIA readying killer smartphone’
Yes the iPhone has a fantastic interface, the best mobile browser out there and one of the fastest growing libraries of quality software on any device, but can it do MMS? No, it can’t, at least not yet.
A lack of support for media messages on the iPhone has been one of the device’s most glaring omissions from day dot and aside from the oft bemoaned touchscreen QWERTY, it’s probably the iPhone’s biggest failing.
A story that broke late last week alleged that MacWorld Sweden had heard on solid authority that the Swedish carrier, Telia, is planning to bring a multimedia messaging service to its iPhone users. Apparently a third-party application hewn by Swedish developer, Mobispine, is currently being punted to carriers as a billable MMS solution.
Continue reading ‘Swedish developer promises carrier branded MMS for iPhone’
Because it’s Friday and because we fancy ogling something we know we will probably never live long enough to own (we’re pretty sure these phones wouldn’t look out of place on the Starship Enterprise) here are some scrumptious mobile phone concepts for your eyes to devour. The concepts come courtesy of those dreamers over at Yanko Design, but sometimes it’s nice to dream.
So behold, two beautiful glass phone concepts. We have only two words; ‘want’ and ‘smudgefactory’ (the latter one there might not be an actual word). Hit the jump for more pics.
