We haven’t heard so much as a peep out of the N85 for quite a stretch now, so we’re happy that the latest news on the device concerns its launch.
In fact, that should be, it’s launched, as the N85 was released in the UK last Friday. So if you have been craving a new Nseries device but can’t stomach the N96’s sizeable shelf price, the feature-rich N85 is certainly a very happy compromise.
In fact, besides sharing the now thoroughly established kinky PVC Nseries exterior (it’s officially piano black but it looks ever more fetishistic to us gadget perverts) the N85 also borrows the N96’s dual slider design for the benefit of some cunningly concealed dedicated music and gaming controls.
And you’ll need them as the N85 is a bit of a multimedia beast, which let’s face it, is what we all want from a phone these days, never mind this speaking to people over great distances lark. Anyway, if you are in, you can get the device on a range of contracts from Orange which are available here.
The less salubrious electronics markets of the Far East often turn up quite accurate looking - but ultimately shonky as anything - clones of popular handsets, with high-end Nokia’s being a favourite target for the dodgy duplicators.
This must be a first, though. The CECT K898 is a clone of the Nokia N97 - a phone that has never been officially announced by Nokia, nor seen in the wild.
Weirdly, the phone looks a lot like the N85, the patent for which was leaked earlier this year.
It is definitely one way of staying ahead of the competition. Perhaps we are about to witness a strange inversion of the market and the cloners will start innovating new hadnset designs that will then be slavishly copied by Nokia.
We just got official confirmation of the Nokia N85 smartphone yesterday and already it seems the internet is awash with videos of it. Here is the official advert for the device in all of it’s slightly clunky, expositional and not quite natural glory:
We have been speculating about the Nokia N85 for a while now and finally Nokia has fessed up with an official press release confirming the device’s existence. Billed somewhat exaggeratedly as ‘the latest Nokia Nseries multimedia computer’ the N85 is certainly eye catching.The device follows Nokia’s increasingly homogenized style of the Nseries line with a glossy piano black finish and an eye catching OLED screen. There’s an in-built FM transmitter, 5 megapixel camera with Carl Zeiss optics, 3.5G HSDPA and Wi-Fi, A-GPS and some handy dedicated gaming and music keys (it’s a dual slider like the N96/N96). Continue reading ‘Nokia N85 shows its face and bares its teeth’
The Nokia N85 has been rumoured to be Nokia’s next attempt (after the N93) at a video-focused mobile phone.
Nokia have been tight lipped about what this might involve but the publication of a User Agent Profile for the upcoming phone has revealed a few choice details.
The User Agent Profile is a bit of code that a phone’s web browser uses to identify the capabilities of a phone. This lets a website be tailored to that phone.
The UAProf for the N85 sadly doesn’t seem all that great. All the standard 3G smartphone bits and bobs (although no GPS, weirdly) but only a 3.2 Megapixel camera and a QVGA 240×320 screen.
Sure, 32 megapicxels are not to be sniffed at, with the right lens, but surely Nokia could go to at least 5MP? It all seems a bit.. last year, somehow.
As far as camera phones go, the N93 was certainly something of a high watermark, making the lack of a successor after two years all the more conspicuous. A reasonably new patent uncovered by The Nokia Blog however, seems to suggest that a new camera focused handset from Nokia is on the way.
Already numbered as the N85, it looks as though the device will be Nokia’s next flagship video/camera phone (and hence the spiritual successor to the N93). The patent images suggests that the clamshell form factor is gone and replaced with a slider but with a swiveling camera unit on the top.
We are guessing that a 5MP snapper (or maybe even a 6MP one if that photo is the real deal) and a better screen than the N96 are probably a certainty here. Which would be great, though we can’t quite get over the chunkiness of the thing. Sure we understand the need to have a bigger lens in the device than in your typical handset (much like the N93 did) but this is ever so slightly brick-like.
The rumour is that the N85 is scheduled for a summer 2009 release so expect much more info to surface between now and then.
