James certainly has been busy!

On a "video playing test" the Nokia (NYSE: NOK) N95 scored 3 hours and 35 minutes in offline mode, 3 hours 14 minutes with the GSM radio on and an iPod got 4 hours and 4 minutes.

What can we say about this? The iPod has an onboard h.264 decoder while the N95 is doing the decoding via software since the TI OMAP 2420 doesn’t have any h.264 acceleration.

The TI OMAP 3430 chip does! This will give us a hint as to what future N series devices are capable of.

On to the image test:

From left to right we have the Nokia N93, N93i and N95.

Here we can obviously see that megapixels count.

Great work James!

All About Symbian:

Nokia (NYSE: NOK) and their N-Gage sub-brand are sponsoring the GCDC 2007 game developers’ conference, which takes place in August in Leipzig, Germany. Nokia’s Next Gen Gaming Platform
is due to launch shortly afterwards in September, so there should be a
complete unveiling of the platform at the conference if not earlier.

I wish Nokia the best of luck in the gaming arena. They’re going to need it.

What was wrong with the previous DST dates that the USA had to sign in to legislation times that were "more convenient" to them, but shaft everyone else? I’ve been sitting on this story for a while now, but after seeing it go up on almost every single Nokia (NYSE: NOK)/S60 blog I read I figure it must be important to at least a few people.

Why does America have to be different?

E-Series:

Nokia has released an update for the changed dates of Daylight
Saving Time (DST). In the US, DST starts three weeks early and ends one
week late.

Download the patch here

This is beyond awesome. Metasploit can do some serious damage if you know what you’re doing

I seriously need to get one of these over the summer and just start war driving.

ZD|Net:

Earlier this month at the RSA conference, I got a chance to see a demo of Immunity’s Silica, a $3600 handheld devide that can search for and join 802.11 (Wi-Fi) access points, scan other connections for open ports, and automatically launch code execution exploits from a built-in exploit platform.

Now comes word from David Maynor that, for the cost of a new Nokia (NYSE: NOK) N800 Tablet PC ($399 new), pen testers can use the Metasploit point-and-click attack tool in the most covert manner.

Using a free utility from Maemo.org and a custom-built Ruby package, Maynor found that it was pretty easy to get Metasploit running on the Nokia N800.

"Its not as fast as a laptop but it’s still pretty quick," Maynor
said, explaining that he was able to break into a Windows 2000 SP4
server using a Metasploit exploit.

He said the six-hour battery life of the device makes it perfect for
covert security auditing. "You can turn it on, toss it in a backpack,
and just let it gather data," Maynor explained. 

"You can turn it [the Nokia N800] into a Metasploit/Bluetooth/Wi-Fi
auditing device in a few hours. Just copy Metasploit on to your memory
card and you’re ready to go."

Awesome, complete, in depth review. Check it out.

Some snippets:

Sliding the cover back to its standard position automatically locks the keypad (it also locks after configured time out). The movement is very smooth and additionally supported by a spring, which means: push it slightly and it’ll go further by itself. So far so good. What’s missing, however, is any kind of lock keeping the cover in its central position. Unfortunately, it happens that it slides up or down in pocket, which also automatically unlocks the keypad… It’s also just a bit too loose and tends to rattle a little (although it may be just my unit).

Considering the pre-sales firmware version it’s too early to comment on the power efficiency of the retail units, but the tested device worked full day with quite extensive use and about two days with light use. The N95 doesn’t support USB charging.

The N95 features a built-in GPS receiver. It’s the same chip you can find in the Nokia (NYSE: NOK) E90. It’s quite sensitive and after obtaining fix it keeps working indoors and under heavy foliage, but it’s slightly less sensitive and also slightly less accurate than SiRF Star III based receivers.

The only problem, present in recent S60 camera phones, and also strongly affecting the N95 is incorrect automatic white balance resulting in excessive magenta saturation giving pictures unnatural, purple hue. Hopefully this will be fixed via a firmware update.

Nokia N95 is not only a great still camera but also a fantastic video recorder. Like other high-end models, it records MPEG-4 video with VGA (640×480) resolution at 30 frames per second. "DVD quality" is certainly an exaggeration but it definitely offers quality of amateur single-sensor Mini-DV camcorders. The tested unit, however, was still running an early, unoptimized firmware, and the recorded video wasn’t smooth, with some occasional jerks and delays. But this will undoubtedly be removed in retail firmware. Video stabilisation helps avoiding shakes and vibrations.

Being based on the S60 3rd Edition Feature Pack 1, the N95 contains the new 2.0 version of the Nokia OSS web browser. It’s now faster and less memory hungry. Even the first version was very good at rendering web pages the same way as you can see them on your desktop PC, but v2 goes even further and provides almost perfect accuracy. Moreover, it now supports both WWW and WAP, so it is now the only browser preinstalled in the phone. New features in the 2.0 version also include auto-completion for form data fields, video plug-in, support for favicons, Flash Lite 2.0, RSS and Atom feeds with automatic update, password manager, support for landscape orientation, toolbar, background sounds, saving images and whole pages for offline browsing, operator cache, visual windows manager and user agent profile. Wow, it’s now a fully mature browser. The only thing I miss is Opera-like small screen rendering mode.

The perfect phone? We will have to wait and see until final firmware is out.

The image quality isn’t acceptable. It can be fixed via post processing … but who wants to do that?

Check out the full preview; here are some snippets:

With some black trim around the outside, and a metal back cover taking up almost three quarters of the device, it looks and feels sleeker and more solid when compared to the original E61.

The keyboard, the mainstay of such devices, has also been improved. It still takes up the same amount of space and the same excellent layout has been preserved, but the space between the keys has been increased and the keys are slightly more domed, with the result that mis-keying the wrong button is now something that happens a lot less.

Some existing users may be disappointed that the E61i does not use the latest version of S60 (S60 3rd Edition Feature Pack 1). Nokia (NYSE: NOK) says this is due to ‘time to market considerations’ – in other words in order to get the device out in a reasonable time frame, the original software has been retained.

Unsurprisingly, Nokia says the addition of a camera has been one of the commonest requests from E61 users. Is commonest a word? =P

Sample image from the E61i

I’m not buying it because there is no performance upgrade and it still uses the same OS as my regular E61.

Do I think it looks pretty? Yes!

What would an updated model have to contain for me to open my wallet? Higher resolution screen, faster processor, S60v3FP2, 3.5 mm headphone jack, SDHC compatibility, mini usb (with charging support!) and GPS.

I think all of those are possible, except for the 3.5 mm headphone jack.

Enterprise customers want to listen to their music too!

WOM World:

Official word from Nokia (NYSE: NOK) has come through as to why the N93i final production model will not have the auto-focus feature. Here it is:

This feature was tested during the product development phase, however, when the implementation was reviewed it was judged to generate too much noise both in viewfinder mode and during video recording. Rather than disappoint customers with a poor experience we decided to remove this additional feature from the final product, user guides and marketing materials.

It is unfortunate that we provided sample products for review with this feature enabled thus causing confusion. We regret any disappointment caused and will work to make sure such cases do not happen again.

There you have it.

I’m sending my N93i back to Nokia today to have it flashed. I’m going to be loosing one of my favorite features. I’ll let you know how it preforms when I get it back.

Knowing Nokia, they’ll have an updated model within a year that will probably have auto focus, more megapixels, etc.

That’s one thing I love about the mobile phone industry, the speed of product development.

During the Academy Awards, Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) was telecasting the ad for its upcoming iPhone. Nothing much was revealed, just a bunch of people saying “hello”. But then again, just enough to tease us.

It seems that Nokia (NYSE: NOK) decided to additionally promote the single most-popular NSeries device – N73. On the official N73 page, new colors emerged. Besides the Plum, Red and Brown there are Pink, Blue and what appears to be either a Sand or Pearl.

Great camera (3.2 MP with Carl Zeiss optics), solid software architecture (Symbian with S60 UI) and now additional colors should further drive the sales of the Nokia N73 – or at least that’s what Nokia hopes for. (via DarlaMack)

As the demand for mobile devices is rising constantly the need for a high quality virus protection grows rapidly as well. Therefore BitDefender now offers a full “On-Demand” and “On-Access” security solution which protects smartphones and PDAs from today’s Internet threats.

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BitDefender Mobile Security is available immediately for purchase from BitDefender’s site. A 30-day evaluation version is also available for download.