Wired has a Nokia (NYSE: NOK) N900 in house (while I’m still waiting for my review unit, if it ever shows up at all) and they’ve given it a brief ~ 3 minute review. For an American publication to say that $650 is a bargain for a mobile device is shocking enough to raise my eyebrows. Also note how the reviewer refuses to call this thing a smartphone, sticking to the ancient “Internet Tablet” moniker, a term that Nokia Maemo Devices Vice President Ari Jaaksi has always secretly hated, going so far as to say that “a tablet is something you eat when you are sick”.
Identity Crisis aside, check out this video while you count down the days, weeks, and if you’re Swedish the months, until the N900 ships:
China has their own 3G standard. First thing you may be asking yourself is why? China has always done their own thing, and by developing an alternative to WCDMA they save themselves the burden of having to pay for WCDMA royalties. Every decision in today’s mobile world, and I mean every single bloody decision from the materials used to make the body of a device, to whether the instruction manual inside the package comes printed in color or black and white, comes down to money. Nokia (NYSE: NOK) feels that with China’s population of 1.3 billion people, playing their game and making devices that work on their network would be beneficial to their bottom line.
Politics out of the way, does anything make the 6788 special? Well it has two 8s in the product name, which is a big thing in China. Some Chinese, a fair bit actually, are still superstitious and believe that the number 8 will bring them good luck. When picking a mobile phone number, they want to make sure it has as many 8s as possible, and they’ll even pay to have a phone number with a lot of 8s. Specification wise you have a massive 2.8 inch screen that is sadly QVGA (320 x 240) resolution, a 5 megapixel camera, and it’s powered by S60 3rd Edition Feature Pack 2. The 6788 will star shipping in December on China Mobile (NYSE: CHL), price unknown. Looks like Colin Giles, Nokia Senior Vice President for Greater China, Japan and Korea, kept his promise.
Remember Nokia (NYSE: NOK)’s Here and Now project we covered some time ago? It has been updated recently to include movies and restaurants to the mix. This means that now (and here ) you will also be able to check out movie listings in theaters around, as well as good places to eat — all from a comfort of your Nokia (or other manufacturer’s) Symbian S60 smartphone.
In addition to the feature upgrade, the latest version of Here and Now also fixes some of the known bugs reported by the users. The download link remains the same…
A new trend in mobile phone user interfaces, possibly started by Apple (NSDQ: AAPL), but you never really know, is to have multiple home screens. Instead of being forced to pick the most important 3 or 4 shortcuts to put on a small, pixel constrained display, one can opt to have multiple virtual screens that a user can slide through and put whatever shortcut, and more recently interactive widget, they prefer to use on their device. The trouble with this new user interface is that it’s hard to find decent wallpaper. If your screen is basically one ultra wide photo, how do you make your background look pleasing to the eye?
A possible solution is to use something called “equirectangular” photos. Remember the globes you used to see in your history or geography class growing up as a kid? How do you view that same data on a 2 dimensional surface? Equirectangular projection was invented in the year 100 to solve that issue, and the same concept can be applied to photographs.
Mark Guim discovered this technique and made a tutorial on how one could utilize equirectangular images to create beautiful wallpaper photos. In this video you’ll see the technique he developed to make equirectangular photos work on the Nokia (NYSE: NOK) N900, but this can easily scale from Android devices which have only 3 home screens, to the HTC Hero which has seven.
According to a report from Economic Daily News in China, Compal, the company that manufactures the Booklet 3G for Nokia (NYSE: NOK) by making people work in hellish conditions while earning terrible wages just so you can enjoy your third laptop purchase in 18 months, can’t keep up with the pace of demand for the device. They’re working overtime. The report also mentions that Nokia plans on releasing a new model in 2010, which is very vague since that can mean Q1 or Q4.
What would you like to see in a new Nokia Booklet 3G? On my list: more RAM, matte display, a powered USB port that can charge my mobile phone even when the machine is off and a user upgradeable 2.5 inch hard drive.
Some of you guys may already know that I got back from Nokia’s “Secret Event” in London, which was OVI Maps with WomWorld, at 2am this morning. It was really nice to meet other Nokia bloggers, especially my buddy Ibrahim from The Nokia Review. The purpose of this short trip was to discover OVI Maps in London with the help of the Nokia N97 mini! However due to the delayed launch by Nokia we were all given the Nokia N97 instead.
This makes you wonder, how far ahead are these marketing campaigns actually planned, and is the company having trouble shipping smartphones on time? During Nokia’s Q3 2009 conference call, the Nokia E72 was brought up. It was supposed to be a Q3 product, but it has slipped into Q4. The Nokia N900 has the same story, it was supposed to ship in October, but has now been pushed back to November. The Nokia N97 Mini, even in prototype form, should have been at this event, but it wasn’t. Odd considering the Nokia Flagship Store in London told customers that the Nokia N97 Mini would be in the shop on October 24th, a mere 48 hours after this marketing campaign occurred.
Is something the matter in Finland? Yes, seasonal depression is kicking in for everyone, myself included, and the problem is only being exacerbated due to daylight savings time, which kicked in last night, but in this competitive landscape it is becoming mission critical that deadlines are met and projects ship on time.
Anyway, for those of you wondering why the Nokia N97 Mini was created in the first place, here is a brief, yet highly informative video created by Mark Guim from The Nokia Blog:
In case you’re into role-playing and like to pretend to be a lawyer in your spare time, the best kind of lawyer too, the kind who sleeps with their secretary that’s half their age and tells the wife that they ended up staying late at work battling a pro bono case defending an inner city kid accused of selling illegal substances, then you’ll want to read this 30 page PDF detailing Nokia’s complaint against Apple for violating 10 patents held by the Finnish handset maker. For the impatient people among us, here is a list of the 10 patents, with links to their corresponding page on the United States Patent and Trademark Office’s website:
If Nokia (NYSE: NOK) wins this case, they’re looking at getting between $200 million and $1 billion courtesy of Cupertino according to an estimate by Strategy Analytics analyst Neil Mawston. Knowing how long Nokia fought InterDigital and Qualcomm (NSDQ: QCOM), it’s safe to say that you’re going to hear about this case with Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) every year of the first half of the upcoming decade. As always, stick to IntoMobile to get the details you crave.
It wasn’t that long ago that Dusan speculated the Nokia Surge may make an appearance on the Rogers (NYSE: RCI) network in Canada… And, as luck would have it, the Surge is indeed on its way to Rogers according to some recent reports. The Nokia Surge 6790 should be ready for prime time (on the shelves) early next week. The Surge is a slider featuring a 2.4″ screen, full QWERTY keyboard, 2MP camera (with 4x zoom), GPS, Bluetooth, microSD (up to 16GB) and more.
Look for pricing to come in at $49.99 on a 3-year contract, $99.99 on a 2-year, $199.99 on a 1-year and $279.99 outright. I’m sure we’ll hear more about this one shortly, so stay tuned for more.
Orange France is the latest carrier to jump on the Nokia (NYSE: NOK) Messaging scheme. The France Telecom-owned operator will offer the service with its Origami Plus and Origami Jet monthly plans, as well as with the Orange email option. Following devices will be offered in the time of launch: Nokia 5230, Nokia E71, Nokia N97 and the Nokia N97 mini.
And as you know, using Nokia Messaging you can access thousands of webmail services from your mobile phone — including the most popular ones such as Gmail, Yahoo! Mail and Hotmail.
) you will also be able to check out movie listings in theaters around, as well as good places to eat — all from a comfort of your Nokia (or other manufacturer’s) Symbian S60 smartphone.
