This is absolutely great stuff, better than anything I’ve ever shot!

First video is an unboxing, intro to the N93i, and N93 vs N93i comparison.

The second mentions hooking up your 93i to the Nokia (NYSE: NOK) Bluetooth keyboard and a brief tour of S60.

Part 1:

Click To Play

Part 2:

Click To Play

Make sure to check out Alex’s website for more information and pictures!

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Straight from Phil’s blog, See into S60:

Quick demo of 3rd Edition Feature Pack 2, but it didn’t turn out that well.  I need to learn how to take better video on this Nokia (NYSE: NOK) N93…

Direct link to video

Understatement of the century haha. I don’t have headphones with me so I can’t comment on the informational benefits of this video.

All I have to say to Phil is: Next time you shoot the video, can you capture your fingers pushing the buttons as well? The most important thing to me right now, when it comes to S60, is seeing the interface become more responsive.

Snappier is better. Lag is why Windows Mobile isn’t popular. Palm (NSDQ: PALM)’s from nearly a decade ago had the snappiest UI on Earth. Sure they didn’t do all the things phones do today, but man … when you tapped the screen things responded immediately.

"Aamun torkku, illan virkku, se tapa talon hävittää."

"Asleep in the morning, awake in the evening; this way will destroy a house."

I’ve been fighting a loosing battle my entire life: Sleep.

Ever since being born around 01:15 in a hospital located in Ploesti, Romania I’ve been a night owl. I can function very well during the day, but when the sun sets my mind instantly goes in to a hyperactive sense of reality. My parents always told me I never slept at night as a child, and growing up I would always get yelled at for not going to bed at a regular hour.

This problem has only exacerbated due to college. The real world functions from dawn till dusk and not being apart of that schedule has caused me great grief. From missing classes early in the morning, to not having anyone to communicate with during the late hours of the night, being nocturnal isn’t fun.

It is something that makes me who I am however, and something that will never leave my system. I can’t quite put my finger on the reason I like being awake so late, but I do know one thing. I enjoy silence. I live for it, that tiny moment of complete auditory bliss where you start questioning if you’ve gone deaf.

The irony of that statement is I greatly enjoy content. Audio, video, and human interactions are my preferred methods of learning and entertainment. I usually spend nights enjoying another new film, or out just driving. That may seem solitary and depressing to you, but if you knew the kind of person I was you wouldn’t say that. I have quite a healthy social life, often going out for periods of 12 hours or more. You will also see a smile on my face often, no matter how difficult the hardship I’m facing is.

I have modified my lifestyle around this behavior. If you’re the type of person who can’t adapt to such a time frame then you will start having problems. Getting to work on time, hanging out with your friends, proper rest of the body, these are all necessary in today’s world otherwise you will loose your house. More importantly you might loose your health.

Finnish people have it rough. While the majority of us have a sun to gage when we should and shouldn’t be awake, around a quarter of Finland is in the Arctic Circle region. They experience a phenomenon known as midnight sun. In some areas the sun doesn’t rise for 51 days in the winter, and doesn’t set for 73 days during the summer. The human body wasn’t meant for these extremes and because of that serotonin deficiencies in the brain due to lack of light cause problems: disruptance of the sleep cycle and depression being the most notable.

How does this relate to Nokia (NYSE: NOK)? A little research shows that Finnish people have a 40 hour work week and can not be forced to work over time. I’ve been employed at some places where we had to stay until everything was done, even if that required another 4+ hours. At first it was a once a month thing, then it got progressively worse to the point where I was working 12 hour days twice a week. My productivity obviously went down because I would show up to work literally exhausted. The body isn’t well rested so its immune functions aren’t working to their full potential and you get sick easier.

It wasn’t pretty.

People in Finland understand that work is work and private time is important. You can’t do your job to your maximum potential if you’re not enjoying the other aspects of your life to their maximum as well. It shows in their products that these are phones meant for people who live life.

They need a lot of talk time, stand by time, and it has to survive getting dropped off the family dining table, or splashed at the local pub while hanging out with your mates. Finnish people don’t need technological masterpieces that they have to treat like a newborn child so it doesn’t get scratched or dropped. They need something that is the sheer definition of a tool:

Something that makes your job, your life, easier.

(image found on Flickr)

In order to truly understand a company you have to get intimate with its history and employees. Nokia (NYSE: NOK) is a Finnish based company, and that fact alone has dictated their design, marketing, and business practices from its inception.

What makes Nokia so Finnish, BMW so German, Samsung so Korean, and Sony so Japanese? If these companies were founded in other parts of the world I guarantee you they wouldn’t be as iconic as they are today.

There is a Nokia employee out there, Phil Schwarzmann, who has a great blog called “Finland for Thought”

The byline reads: “I’m an American who’s been living in Finland for four years. I started this blog to address some of the political, cultural, and current event issues in Finland and the United States. I am a strong advocate of liberty, individuality, equality, and tolerance. Enjoy!”

I like that. I like that a lot.

Reading about Finland from the perspective of an American living there has been rather interesting. It’s caused my curiosity level of this Nordic country to peak.

What do they eat? How social are they? What holidays do they celebrate? These are the questions I ended up asking myself, and later looking up on Google (NSDQ: GOOG), to silence that little voice in the back of my head who always wants more input.

I’ve only scratched the surface when it comes to understanding Finland and maybe one day I can use, and expand, that knowledge of the region if I ever get to see Nokia HQ in Espoo.

One thing every country has unique to themselves are proverbs. I’ve found a website with a ton of them, from Finland of course, and I’m going to be starting a new segment, every Monday and Thursday of the week.

To put it simply, I’ll share a Finnish proverb with you, twice a week, tell you what I think about it, and see how that little tidbit of information has shaped Nokia today.

Why am I doing this? Like I previously mentioned, you can’t fully appreciate a company until you understand what geographical and social elements contributed to the way we know them as today.

Tomorrow is going to be the first installment, what should I call this little idea of mine?

I’m leaning towards "Nokia: Made in Finland"

Direct link to video

Source and Review: InfoSync

I hate fast food, but every once in a while I indulge in this milk shake McDonald’s makes. They call it a McFlurry; it is essentially a thick vanilla milk shake with pieces of Oreo blended in. It is absolutely delicious.

Enough about that, check out the video Darla Mack shot:

Click to play

I think it’s safe to say that the video quality is better than the Nokia (NYSE: NOK) N93. Too bad this doesn’t have a tripod mount on the bottom!

In English! Remember this post from Christmas day?

Well here we are back in action except this time in a language most of us can understand!

Snippets:

But after all Nokia (NYSE: NOK) 6290 is worth all the hype and waiting-for, as it will be the market’s fist device running off S60 3rd edition platform updated to Feature Pack 1 (FP1)

The phone excelled in having much faster interface and being one of the most fetching devices of its time – all this has given it the title of one of the most popular smartphones in the end of its lifecycle

It’s interesting to know that Nokia Mobile Phones division industriously avoids calling this very handset a “smartphone” and in all documents for public use, on the company’s page, Nokia 6290 is presented as a phone. Actually, the same holds true for Nokia 5500, which proves it just one more time – Nokia Multimedia and Nokia Mobile Phones are competing each other by separating generally similar products as much as possible, however this doesn’t bring any considerable benefits

But at the end of the day, people who go for Nokia 6290 after using any other S60-powered smartphone will have to revise their experiences, in light of the fact all menus, folders and the very layout being not only illogical (as it is a default issue of all Nokia’s phones), but totally different from that embedded in the previous handsets

I could keep going on and on with the list of differences and ridiculous location of some menu items, but the fact is: taking uncoordinated steps the company comes up not with high-quality, but with artificial solutions. This results in confusion reigning among unsophisticated users, as they don’t see the way to make browsing and playing around with their S60-based devices a breeze, and prefer calling their menu layouts illogical.

Undoubtedly, the user can attune the menu and thus the handset gets much easier to use, but this will obviously take a whole lot of time – having a well-categorized menu by default is much more welcome. This is why we are offering you to lend Nokia a hand in creating a really good menu layout and participate in our User-Vendor project

The top end houses sockets for plugging in a headset (2.5 mm) and slim charger, both are covered by plastic drop-out flaps – we have never seen something like that, but it is truly handy and seemingly long-lasting – make no mistake about that.

Flipping the 6290 open single-handedly is possible, but you will have a hard time doing so for the handset is quite bulky and hefty at the same time. This was especially stressed by women.

Nokia 6290 carries a new battery type onboard – 950 mAh Li-Pol (BL-5F). As the manufacturer claims, it can keep the handset up and running for 3 hours in talk mode and up to 240 hours in standby. In conditions of Moscow networks the device lasted about 2 days on medium load (45 minutes of calls, up to 2 hours of music playback, up to 20 minutes of games and extra 20 minutes of Net surfing). Should you be heavy on what the 6290 bring to the table, its lifetime will drop down to one day or even less than that.

I will take liberties and draw a parallel between handsets and modern desktops – video cards, CPUs, mother boards makers release upgrades to their current models, bringing more power, more features, so rapidly, that applications that can actually make use of all this superiority become available in six months’ or even a year’s time, it might happen that two years shall pass before users can use their hardware to its fullest. The same holds true here. S60 3rd edition was not optimized for the hardware solutions used in the N93 in this handset’s launch. As a matter of they have attuned the platform only in the end of 2006 and exclusively for the new models (both for the OMAP 2420- and Freescale-based solutions) To provide you with subjective proof that software was actually tweaked, we could look-and-feel of the menu – navigating it has become so much speedier, most items can be now called much faster. Literally, the 6290 passed our interface speed test with flying colors – while in Nokia N80 you were to wait a second or so before getting a new item/submenu displayed on the screen, Nokia 6290 delivers new items almost instantly. Overall, the user interface proves to be extremely fast, scoring many extra points for the handset.

A dedicated pencil-key on the phones, vut to me it is a waste of space, as this function could be easily taken by default keys, such as “*” or “#”

The presence/absence of the power button brings to the surface different approaches suggested by the company’s divisions. In Nseries this key will remain untouched, for the designers see it as a vital for premium handsets. At the same time Nokia Mobile Phones makes a push to get its solutions look very similar to offerings by other manufacturers; this statement, however, is rather controversial, since the models coming from top and middle ranges have acquired own power buttons, replicating Nokia’s know-how. Thus we have nothing left to do but say that everything has mixed up in Nokia’s house, as one writer noted.

Due to the casing being quite bulky, they have augmented with some great feats, like large and soft buttons, which make the keypad really comfortable to use. Keys are easy to text with, and their white backlighting is seen quite well in various conditions.

[... ok this is getting crazy, there is too much good stuff in this review, just read the whole thing. trust me! it's an eye opener to S60v3FP1 as well as the external screen]

Click To Play

Source: Mobile Review

If you’ve been reading my blog you’ll know that I absolutely LOVE Mobile Review. They post some of the most lengthy, content rich reviews I’ve seen on the net. Enough ass kissing, let’s share some snippets:

So the goal set for the N93’s successor was not introducing some new features or software upgrade up to Feature Pack 1 – Nokia (NYSE: NOK) N93i presents us only with modifications that have something to do with its looks, specifically now we have something to choose from – grey or brick red trims.

Music player did not get any updates.

This very article is rather an introductory edition of the review on the N93i, but we can draw some conclusions right now – the model is in fact a marginally shape-changed Nokia N93, functionality is not big news either, the differences are mostly minor, the design has been changed a bit (they made the shell a tad thinner, which you simply might miss), stereo-sound recording has been moved off the handset. The sales package has finally gotten to be in keeping with the phone’s concept; we especially like the new bundled memory card about it. Other differences between Nokia N93i and its predecessor are non-existent – as you see it’s nothing more but a skin-deep update to the original offering.

Nokia N93i is scheduled to being shipping in the end of February at a price of 600 Euro (tax-free price). On the Russian market, though, its price might rocket up to 850 Euro, meaning that the N93i flies out of the mass market in an eye-blink, ending up in a category of device aiming at moderate sales even their domains. If you already own a Nokia N93, then going for the N93 doesn’t make any sense – you won’t get wholly new experience, everything will feel just the same way it did. Newcomers, on the other hand, should take a closer look at this handset, in case they are looking for what Nokia N93 delivers functionality-wise and were about to buy it. But for vast majority of consumers Nokia N93i as an option on their short-lists is not very interesting, since the market has Nokia N73 to offer, which shows off better still-image quality and worse video recording in a much more portable casing armed with stereo-speakers and some other fetching attractions.

Click To Play

Source: Mobile Review

Don’t forget to check out the LCD comparison shots: N93 vs N93i. The difference in the amount of colors really shows.

Today I had the chance to play around with what could fairly be called Nokia (NYSE: NOK)’s first RAZR, the 14mm thin N76. The N76 sports the same clamshell form factor pioneered by Motorola (NYSE: MOT) with its RAZR V3 in that it has its internal antenna located below a flat, metal keypad. Nokia’s N76, however, is a true smartphone and runs its own powerful S60 user interface on top of the Symbian OS.

The N76’s keypad is a flat metal unit that is very similar to those found in RAZR devices. Even the blue backlighting looks nearly identical to that found on Motorola RAZR phones. One difference, though, is that the N76 keypad lacks raised numbers, which makes it significantly harder to find your way around it by touch alone. But with that said, the tactile feedback offered by the keypad when a key is pressed is good.

Other things of note in the N76 include the miniUSB port, something not found on many Nokia devices. Sadly, it is not capable of providing power to the phone, which means that the N76 can not be charged from a laptop computer when you are on the road. The N76’s QVGA display seemed to be on par with other similar units we’ve seen from Nokia recently, which is to say that it is quite good.

My only complaint with the device is that the plastic cover material seems maybe a bit cheap when compared with what we have come to expect from similar devices. The glossy plastic just doesn’t do it for me personally.

Source: Mobile Burn

I sent a few of these out and can’t believe I forgot to blog about it! Darla Mack to the rescue reminds me:

No worries.  Send a UNICEF E-card this Holiday Season and show your support.

For each UNICEF Season’s Greetings E-card Nokia (NYSE: NOK) will make a donation to UNICEF to help make a difference in a childs life.  Last year, Nokia’s Season’s Greeting E-Card raised more than 50,000 euros for impoverished children around the world.

I recieved a few of these from bloggers, associates and even little Linus.

Show your support and send out your E-cards.

Source: Darla Mack