There is a text review to accompany the video below.

Likes:

• Small and light
• Call quality
• Extremely loud and clear speaker phone
• GPS. Once it finds the satellite, it rocks
• Gaming almost matched the PSP experience

Dislikes:

• Dual slide mechanism felt loose
• When closing the slider it would sometimes slide too far down and reveal the multimedia buttons
• "We still don’t think the images produce will replace a good dedicated camera."
• Limit of 2 GB expandable memory
• "Battery died once."

One liner to sum everything up: "If you want the best phone on the market that has all
the features you could ask for, this is the phone, and the price might
not matter as much as the resume."

Update: The supplied HTML code to embed the video doesn’t work correctly. You’ll have to click this link and watch it over at InfoSync.

I rarely cover applications on this blog, but this is a big one.

I’m amazed it took someone so long to create this application and am left in sheer awe wondering why the company that practically invented SMS hasn’t adopted this style of visualizing data while competitors have had it for several years.

Maybe in a later feature pack =)

This doesn’t have to be for SMS alone, imagine if this threaded view was enabled for email!

Biskero brings us good tidings about this new framework called Flyer. I’m not a developer, but all I had to read was "take photos" and "access GPS coordinates" to get excited.

Why do I feel this is important?

Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) worked their butt off trying to finish Expression. A development tool that would make the creation of rich user interfaces in Vista easier.

Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) has had pretty turned on since OS X shipped.

Linux communities are excited about Beryl and Compiz since they can now have stunning effects enabled on their desktops.

Flash was created to escape the boring Internet world of jpg’s, gif’s and text.

What is Nokia (NYSE: NOK) working on to make interface development easier and more visually appealing?

I never understood the significance of Flash Lite until this very second. Adobe is bringing rich interfaces to the mobile masses and rendering old static menus riddled with icons and text obsolete.

People don’t love the iPhone because it can do A, B and C. They love it
because it does things with style. Same can be said about the LG Prada
phone.

Am I right Biskero or am I just having delusions of grandeur?

I totally imagine an application that looks like Nokia’s OpenGL accelerated GPS, but instead of being built for S60 it can run on any Flash Lite enabled device with GPS. Something that seems rare now, but will be common place in less than half a decade.

When will someone licence Symbian and build a UI entirely based on Flash Lite?

Will people even want to pay licensing fees to Symbian when they can just build a UI with Flash Lite and an OS foundation built on Linux?

These are open ended questions I am curious to see S60 developers, Flash Lite developers and mobile phone developers in general answer.

Never underestimate the power of a pretty UI. It’s the second thing a person notices when picking up a phone, the first being the design of the phone itself.

Remember my previous post when I said I was browsing youtube for "Finnish music?"

This is the 6th most viewed video for that search term. Apparently some Finn’s got together and made a song about what they dislike about Helsinki.

Fast forward to about 2 minutes 10 seconds. I guarantee you will giggle a little bit.

Obscure (these kinds of operations always are) cell phone manufacturer, Deeda, has announced their new Pi Phone. Deeda claims that their iPhone clone “is the next generation of portable consumer multimedia devices,” and has been in development since 2005. Right, we’re sure Apple (NSDQ: AAPL)’s legal team will be fine with that and leave Deeda on its merry way. But, should the Pi Phone come through on its feature set – consisting of a 3.6 inch touch screen, proximity sensors, haptic touch feedback, WiFi, Bluetooth, and 800 x 480 resolution, 2 megapixel cam, and that familiar interface – the Pi Phone could give the iPhone some competition.

These kinds of device releases are dubious, at best, and will likely be subject to all kind of legal prosecution long before Deeda ships a single phone. Still, we’d like to see this thing come to market, if for nothing more than a comparison with the Apple iPhone.

Via: deeda

Hulger will bust out with two new super-limited edition “museum” phones at the Milan Salone del Mobile 2007 . The Astor (pictured above) and Sophia (after the break) are Bluetooth enabled phones custom designed for Spazio Rossana Orlandi – one of Milan’s premier design showrooms – and will be showcased there prior to the Milan Salone del Mobile 2007.

Read the full article »

When you are as obsessed with Nokia (NYSE: NOK) as I am, you tend to learn a lot about and fall in love with: Finland.

Did you know that Santa Claus is from Finland?

Did you also know that Finnish people eat reindeer aka the animals that help Santa make his once a year flight around the world possible?

Enough about Christmas. While it is my favorite holiday this post has been inspired by my youtube search for "Finnish Music"

Look what I found:

If you want to learn more about Finland thru the eyes of an American Nokia employee living there, then I highly recommend the "Finland for Thought" blog.

Don’t even bother reading the whole press release. The first sentence is enough:

Multiple award-winning singer/songwriter Chantal Kreviazuk has partnered with Rogers (NYSE: RCI) and Nokia (NYSE: NOK), to film her new video for the smash single "Wonderful," entirely on two Nokia Nseries mobile phones.

If you like the song below then make sure to check out Chantal’s website:

Not really my kind of music. I’m more into … well watch for yourself:

About 12 minutes long split up into news from the past few weeks, a review of a Window Mobile 6 based GPS enabled E61i look alike and finally: editing video in S60.

I highly recommend you subscribe to Steve’s show and that all you N95 junkies watch episode 28, which was dedicated to that device.

Their conclusion:

The E65 is brilliantly built and has specifications that blow most other slider phones away. It is unfortunate that the keypad sometimes fails to register key presses. Otherwise, the E65 would have been perfect.

Now let us get into the details. What they liked:

• Best looking E Series device
• Ambient light sensor that automatically changes screen brightness
• Improved active standby screen shows more information
• Battery life

What they didn’t:

• Battery release button looks awful
• "End Call" button is too small
• Camera lacks a macro mode
• The device randomly reset itself even if no 3rd party applications were installed
• Poor reception in places where other phones had no issues
• No editing of Office Documents, only viewing

I’m amazed that an E Series device doesn’t have document editing capabilities. Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT)’s Windows Mobile operating system is looking much more attractive now to prospective buyers.

I do admit the E65 is a sexy looking phone, but it is something I would have a hard time purchasing. I’m too addicted to QWERTY and I generally don’t like sliders. The 8800 is the one exception to that rule.

For me the Nokia (NYSE: NOK) E65 is a landmark device because it was available almost immediately after it was announced at 3GSM. I think the wait time was about a week, may have been two. This is unheard of for Nokia.

Take the N95 for example, it took them half a year after announcing it to shipping!