Nokia's New All-In-One Phone 317
conq writes "BusinessWeek has a piece on Nokia's new phone, introduced today and hitting the shelves in July. The N93, costing $660, will supposedly fill all of your needs for electronic equipment on the go. From the article: 'Should anyone miss the point, Nokia's press extravaganza in a spiffed-up Berlin warehouse ended with a video in which the camera slowly panned across a tableau of dusty, discarded electronic equipment -- including digital cameras and a cobweb-covered iPod. The message: Nokia plans to make these products obsolete.'"
Awesome phone? Carriers will cripple it. (Score:5, Interesting)
It may or may not be as much of a computer as a Treo or a Pocket PC, but it has many trademarks of a computer. Pictures, music, videos, wifi and even voip services are possible. This in particular make phones in direct competition with their carriers. Why pay $150 a month for cell phone service when you can get a "Multimedia Enabled" voip capable phone with a $50 dataplan and talk all you want through Skype or other similar services?
Bottom line? If we let carriers like Verizon continue to cripple these awesome phones, we lose money, ease of use and a significant portion of usability. But if we keep taking them to court and winning, we will have the ability to use all of the features the manufacturers intended and save money in the process.
iPod obsolete? (Score:4, Interesting)
And high resolution, non-shitty CCD+Lenses in the camera?
And last as long or longer than both devices, on the same battery?
Somehow I doubt it, and this is Nokia sticking their collective foot in their mouth again, just like they did with the ngage.
Durability? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Awesome phone? Carriers will cripple it. (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm not normally pro-reguilation, but we need a few simple laws to fix this. Let's start with this:
I'd like to just outlaw contracts longer than 6 months and bundling phones with service, but the above will do as a start. Hell, a government mandated network standard (instead of GSM/CDMA/EDGE) could be an improvement, even if in the form of a mandate for the industry to pick their own standard with some regulatory backing to the mandate ($1,000,000 per day per company per metropolitan area if they go over the deadline to decide or the deadline to implement sounds good to me).
Oooooo! (Score:4, Interesting)
If you buy this multimedia computer (AKA not a phone) will it be able to run this software (as you would assume since its bundled)? Alas, apparently this does not replace your other computer [adobe.com] that requires at least 4 GB of disk space. I suppose if someone figured out how to run DirectX 9 on this multimedia computer...
N80 (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Awesome phone? Carriers will cripple it. (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Awesome phone? Carriers will cripple it. (Score:5, Interesting)
First, you enter any of these contracts completely by choice. If you don't want to sign up for a two-year commitment, buy your phone on the open market -- without their discount. It's an incentive, not an imperative.
You are already allowed to bring your own phone to their network. You don't pay more for a non-provider-provided phone.
If you want a phone that's portable between carriers, again, you're free to buy one on the open market. (AFAIK, not counting locked phones, GSM phones are more portable between carriers than CDMA phones. Analog is a few months from death, and I have no idea whatever became of TDMA or PCM.)
If you want a phone that's not crippled by Verizon (the worst) or another carrier, buy one on the open market.
Basically, the reason contracts are as bad as they are is that people are very attracted to the "free" phones, or the steeply discounted phones available from the cellular providers. That's the idea. But the free market is still out there. Quit whining about locked-down phones and insane contracts and spend the $200 extra for an unlocked phone. Or take their discount and STFU about it.
What I'd rather see is sanity brought to the plans. Having to "guess" at how many minutes you'll use in a month is a pretty lame way to force us to make a purchase. But all of the "pay as you go" plans cost far more for anyone but a mime.
Phones are HUGE- Photos Here (Score:2, Interesting)
Check it out here: http://www.phonescoop.com/articles/nokia_nx3/inde
Also, the N73 was also announced, which is thankfully a smaller phone, still feature rich, and is quad band unlike the N93, and thus better for those of us in the US.
Check it out: http://www.phonescoop.com/articles/nokia_nx3/inde
Also, for those who are interested in phones check out howardforums.com It's the best message board for cell phones and network information.
It depends on your carrier, and the software sucks (Score:2, Interesting)
Verizon will lock you out of your phone; if you go online and try to grab a copy of Motorolla Phone tools (yes, I know this is a Windows application suite), they specifically note that they have disabled thing, like the ability to download background images and ring tones, at the request of Verizon.
For other carriers, whether you can sync with Linux is a function of which SourceForge package you download, and how long your phone has been out. The best ones seem to be for Nokia phones (Nokia is popular in Europe, despite the exploding battery issue) and because the E.U. has a law permitting reverse engineering for the purposes of interoperability, a lot of phone hacking happens there.
For MacOS X, iSync will handle your address book and data connection. If you want the camera portion of your phone to show up in iPhoto, it's not going to happen. If you want the background picture to show up there, too, and be downloadable to the phone, that's also not there. If you want to take an iTunes song and use it as a ring tone, that's also not there.
To be fair, this takes extra software on both the Mac and the PC - not just the Mac - and, again, your carrier can lock you out of it, if they choose to do so.
For third party applications for doing the transfers, you're normally talking about needing a WAP enabled phone, and your computer uploads the content to a web site, and then you pay text and data transfer charges to get the URL, then the content itself, down to your phone, unless you get software designed to talk to the phone over USB (also needs a data cable, anmd extra expsense - at least Motorola uses standard 5 pin minim USB 'A'/'B' cables for many of its phones).
I've personally purchased an application that is considered the best out there for image and ring tone transfers (it's basically a piece of crap, so I won't name names, but it runs on both Mac and PC, and it's considered the best of the lot, for both platforms); it wasn't useful for ring tones or image cut down until I downloaded 3 or 4 other packages from freeware/open source sites, and even then, editing was somewhat hinky.
The bottom line is that the phone companies (or should I say "phone company", now that AT&T has reassembled itself like a Terminator II) control the code on your phone, and as long as they do, they own what you can and can't do with the phone. And if next Tuesday, that means not syncing with Linux or MacOS X, then that's what it means.
-- Terry
Re:Awesome phone? Carriers will cripple it. (Score:2, Interesting)
I was using a 6585 from Ebay for 8 months. I sent it in to Nokia to have the firmware updated, and when I got the phone back, I was told that it was not compatable.
Not compatable when I had been using it for 8 months, and it was giving me much better service than the one Verizon branded phone I had been using in the interim. When I pointed this out enough times, I was told that it was because my phone wasn't E911 complant. It was. Eventually, I got them to reactivate that ESN under a different model, that they carried. It took a month and over a dozen calls to customer service, escelating every time to get that done.
I have since switched to Cingular, in spite of lessor service and worse coverage and call quality, and have been switching between the phone they gave me and another that I used to use on TMobile.
I think it's really unfortunate that Verizon has gotten so overprotective of their hardware sales margains that they're willing to give up customers. I used to reccomend them to everyone that I knew because of superior coverage and customer service. Now customer service has tanked, and they don't get my reccomendations.
On the other hand, my favorite N-Series Nokia is gonna be the N-80.
Why don't people like goodphones? (Score:2, Interesting)
This phone actaully has a great spec. Lots of people don't seem to be reading the article. Battery life will be similar to the N91 for playing MP3s, i.e. about the same as an iPod. The MP3 player has a better interface where you can actually search without scrolling through all your songs.
The camera is no DSLR but that's not the target. It's a 3MP with a good lense. It would replace an average $150 digi cam.
The video recording also looks fantastic, with resolution and bitrate that will look good on a standard TV - possibly better than home (analog) video cameras. It has TV out as well.
It runs S60 so you can write your own programs or download other peoples. There's thousands, possibly more than Windows Smartphone / Mobile.
This phone has an undeniably great spec. If that's not for you then don't get it.
Seriously though... (Score:5, Interesting)
That's not the stupid part... (Score:3, Interesting)
These are the things I expect from a phone:
- Appears as a USB mass storage device.
- Data like contacts, messages, and so on should be stored as CSV files or some similar sort of text files. I want them editable in a text editor.
- Photos and videos stored in
- Photos and videos in common (and preferably patent-free) formats. PNG and Ogg Theora would suit me fine.
- Bluetooth.
- A C or C++ cross compiler.
I think the Nokia 770 might be perfect for me if only it was a phone. If anyone knows of a phone that can do some of those things (a bare minimum would be appearing as a mass storage device...) please let me know!
I also don't see why digital cameras and other devices shouldn't all appear as mass storage devices. It is ridiculous to require some crappy half-hearted software effort (that usually doesn't work) from phone companies.