Phones

Both Vivian and my Nokia phones were stuffed up, but in two different ways.

Anyway, I have been trying to find out a simple way to update the firmware on Nokia phones for a long time.

Throughout the conference bunch of us will be bumming around the premises. You can recognize us by the Nokia phones running ZoneTag. Or follow us on Flickr to see where we are, real time. Or just look for name tags that read “Yahoo! Research Berkeley”, and hope that it’s not an imposter.

Earthlink and Nokia are working on a promotion, looking to increase interest in Earthlink’s muniFi and boost the sales of Nokia’s new Internet tablet in the U.S. Earthlink plans to offer free muniFi to users of Nokia’s N800 Internet tablet until the end of 2007.

I am seriously pleased with myself! This entire blog entry was posted from a Nokia 6600, without recourse to my PC at all! And that includes the picture!

But later Nokia phones that I owned seemed to abandon games altogether. My last phone was a Sony Ericsson W810i, and aside from its laughable excuse for a keypad, it didn’t seem to have any particularly compelling games on it.

I have been using my T-Mobile Dash for the last couple of months and really do enjoy using the device, but before I was using the Dash the Nokia E61 replaced my Treo 650. After discovering that some new VoIP applications worked on the E61, there was a new QuickOffice Suite for the S60 platform, and my Twitter usage has increased I decided to give my E61 another shot. I actually put the cool purple Nokia N95 theme on it too and love the looks of it.

This, however, changes the rules. With a 2.4-inch swivelling screen, the N93 shoots at VGA resolution, with impressive results. It’s even got a 3x optical zoom and shake-quashing digital image stabilisation.

Nokia has upgraded one of it’s N series, the N80, now called N80ie. There’s no hardware upgrade, only some softwares being added to the mobile phone to make it more web friendly. The Nokia N80ie now features shortcuts to Gizmo VoIP, F-Secure, Yahoo Go etc., a great download client and other useful applications.

Quick tip: If you ever need to find the MAC address of your Nokia phones’ WiFi interface, dial…

However, I had a few bumps installing the software, for Internet calling, and the phone drivers on my laptop. Tell ya about that later.

Nokia, meanwhile, unveiled the N76, a light, clamshell model that includes a 2-megapixel camera and 2 gigabytes of expandable memory. But, at a half-inch thick, it is only slightly thinner than Motorola Inc.'s popular Razr model and is nearly twice as thick as Samsung Electronics Co.'s X820, which the South Korean company claims to be the thinnest on the market.

Although the U.S. market has proven to be more conservative, Naked cofounder John Harlow, who splits his time between New York and London, says that the end result is inevitably the same. “Sometimes companies here just need a little convincing,” he says, “but they wouldn’t have hired us in the first place if they didn’t want a unique slant.” For example, in November, Naked joined forces with David Bowie to develop a new Web-based music venture from Nokia called Music Recommenders. Forty independent music stores from around the world will create custom-music selections for downloading direct to Nokia phones. “With a program like iTunes, you have no guidance, no one to talk to about the kind of music you’re interested in,” Harlow says. “This is more real, more personal. It’s full-service entertainment.”

An anonymous reader writes, “Yesterday Symbian announced that 100 million Symbian smart phones have shipped to over 250 network operators worldwide since the company’s formation. According to a CNet article, however, Nokia phones running on the OS are actually worse than their non-Symbian predecessors. From the article: ‘The fact is, Nokia’s phones are in danger of turning from the iPods of the phone world into the Gizmondos — from devices dedicated to doing one thing well to jacks-of-all-trades that do too many things poorly. The S60 3rd Edition interface has received tons of criticism from veteran Nokia users for being far too complicated to use. It’s great that there’s new stuff to play with, but not so great that the old stuff, as in making calls and sending texts, has been made more complicated.’”

Here's a video that shows a Nokia N95 with integrated GPS. Since your phone knows where it is, you can send your coordinates to someone else. Instead of having lots of small conversations like, "Hey, I'm under the umbrella," or "If you're at 12th Street, you went too far," your friends can find you at your current longitude and latitude.

The E60 runs on Series 60 3rd Edition and features 3G and Wi-Fi connectivity with the option to run VoIP. The reason this has Crave relative to other mobile VoIP handsets is that Nokia E60 is one of the most compact mobile VoIP phones on the market.

The Treo 650 is a great phone. I purchased it after a horrible experince with Windows Mobile and decided to go the Palm route for the excellent Linux support. Excellent was an over statement. The experince is only excellent if your palm is older than 3 years. USB and new Device IDs seem to be the bane of syncing. The final straw was my new work location doesn’t allow phones with cameras in the building. My Dad is more than welcome to carry such things so to him went the treo. I have battled with the next smart phone with a 3 way tie between the Nokia E61 (not E62), Cingular 8125 (HTC Wizard), and the Blackberry 8700C. What finally pushed me over was the fond memories of my Nokia 3250 and the power of Symbian OS. With the Nokia E61 coming in with Wifi and a SIP VOIP Client that sealed the deal. I will be able to walk around my house in dual-mode making free calls when I am in range of the wifi. Keep checking back for tips-n-tricks with this great little device.

Sending Picture messages, Caller Group Graphics, Operator Logos and Ringtones only work for Nokia phones. Most new phones can however now receive FlashSMS.

Inside, of course, all the features that 20somethings supposedly want are in attendance — in addition to a USB port, specific-branded ports for iPods and Nokia phones are included. And it goes without saying that there’s internet access and an on-command interior light show.

The hilarious thing about Nokia’s slavish devotion to the Windows platform is that Microsoft themselves has banned their employees from buying Nokia phones. Microsoft encourage their employees to buy smart phones using Windows mobile edition and Nokia uses the Symbian OS.

Today, I am very sad to report that my Nokia N-Gage cell phone has officially taken a permanent dirt nap. That’s right, after almost two solid years of phone calls, emails, text messages, Tiger Woods’ Golf and Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater, the N-Gage has gone down swinging.

Did you know Nokia phones come with a reserve battery? Just press the keys *3370# and your cellphone will restart with this reserve and you will have a 50% increase in battery. This reserve will get charged the next time you charge your phone.

The Nokia E61 has a “block” form factor similar to the RIM Blackberry. It sports a QWERTY keyboard design and has Bluetooth and Wi-Fi capability. It has a speakerphone for those long conference calls and supports many push email vendors such Blackberry Enterprise Server (with Good Link), Lotus Notes, and Microsoft Exchange.

OS 2006 includes other updates as well, including better memory management, the Jabber/XMPP protocol through Google Talk and SIP support. Nokia hopes to support Skype competitor Gizmo’s VoIP client on the device in the near future as well. Google will also be the default search provider for the device.

Obteniendo luz verde me fui a la segura y escogí al instante un Nokia 6060 que lucía su brillante elegancia desde el mostrador. Era 24 mil pesos más caro que el Motorola, ¡pero qué demonios! Fue amor a primera vista.

I heard a quick review of the Nokia E61 on yesterday’s Buzz Out Loud podcast, and decided to see what all the hooplah is about. On paper, this phone is almost perfect:

I’ve stopped being a Nokia fan when I started using Sony Ericsson phones. Having now tried the N80, Nokia is starting to reel me back in. The N80 shares the same sliding design of Nokia’s first Series 60 phone, the 7650. I’ve never been really a fan of the slider since it’s a bit cumbersome to text with but with the N80 I’m willing to let it slide. The demo unit I have is black but I’ve heard that it might also come in silver.

Nokia phones are going to use a heat disassembly process that allows them to be broken down into their constituent materials, which can then be separately recycled. It’s not quite unmanufacturing, but it’s the first thing I’ve heard about a step in the right direction.

Luckily for people with this problem, Nokia has just released the accessory that is the messaging solution. The SU-8W Wireless Keyboard allows users of Nokia phones, specific models will be listed below, to type in messages through their phone anywhere! We all know how keyboards work, so there is no reason to go into more specifics on how it works. The interesting thing to note, however, is the wireless feature that allows users to type from wherever they want. Most computer keyboard users still use wired keyboards, so this added feature is a great bonus for everyone.

A dutch mobileblog called Newmobile published a couple of really interesting pictures of secret Nokia phones today. The models are the Nokia N73, N93 and the 6133. Both the N73 and the N93 comes equipped with a 3.2 Mpixel camera with Carl Zeiss lens, 3x optical zoom and autofocus. Nice!

Πάντως ο Om Malik, εξαιρετικός αναλυτής σε θέματα νέων τεχνολογιών και broadbanc, αμφισβητεί την ικανότητα της ΝΟΚΙΑ να χτυπήσει την Apple. Και το κάνει μάλιστα με πολύ δηκτικό τρόπο:

The phone isn’t particularly small, though it’s not overly big either. It’s definitely shorter, narrower and lighter than a Treo 650, though it is about the same thickness. It easily fits in a pocket and is highly portable. The keypad is a little small, to make room for the 176×208 pixel screen. Unless you have ten meaty thumbs, it’s not too small, though some people are bound to gripe about this.

The Freedom application will be preinstalled on select Nokia phones in the Norwegian market and will be available for download for Norwegian Nokia S60 owners.

For those of you that haven’t heard about this, what they’ve done (besides make a number of bloggers very happy) is provide top end Nokia phones (right now the N90 and N70 phones are being circulated) to bloggers of some notoriety. They’ve asked us to use the phones the way that only hard core mobile phone addicts will use phones and then to blog about our experiences; be they good, bad, indifferent, or extraordinary. While those of us participating are making those comments on our own blogs, Andy has established a site in conjunction with Nokia - The N90 Bloggercom site, which is also collecting those posts and putting up the headlines and links back to the bloggers original posts wherever they may be.

Last night, I saw the Nokia 6682 showed up on Cingular online store. However, Cingular doesn’t offer any discount for new or current subscribers and the 2-yr contract.

The N series is without a doubt the flagship range of Nokia phones and this is obvious from the amount of features crammed into these new handsets. Nokia certainly has been busy and with each of the N series adding a little more to the game, we can be sure of some exciting developments in the coming months.

It’s basically a list of the open source software its working on my favourite is Python for s60 and their upcoming web browser for nokia phones S60 OSS Browser which is based on apple’s safari and kde’s khtml code

Kent Norman is a cognitive psychologist who directs the Laboratory for Automation Psychology and Decision Processes at the University of Maryland. He studies and teaches the cognitive aspects of human/computer interaction with the goal of understanding how to make technology user-friendly. And in his spare time he torches, smashes and chainsaws broken electronics. And to think I was merely going to take a hammer to my pair of dead Nokia phones. Check out Kent’s online survey, publicity and instructional videos.

N-Gage enabled phones are the way of the future? Who knew? The simple fact is that the N-Gage inituative has been at best, a bust. Naturally gamers have flockd back to the companies that have built their trust by delivering games they love; Sony and Nintendo. These companies have a reputation for delivering quality gaming machines by producing first-rate titles on their systems. The PSP and the DS are primarilly gaming machines first. Even if these Nokia phones do incorporate some sort of gaming fuction, the people who buy them are first and phone users, and therefore they will never see the same level of game sales as their console brethern.

this one just arrived this morning... i was supposed to order the motorolla razr but decided to buy this instead... i mean, the appearance of the moto razr's really nice coz it's very thin and elegant-looking but the features were just so-so... unlike the nokia 6630, which is fully-loaded... 1.3 megapixel camera, 1-hour video, mobile chat, internet, and loads more... so i decided to get this one instead... i'll use this phone for my US line (cingular wireless) so that i could call some peepz that i know from here...

Nokia released the 6170 cellphone today. It’s a direct attack on Motorola’s awesome Razr phone. I personally think it’s not up to the high standards set by Razr. The features are there but the style certainly isn’t. The 6170 basically boasts the exact same features as the Razr with the exception for a thicker body and lack of quad-band. (Which I think are reasons enough to get a Razr instead!)

Nokia USA is conducting a 2 to 4 month study to investigate how people use their Nokia phones. The study is accepting new panel members for a limited time only.

i'm already recommending my friends the nokia phones, because of the great and easy usability, intelligent features, the good and long lasting quality (hey, this was my fault, i don't expect, that a mobile phone has to survive such a crash without any damage), their customer support and now also because of their great obligingness!

Today we learned why Nokia phones had become scarce at U.S. service providers - they introduced a bunch of new phones today, especially for the U.S. CDMA service providers (Verizon, Sprint, Cricket, etc). Nokia’s line up was also missing the so called “clam shell” designs that have become extremely popular, especially amongst college and high school students and others.

Unlike the world of Wi-Fi, where one manufacturer’s products can be virtually guaranteed to work with another, the Bluetooth consortium in the past seems to have taken the idea of compatibility purely as an option. We have spent hours, for instance, trying to pair earlier-generation Nokia phones with various Bluetooth devices.

Just arrived in Helsinki with Xavier, I have played with Christian's brand new N90 Carl Zeiss optics (rotating), very nice design, amazing picture quality you can check on Christian's blog (whose TypePad blog design is very cool too).

Looks interesting but frankly I would be happy if Nokia and Apple could get their collective act together so that users of popular Nokia phones, such as the Series 40 model 6230, could sync with iCal, Address Book et al. There is a standalone application for Mac OS X, not integrating with iCal etc, that can communicate with 6230. So what goes on?

Probably doesn’t mean the end of the N-Gage as a standalone device (no comment), but Nokia announced today that they’re going to start expanding the N-Gage’s “mobile gaming solution” platform to several new Nokia smartphones (presumably ones with enough oomph to handle 3D gaming). Mainly means that lots of other Nokia phones’ll be able to play N-Gage games, which is probably how it should have been from day one. But we digress. The first compatible phones should be out sometime in the first half of next year.

When working in the industry, it’s sometimes difficult to get excited about new mobile phones. But with the new Nokia N91 there is really a phone packed with features that I would love to have.

Nokia thought at the user and put some things there in that have been long overdue: a 4GB hard drive, a standard 3.5mm headphone jack, support for playback of MP3, M4A, AAC, and WMA audio files, and USB 2.0. That would already make it a great phone, but it also is a 3G phone (WCDMA), has Bluetooth and more surprising WiFi. The power management on such a phone must be a challenge.

I’ll give you an example, when I bought my new Nokia phone in the US, it’s locked to the Cingular network, and is feature-limited. No authorized Cingular stores sell any accessories for the phone, despite the fact it’s been out in the states for quite some time now. You can’t get cases, covers, headphones, etc. In Taiwan, the same Nokia phone can be bought at any of the millions of cellphone outlets, with no contract, completely unlocked, and with all the features originally built-in by Nokia turned on by default. Not...

Well, I laughed at Danielle the other day when the computer that is running Windows XP and Outlook 2003 and is configured to sync with both of our Nokia phones separately (or so I thought), sync’d my Outlook contact information to her phone. She has been waiting patiently for this stupid company to send the Nokia data cable we need to get the data off of her ancient Nokia phone so we can put it on her new 6230. Then she gets all of my info on her phone. Well, I guess she gets the last laugh, because I just noticed that her 10 contacts that...

The launch of Google Maps in the UK this week has coincided with the desire to write some Python code for my Nokia 6630 mobile phone. As Matt Croydon’s PythonForSeries60 shows, there are an increasing number of interesting projects written using the Python SDK for the Nokia phones.

Damn, I wish I had my Nokia phone now…sort of. This is a nice lil cheat that lets you do all kinds of things…from changing your alpha tag (your service provider name, i.e. Alltel, Cingular, AT&T, etc…), your own phone number (sort of), and even a way to get free phone calls (but I wont go into detail on how to do that, figure it out on your own)…here we go…

The one concern I have with it, however, is data lock-in. Your backed up data is stored in a Nokia proprietary format which can only be opened by Nokia Data Suite, which in turn only works with Nokia phones. In short, if you use this tool and then lose your phone, unless your new phone is also a Nokia you’re screwed.

A collection of photos on Sidetalkin make fun of the new way of talking sideways on Nokia phones and… on anything else.