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It's not Adobe Photoshop, but it does have some useful picture editing functions.

Go to the Nokia web site and download the user manual for the N9x series - not sure about N7x's - and look at the range of options for editing pictures and video. :)

Here's the N90 page - http://www.nokiausa.com/phones/N90/ - and here's the link to the N90 user manual (PDF) - http://nds2.nokia.com/files/support/nam/phones/gui des/N90_US_en.PDF

• the IMAP email client is hopelessly broken, crashing at the slightest provocation (changing folders mostly!)
• the web browser, for all its other limitations, doesn't do gradual page rendering (well it tries, but effectively it doesn't), and freezes the phone up while rendering a long page. Not good when you have a 14Kb GPRS connection;
• the terminal works well (cough, third party software) but is hamstrung by the phone's refusal to change connection types if the first one you pick doesn't work. You have a 10 minute timeout or something so that if a wi-fi connection doesn't work, you can't immediately switch to GPRS without going for a cup of tea first.
• (unforgivably, for Nokia, at least) if you missed a call and want to see who it was, you press "last call log" from the front panel and it takes 10-20 seconds of "Reading log..." on the screen before it shows you. A list of numbers! That's all I'm asking for! Totally maddening.
• No reset mechanism except taking the battery out. Because it will never crash, oh no. Especially not in the middle of a busy street when you're trying to make a call and then have to find a quiet place to take the f--king thing to pieces...

Now under normal circumstances, well, yeah you get bugs in software, we'll get them fixed! Except that you don't with phones. I had three firmware upgrades to that phone and none of those issues were solved. So I never really used it for email or web browsing unless I had a lot of time & patience, and it was very important to try to get a particular piece of info (still it was quicker calling the train times information line than trying to use the web site).

But really there was nothing wrong with the hardware -- I could see that the phone could do everything that it advertised, but Nokia were on to greener pastures now that this phone was out of the door. All it would need (in any other software market) would be a programmer or two, 2-3 months and some willing "power user" beta testers to hammer out these stupid bugs. I mean god forbid they actually try to make a device with a market lifespan of more than about 12 months, with, you know, a user community and long term support plans. But just a bit more love on the software after release would make a huge difference.

After a couple of terrible months with an HTC Universal (lots of problems but the biggest one is that it's impossible to answer an incoming call more than about 20% of the time! Great testing guys!), like an idiot I'll have a Nokia E61 on order soon. Maybe that'll work better :-)

So no I don't believe phone "convergence" is a myth when the phone manufacturers get so darned close. It's their unwillingness to go the extra mile after the phone has been released and tested on a large scale which causes people to damn their gadget-phones as white elephants.

• the IMAP email client is hopelessly broken, crashing at the slightest provocation (changing folders mostly!)
• the web browser, for all its other limitations, doesn't do gradual page rendering (well it tries, but effectively it doesn't), and freezes the phone up while rendering a long page. Not good when you have a 14Kb GPRS connection;
• the terminal works well (cough, third party software) but is hamstrung by the phone's refusal to change connection types if the first one you pick doesn't work. You have a 10 minute timeout or something so that if a wi-fi connection doesn't work, you can't immediately switch to GPRS without going for a cup of tea first.
• (unforgivably, for Nokia, at least) if you missed a call and want to see who it was, you press "last call log" from the front panel and it takes 10-20 seconds of "Reading log..." on the screen before it shows you. A list of numbers! That's all I'm asking for! Totally maddening.
• No reset mechanism except taking the battery out. Because it will never crash, oh no. Especially not in the middle of a busy street when you're trying to make a call and then have to find a quiet place to take the f--king thing to pieces...

Now under normal circumstances, well, yeah you get bugs in software, we'll get them fixed! Except that you don't with phones. I had three firmware upgrades to that phone and none of those issues were solved. So I never really used it for email or web browsing unless I had a lot of time & patience, and it was very important to try to get a particular piece of info (still it was quicker calling the train times information line than trying to use the web site).

But really there was nothing wrong with the hardware -- I could see that the phone could do everything that it advertised, but Nokia were on to greener pastures now that this phone was out of the door. All it would need (in any other software market) would be a programmer or two, 2-3 months and some willing "power user" beta testers to hammer out these stupid bugs. I mean god forbid they actually try to make a device with a market lifespan of more than about 12 months, with, you know, a user community and long term support plans. But just a bit more love on the software after release would make a huge difference.

After a couple of terrible months with an HTC Universal (lots of problems but the biggest one is that it's impossible to answer an incoming call more than about 20% of the time! Great testing guys!), like an idiot I'll have a Nokia E61 on order soon. Maybe that'll work better :-)

So no I don't believe phone "convergence" is a myth when the phone manufacturers get so darned close. It's their unwillingness to go the extra mile after the phone has been released and tested on a large scale which causes people to damn their gadget-phones as white elephants.

I bought my father a Nokia 1110 some time ago. It's a real "back-to-basic" telephone. Pretty nice screen (white-on-black, must be attractive to geeks :-D), great battery life (lasts for a week for him, and he does have phonecalls with it every day) and almost no useless features (if you can at least live with the polyphonic ringtones). No colour screen, no camera, no MP3 player, etc. It also lacks GPRS support, which I personally wouldn't like to miss.

Maybe you'll like it, if you can live with the fact that it's from Nokia. I personally don't understand why people all like Nokia so much (I bought one for myself this year, for the first time in ages, because of bad experiences with all other brands in the last few years (fragile things)).. You can say a lot about the software, but if this is user-friendly, please give me back my user-unfriendly Siemens/SonyEricsson, at least it works and it's a bit more consistent.

It is probably the best mobile phone I have ever owned, for the following reasons:
-It was cheap AU$99 outright,probably cheaper now, I don't worry too much about dropping or breaking it.
-It has a nice colourful display that is easy to read.
-It has a reasonable form factor, not tiny and not huge, not heavy and not too light.
-It can send sms.
-It can make phone calls.
-It has a digital clock.
-It can remember important dates and meetings.
-The battery lasts *for ever* with the right settings. I find myself recharging it less than once a week.
-Even my mother can use the interface.

It does have a few negatives
-The keys feel a bit cheap
-Ocasionally when I go on a train(subway), it loses its connection with vodafone, and I have to turn it off and on. (Probably a firmware bug)
-Cannot add ringtones/skins/java games (who cares?)
-The default settings use more battery than is neccesary
I have owned phones before that were crammed with features (NGAGE anyone?) and I was never as happy with them as I am with this phone. The complete lack of advanced features is it's greatest strength.

I doubt that article holds any substance as Nokia.com has the word "phone" all over it.

According to http://opensource.nokia.com/projects/S60browser/ (which is linked from the TFA... sigh), KHTML/KJS is LGPL (and I guess with Nokia additions in BSD or something)

Oh, and a random chunk of plugin stuff in NPL. I'm amazed Nokia wants that mess of code...

This future DRM-ed device is in a market that is a subset of a subset.

So Nokia is a tiny provider of mobile devices?

I think the restrictions in the BSD license are much worse. In the Linux kernel, at least, anyone can add useful things to any distribution. In the BSD Unix one can add useful things only in the FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD distros. For instance, let's suppose you have a Nokia firewall and want to tweak its operating system. You cannot, because it was distributed under the BSD license and Nokia closed it.

Regarding question 1,

From the Nokia 770 site:
The Nokia 770 Internet Tablet's software is upgradeable and currently runs on the Linux-based Internet Tablet 2005 software edition. There is a planned launch next year of an operating system upgrade - the Internet Tablet 2006 software edition - that will support additional services, including Internet telephony (VoIP) and Instant Messaging.

As for your second question, I would think that a "normal" user couldn't do it, but since as you point out the protocol is open, its down to whatever can be built for it.

I would imagine that the gTalk port won't need lots of private code, but to be sure find Chris DiBona and have a word.

4. What is the cost of upgrading to the Internet Tablet 2006 software edition?
Nokia will publish the distribution details later this year. The cost will depend on the distribution method of the software package.

4. What is the cost of upgrading to the Internet Tablet 2006 software edition?
Nokia will publish the distribution details later this year. The cost will depend on the distribution method of the software package.

Have you looked at the Nokia 770? With the third-party, open source FBreader software it makes a pretty fine e-book reader -- the best I've seen so far, in fact. I've already read 2-3,000 pages on mine. I just saw it on sale for $300 at CompUSA yesterday. One drawback is that it's a traditional LCD, so reading while lying in the sun is almost impossible.

So how is this any better than the Nokia 770?

I mean the 770 already has an active community behind it and an open development environment that you can dig right into.

Yes, the 770 is a bit underpowered but the form factor looks MUCH better than the Pepper Pad. Plus I can go to the store and get one NOW.

This Pepper pad looks nice, just like a bigger version of the Nokia 770, which runs Linux as well. Having an open plattform is a nice way to attract developers and establish a nice collection of applications. I hope we see more of those linux gadgets in the future.

Phone calls. This may be because I'm from the US, and we get the crap phones here from what I hear. The UI on these things gets worse every year.

I wish there were "open" phones with a free SDK so I could make the UI worthwhile.

My current phone is pretty simple, so I can tolerate the numerous issues I have with it, but are these people on crack when they program these things?

My phone is paid for by my employer and is "part of my job", I don't want or need a cell phone personally.

...The contact list is purely alphabetical, so I either have to bastardize someone's name that I call frequently to put it on the top of the list, or scroll down past the numbers I don't use frequently to get to the number I use frequently. Oh, but I could use the voice recognition to call right? ... The two color LED would be perfect for this notification, but instead, its only used to tell me that the phone is on by obnoxiously blinking or that the phone is charging

... There are a slew of unintuitive icons on the top of the screen, and I guess I have to look at the book to know what those mean.

The settings don't have any information about what the setting is used for. For example, under System/Select System it says "Home is B" and the three options for "Selecting the system" are Home only, Automatic A, Automatic B. So WTF is "Home is B"?

I recently had raised the same questions when getting a new cell phone.

My previous phone was a Nokia 6230 (link) and at the time I purchased it, was at the bleeding edge of cell phone technology. Bluetooth, GPRS Modem, Camera, Video, SD Card, you name it. So the decision to upgrade FROM this phone was a tough one. Which phones on the market today made the $$ I'd have to spend WORTH the upgrade?

After spending a lot of time researching, I finally settled upon the Nokia 6682 (link). It had the same features as my previous phone, but also a few key others:

- The 6682 is the only 3G Phone offered by Cingular (my carrier), thus future proofing me for a while
- It supports GPRS/EDGE over USB (cable included with phone) or Bluetooth
- Supports syncing with PC (My Powerbook uses iSync, which installed automatically on my phone and worked flawlessly)
- !ACTUAL! Web Browser Support. Phone comes installed with Opera 7.2.x. I updated it to the latest version of Opera by downloading it from Operas website.
- Next-Gen Data features such as MobiTV (Mobile TV, 35 channels including Weather Channel, CNBC, MSNBC, Cartoons, Music Videos) and MobiRadio
- PLENTY of Open Source applications (ie: Putty) are available for this phone because it runs Symbian Series 60 (S60)

I think this phone is right up your ally, especially because all of it's Bluetooth functionality is also available through the USB data cable, which is included with the phone.

Hope this helped! Cheers!

(offtopic)

Just look at some hi-res images, and see the screen images are simulated.. Does the law allow this?

(E.g. in 'photo' 5, the big picture displayed is a lot sharper than the description text. This isn't possible by antialiasing only.)

For SMS usage, the mini-keyboard is more compelling on the E61 than the N93's video integration.

Still hoping they'll offer some sweet bundle on a 770.

Standing by for my overrated mod from the coolest editor evar!

A few months ago I was shopping for an all-in-one device. I settled on the Nokia 6230i.

It auto syncs my calendar via bluetooth when I walk in the front door of my apartment. It has an expandable memory card that I currently store 512 megs of mp3s on. Other standard features include java, camera, audio recorder, fm radio etc. On the other hand, battery life is pretty shit. I play 1-2 hours of music with it a day, and usually it needs to be recharged every 2nd or 3rd day. It does charge fast though.

I am pretty happy with it. Though if I were buying a mobile device today, I would seriously considering going with the Samsung D600.

Why not go straight to the source?

Pics at Nokia.com

You want the Nokia E60
http://www.europe.nokia.com/nokia/0,,81338,00.html

Has most of the features of the N-series phones, but no camera, and much smaller and lighter to boot.

The N93 has a second hinge for clamshell orientation instead of flip phone. Want to watch the video you just took, read e-mail or browse the internet on a landscape-oriented screen? You can with the N93. Want to take a picture or video with the camera up high above the crowd and be able to tilt the screen down and see what it sees? The N93 can. Want to use it as a camera and hold it in the more stable thin-edge-towards-you orientation while still seeing the screen? The N93 can. Yeah I sound like Nokia is paying me for this, but I really like this phone.

AAGH MY BRAIN!

[gets a mop]

Linkage for those curious. . .
technical specifications
N Series overview

Nokia has Sensor, which has the downside of being only available on their phones, but the 'upside' of being available to anyone using Bluetooth. Slightly different concept, admittedly, but at least more generic and a lot less primitive.

I would have said the LCD displays would also chew a fair bit of power - especially on phones like my Nokia N90 with two of them, one a very high res one (352x416). Not to mention people who are high users of accessories, in particular MP3 players and cameras.

Again, because GSM was made to be incompatible, and then enforced by law (plus some other, more positive things), the EU forced their system out there. This would have been fine if it were compatible, US companies would have switched to GSM in 1995 simply for the capacity. Most of their customers were on AMPS, not IS-136, so they could have made the digital solution GSM. Except GSM was incompatible, so they had to choose between their current customer and GSM, a system that provided more capacity and more features (whether they wanted to provide them or not).

If the systems were compatible, my father wouldn't be switching today, he would have had a GSM phone when he went digital in the late 90s. Then rural Michigan and Ohio wouldn't be chock-a-block with towers that only do IS-136 and AMPS. So even if he got a digital-only phone (very likely nowadays), he would have his choice of towers that did GSM and AMPS. And he wouldn't have coverage problems. It isn't the fragmentation that killed him, it's the consolidation, the failure of IS-136 as a viable system and the replacement of it with GSM, and again, the fact that GSM cannot provide even analog compatibility during that switchover)

I don't feel Europe made a mistake choosing GSM. I feel that legislating it (especially today) is a disaster given its incompatibility. I strongly feel making it incompatible was a mistake. CDMA 2000 (even IS-95) provides more available call capacity than GSM (per MHz) and is compatible with AMPS. There was no reason to make the new digital systems incompatible with existing AMPS/TAC (or NMT, sorry about that mistake, I thought Lapland used AMPS, not AMPS/TAC).

Really, Europe had such a strong need for a digital system, because given the cost of landlines, the need for larger numbers of cell phones fast was very evident. In the US, it took years for companies to put people on IS-136 and IS-95. When I bought my first digital phone (in 1997, http://press.nokia.com/PR/199708/778136_5.html, I can't believe I had my analog phone for 4 years!) GTE (nee Verizon) only sold digital to business customers. I had to go through my employer as a front to get a digital phone! Of course, by this time, GSM had been serving customers in Europe for several years, providing much more bandwidth than the AMPS GTE was pushing on over 90% of their customers. (Note that Cellular One nee AT&T had IS-54 in 1992 selling Motorola "aqua phones" to business customers only also). The US could wait for digital cellular to evolve, Europe really couldn't.

A few items related to the argument, but not argumentative:
Lapland is in Finland, not Sweden. I'm sure Sweden (Ericsson) had a lot of NMT too, but I was referring to Finland (Nokia). Lapland is notable because it was the first application of fixed wireless (the 450 MHz version of NMT would be great for this, it could span longer distances than GSM can at any frequency), and was a huge success showing how wireless can reduce the "last mile" problem in very sparsely populated areas. Since it was a roaring success and did what GSM couldn't do, it was the last system to tumble to GSM (in the late 90s I believe) in Europe.

IS-136 is a compatible follow on to IS-54 (IS-54B) that provided what is referred to in the US as "PCS". PCS was a marketing term created to encompass basically what GSM brought to the table, which was voice mail notification, text messages and caller ID (although voice mail notification and caller ID were grafted into NAMPS and even AMPS!). IS-54B and IS-136 provided the ability to offer digital cellular (with 3X capacity and much longer standby times) over the same systems as AMPS. They were wildly successful, the first true national digital coverage in the US was with Cellular One over IS-136. This allowed Cellular One to offer nationwide roaming that actually worked and revolutionized the market. They are not best described as just "digital AMPS", even though IS-54 was marketed as such for a while. IS-136

I used to have a 9300 - no Wifi, though the 9500 does have it (I've not checked out the 9300i featureset, I instead ditched the 9300 for an N90) - but there is a tool for the 9300/i, 9500, and E series phones called Nokia Network Bridge that offers IP Passthrough to give LAN based connectivity to the device. Not perfect at all, but still can be very handy. It doesn't work with WLAN, though (ie if you connect the phone to a laptop that is getting connectivity by WLAN via USB), presumably because it installs a network driver to do the bridging, and the wireless isn't happy acting as a bridge (I dunno these things ;) )

It's not as difficult to build a very usable, very tiny interface on something that only performs one or a few specialized functions, such as the iPod or a cell phone.

I don't even know about that -- there's definitely a non-trivial market for cellphones with big, big buttons, for example, which implies that cellphones haven't exactly nailed the UI thing even for single task devices. Nokia has even started making this an explicit part of their marketing; see their new "Buttons for Humans" campaign for an example.

Hopefully Nokia execs will read this.

Bundle the 770 with that E61, and you will have a dynamic duo.

and almost as many crashes as an unpatched Win98 install.

Here is the english link. No bluetooth though.

According to the article “the handsets aimed at business users, such as the Nokia 9300i and the O2 Atom/Mini incorporate some pretty heavy duty cameras.”

Nokia 9300i does not have a camera! Nokia 9500 have a camera.

According to the article “the handsets aimed at business users, such as the Nokia 9300i and the O2 Atom/Mini incorporate some pretty heavy duty cameras.”

Nokia 9300i does not have a camera! Nokia 9500 have a camera.

I have two voip capable cellphones, a 9500 and 9300i. There are also the PalmOS wifi enabled phones too most of which can get free VOIP software and make free calls from any free wireless lan.

http://www.europe.nokia.com/nokia/0,6771,77854,00. html -phone
http://www.my-xda.com/comp.html -more phones.
http://www.barablu.com/ -voip software.
http://www.skype.com/download/skype/mobile/ -more voip software

You're off the mark a bit. Nokia 770 internet tablet is ~200MHz ARM with 64Mb RAM and 64Mb of flash running debian and maemo desktop - works like a charm:

Symbian is closed? Hmm. If you say so. You can download Python for Symbian phones, or even the full Symbian SDK.

Anyway there are several applications out there that will block particular, or all unknown, numbers from getting through to your Symbian phone. Perhaps it would have helped if the original poster mentioned exactly WHAT phone he has...

I think it depends on what you mean by "first". I don't think that the Nokia E61 is actually in the shops yet either, but it was due for release in February and looks like a far nicer device, with the same bluetooth modem/3G concept, plus WLAN, various synching and push email options and a nice screen. Oh, and Nokia just bought Intellisync, so you can assume that Intellisync is going to provide their superior experience on these E series phones sooner rather than later.

Most if not all of the things you mention are doable with the S60 port of Python. Sure, it requires some hacking, but at least it's Python. Check out Python S60.

I use a Palm Tungsten T PDA and wanted a basic bluetooth GSM phone that I could use to connect the Palm to the Internet. The best I found -- actually, the only basic phone I found -- was the Nokia 6310i. Basic black and white screen, basic keyboard, somewhat large compared to other phones, but IT WORKS. My 6310i is now over 3 years old and I've seen nothing on the Canadian market that looks like it. I have a great Palm PDA - why would I want a $500 colour phone discounted to $99 with a 3 year contract?

Active browsing time via Wi-Fi or Bluetooth is up to 3 hours. Stand-by time of the Nokia 770 Internet Tablet is up to 7 days. from Nokia.

Isn't this similar to the Nokia 770?

Only more expensive...

Nokia is a step ahead of MS:

http://www.nokia.com/770

The 770 tablet is practically all of Origami with the added bonus of open source goodness.

They're crap to use. I mean, they're *useless* for any serious amount of data input, have you ever tried writing a letter on one? and a PDA or smart phone is more useful for displaying data because *it fits in a pocket*...

You want a serious computer, today, it *must* have a keyboard, otherwise it's a data display device.

For those who don't want to carry a PDA, camera, a laptop and a phone, Nokia have the Communicator devices, everything in one.

Big:
http://www.europe.nokia.com/nokia/0,,54106,00.html

Small:
http://www.europe.nokia.com/nokia/0,6771,77854,00. html

They're crap to use. I mean, they're *useless* for any serious amount of data input, have you ever tried writing a letter on one? and a PDA or smart phone is more useful for displaying data because *it fits in a pocket*...

You want a serious computer, today, it *must* have a keyboard, otherwise it's a data display device.

For those who don't want to carry a PDA, camera, a laptop and a phone, Nokia have the Communicator devices, everything in one.

Big:
http://www.europe.nokia.com/nokia/0,,54106,00.html

Small:
http://www.europe.nokia.com/nokia/0,6771,77854,00. html

Yeah I'll stick with my Nokia 770

FBreader, the e-book reading application available on the Nokia 770, supports a format called FictionBook 2 (.fb2) that is apparently very popular in Russia.

There is also a beta CHM viewer available for the 770 that seems to work.

That is the reason why I was shocked when I read the title. I know that there are Nokia phones that can read RFID and Nokia is pushing for its widespread use. Here's a useful link regarding RFID in Nokia phones: http://europe.nokia.com/nokia/0,,55737,00.html

A handheld based around Inkwell

Some folks have it working in principle using a Nokia 770 and Einstein.

You can always ditch the pocketPC and get one of these ;)

I'm writing this from the device using opera 8