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Er... here in Europe we call that "my phone".

Seriously, though... you guys don't have digital flash-memory video cameras on your cellphones? WTF? Digital still cameras have been standard on cellphones for the last two years, video and flash memory last year. I don't want to start a "diss the yanks" thread, I realise there are plenty of things y'all do better, but... you chaps need to have some serious words with your cellular providers, you're not getting good handset upgrades.

My phone has digital video camera and an MMC card offering up to 1GB of storage. The phone came free with 100 minutes of calls on a monthly £25 (US$50) contract, albeit only with a 32mb MMC card, then I purchased a larger MMC seperately for thirty quid. My missus got one too, free with contract again, here's footage she shot of squirrels in the churchyard.

I didn't even need to change contracts. I just rang them up and said I'd quit my contract after a year unless they upgraded my handset to a video model. It was delivered next day.

I have actually written several small apps for my phone, a Nokia 7610, mostly just to see if I could. And according to the info at Forum Nokia it seems to be possible to also write apps for the phone in C++...

/Mikael

I have actually written several small apps for my phone, a Nokia 7610, mostly just to see if I could. And according to the info at Forum Nokia it seems to be possible to also write apps for the phone in C++...

/Mikael

I don't see what all the fuss is about with these treo & SE phones. In the coming weeks the Nokia Communicator 9500 http://nokia.com/phones/9500 is coming out and will blow them all out of the water:

Symbian OS (like the P900)
Wifi, Bluetooth and GPRS
Great keyboard (not like the Treo)
Great battery life

I've seen a lot of people scribbling away on their keyboard-less pda's and for me it remains an inferior method of text input. Ever tried doing an ssh session with a pen? The Treo's keyboard is a joke.

Main disadvantage is the size, the 9500 is quite large. In a few months the 9300 http://nokia.com/phones/9300 will be released that solves that issue at the cost of losing the Wifi and some of the battery capacity.

I don't see what all the fuss is about with these treo & SE phones. In the coming weeks the Nokia Communicator 9500 http://nokia.com/phones/9500 is coming out and will blow them all out of the water:

Symbian OS (like the P900)
Wifi, Bluetooth and GPRS
Great keyboard (not like the Treo)
Great battery life

I've seen a lot of people scribbling away on their keyboard-less pda's and for me it remains an inferior method of text input. Ever tried doing an ssh session with a pen? The Treo's keyboard is a joke.

Main disadvantage is the size, the 9500 is quite large. In a few months the 9300 http://nokia.com/phones/9300 will be released that solves that issue at the cost of losing the Wifi and some of the battery capacity.

The candidates I am looking at are

Nokia Observation camera that can send a MMS picture taken on request.

Another one is the Nokia remote camera, with better picture quality but not release yet.

I think there are probably other stuffs out there. But I am looking for something that I can monitor from my mobile essentially. Other ideas welcome!

The candidates I am looking at are

Nokia Observation camera that can send a MMS picture taken on request.

Another one is the Nokia remote camera, with better picture quality but not release yet.

I think there are probably other stuffs out there. But I am looking for something that I can monitor from my mobile essentially. Other ideas welcome!

I don't know if Art Deco is your cup of tea, but check out these phones

They've got that retro-futurism thing going on.

In the UK - and I'd guess the EU, there are nokia stores

They're telco agnostic, *very* knowledgable, do stuff like upgrade firmware, swap faulty 'phones (without needing to go near your telco 'support'!), sell accessories, show off the latest phones, etc

It's nice, because I end up with 3 differing places to go for support:

* Vendor (eg carphone warehouse)
* Phone OEM (nokia)
* telco (eg o2, etc)

They each have differing support strengths for me as a consumer, but if I want a firmware fix (eg for a problem with the bluetooth stack on early 6310is), it's straight to nokia for me

I've often wondered why cell-phones don't have some type of similar device

more here

I get tired of the whiners that ask that question in every single article about cellphones with an even moderately extended featureset. Nokia (for example) produces some good, cheap phones that you can use as a phone, and not much more, like these: 1100 and 3510i (warning, although cheap, the 3510i has Java support. The horror!

I get tired of the whiners that ask that question in every single article about cellphones with an even moderately extended featureset. Nokia (for example) produces some good, cheap phones that you can use as a phone, and not much more, like these: 1100 and 3510i (warning, although cheap, the 3510i has Java support. The horror!

My Nokia 6800, as I've mentioned once upon a time, is pretty much the cat's meow.

Now if they had included a decent camera (besides your typical 1.something MP ones they have now on cells), and some sort of MP3 playback capabilities to give iPods a run for their money, well hell...that'd settle my wish list!

..Will have atleast Chinese support. Keep your eyes focused at the web pages.

..Will have atleast Chinese support. Keep your eyes focused at the web pages.

Like Nokia 5100?

I think that the 6230
is a excellent phone. I am very happy with it. and they sync. are not total crap anymore, but not great either. I went for a bigger memory module than the one that came with the phone(32mb) and transfer the MP3's I want to hear on my way to work, via bluetooth. I have managed to connect to the internet via bluetooth also(although painfully slow with GPRS). The radio also works well.
This is the first Nokia phone that I have liked since the 7110. and the battery time is good also.

The link over at Nokia.

Anyway, in Europe, AFAIK, it's too late. It has been a long wait for such Tivo-like products

I thought there were already Tivo-like products on the market in Europe. This is the first one that comes to my mind.

Granted it is not a Tivo, but some models still offer PVR functionality.

Amiga, Linux, Tivo ... my fascination with cult-like technologies would intrigue any psychiatrist :-)

Hafta agree with you....and the other thing I can't figure out is how this is any different (or more advanced) than the 6600 or the 9500...both seem to have almost the same features....

Hafta agree with you....and the other thing I can't figure out is how this is any different (or more advanced) than the 6600 or the 9500...both seem to have almost the same features....

Well, my Nokia 3300 lets me use any mp3 file as a ringtone. It has a USB connection so I can download them from my PC, and a microphone socket so I can record from any audio source. Oh, and a radio which I can also record from.

Naturally it has a built-in MP3 player too, with 128Mb storage on standard compact flash cards. Which I can also use as a regular USB storage device for transferring files around. Battery life when not playing music is around 4 days; charge it nightly and it has enough juice to use it for 2-3 hours of music a day (more than my commute) plus regular phone use the rest of the time. And yes, it was free with my contract (second-cheapest contract on offer).

Mind you, this was last year's model. It was discontinued 3 months ago. The 7600 plays AAC and video as well.

You don't take much risk : Nokia bluetooth keyboard

I just wanted to point out the obvious (but apparently not so obvious for many) that almost all of the mobile providers offer phones without some degree of features such as cameras, MP3 players, and the kitchen sink. It makes me wonder if anyone's actively looking for one...

T-Mobile - Nokia 6010
Cingular - Nokia 3595
AT&T Wireless - Nokia 2260
Alltel - Nokia 3585i
Verizon Wireless - Nokia 3589i

OK - now perhaps you're one of those who feels that color screens are over the top for mobile phones... so what to do? Why not look around on eBay?

With that said, I wholeheartedly appreciate the trend of adding features to phones.

Rotary phones "just worked." Why did they even bother adding that newfangled touchtone button dialing or even eliminate operator-connected calling? They always "just worked." The reason: progress.

I love Caller ID and SMS... they're infinitely useful and convenient. Sure... features like Push-to-talk and loud ringtones are annoying... but only when they're blantantly misused or inappropriate... like for personal conversations and in classrooms, respectively.

I just had to say this because I really dislike comments like "just give me a phone that works" because if telephone tech never evolved and never incorporated any new features, we'd all be using AMPS. We've come a long way from the days of car phones. And I, for one, LOVE being able to check my eMail on my 3650. Granted, network reliability should be paramount, but I've never had any lingering issues with my T-Mo service.

I guess I'm less spiteful of the industry than I used to be.

So did I until I bought this

Now, I think for most tasks, I could probably replace a PC now if the damned thing could be connected to a monitor (you can already connect a bluetooth keyboard)...

Considering that, I think three years is not a stretch at all...

The Nokia 6230. You can put up to a gig mmc card into it (it comes with 32mb, I use a 512mb) and you have a nice little mp3 player. The Nokia headphones are terrible but you can mod them and use your own. I use a pair of Sony e888s and the sound is fantastic. Plus when you get a phone call you can patch it trough to the headphones and use the mic on the wire, the little button will switch to the next song otherwise. Plus you can use mp3s both as ringtones and as your alarm clock.

The Nokia 6230 (and the forthcoming 6260) are somewhat more impressive, using interchangeable MMCs to store up to and above 128Mb of data. And I don't think iTunes compatibility is a great reason to endure such lousy storage capacity.

I replaced it last week with a Nokia 6600, which, with the exception of the full keyboard, does everything the Sidekick could do and more, only better. Plus it actually works well as a phone.

How universal can any kind of "identity system" be before it gets scary and/or illegal? (Illegal in countries with data protection laws anyway.)

Nokia is on board with this, and as more and more of my personal information gets concentrated on my phone I'll probably end up using it.

Eventually we'll probably all have a digital "passport" of some kind - and much better this way than the Microsoft way - but it's still a bit creepy.

...I would like to see a really durable phone that was made out of rubber or something

Actually that has been one of Nokia's best points for customer loyality, the durability of the units. I think that the biggest reason why Nokia didn't use the clam shell form factor was because of weakness of the hinge.

I love Nokia phones, never had a problem with one of them, my old phone (8260) still works, and I was hard on it.

I love Nokia phones, never had a problem with one of them, my old phone (8260) still works, and I was hard on it.

I love Nokia phones, never had a problem with one of them, my old phone (8260) still works, and I was hard on it.

Outside North America, Japan and South Korea (perhaps Taiwan too), the world uses the GSM standard. Most of Europe, Africa, Asia and South America are just one huge area of a single standard.

Now that GPRS (data for GSM) is widespread, people are starting to use mobile phones in different ways. I know people who chat with me over Yahoo Messenger and MSN Messenger using Nokia 6600, or a SonyEricsson P900. The latest fancy models have Symbian in them and semi-decent color screens that can be used for browsing, chat, ...etc. Free applications abound for Symbian.

The main points for GSM is that:

• The end user gets to chose the phone from ANY manufacturer, not pick from a limited selection provided by the network provider. One can change phones without changing networks, and change networks without changing phones.
• Roaming is much easier, since there is just one standard among these areas.

The person I know using Nokia 6600 is happy with it so far (he has been using it for a few weeks).

The downside? The person I know who uses the Nokia is almost exclusively a Linux user. He keeps Windows on his laptop to sync the phone to it! Darn!

if I only used my phone to do the things you can do then it would probably last TWO weeks.

the battery lasts about 20 days in standby mode.

in case it wasn't explicit, I meant 4 days of MY typical use - that means phone, SMS, internet, email, calendar, games, mp3, pictures, videos etc., all the time using a 208x320 65,536 colour touchscreen display.

also, my phone weighs 130g, yours is 170g. and you must have a really special battery because none of the ones Nokia list allow more than 6 hours talk time, whereas mine is 16 hours talk time.

your phone is also considerably longer and thicker than mine. mine is wider, but that's not surprising given my 208x320 65,536 colour display vs. your 5 lines of greyscale.

Looking at the current lineup, I see 4 out 20 phones (which one is touchscreen) that do _not_ have 4 rows of three numbers layout.

People claiming that nokia keypads suck are referring to minority of the lineup.

.. that can make phone calls and NOT take pictures (Ah!), NOT allow changing a faceplate in under 5 seconds (Oh!) and NOT do something else as usefull as baking a cake or running an embedded Java (why not Perl, BTW ? ;)).

Seriously, I've been looking for a new phone with no extra features - just wanted GSM phone, which is light and small to carry in a pocket. It also must look good, but that's subjective. Something like this (Nokia 8910), but triband or at least Canada-compatible.

And guess what - I'm still looking :-/

I just got a 6100, and I like it a lot.

However, there are a couple of things I just can't figure out.

Like why Nokia didn't include a Java-based HTML browser and e-mail client. If a third party can make them, you'd think Nokia would give it a shot as well.

Or why there is only *one* game pre-installed, and not a very fun one at that ("Chess Puzzle").

I can make up for these deficiencies with a few Euros and a few downloads, but it strikes me as odd that Nokia didn't bother updating their phone software on that particular model, which where I live (Hungary) is being pushed as a sophisticated low-price handset (I paid about 80 EUR with a contract.)

The real bummer about this is that Nokia has far and away the most open platform for development of any phone manufacturer. They provide a huge array of sdk's and example code for both symbian and j2me developers.

Contrast this with an LG phone running brew on verizon and you have to pay all kinds of money and jump through all kinds of hoops just to write an app that verizon decides it doesn't want to distribute anyway.

My (very small) company is developing a cellphone app, and the costly barrier for starting Brew/Verizon devleopment is preventing us from using that platform. You pay through the nose for the development suite, then it's 300 bucks to register as a qcomm developer, then you have to jump through all of these verisign hoops to get a DRM key to sign your apps with, then you have to mail in your phone to be flashed into development mode, then you have to deal with verizon for distribution.

Meanwhile we're downloading compilers, tools, and example apps off the net for the nokia symbian platform that just work on an unmodded handset we bought at the store.

My Nokia 7650 is 18 months old. It has a camera and Bluetooth. I am in Europe so I am not sure if there was a version which ran in the US. The model is obsolete now anyway.

Now to what is wrong with it: It runs out of power after 5 days. For the last 36 hours or so of those 5 days, if you actually want to telephone with it then it powers down. You can power it back up again and send messages, take photos, whatever, just phoning takes too much power. This thing is supposed to be a telephone. What use is a shrinking violet phone which hides whenever someone calls it?

When I originally got it, it was set up so one of the two main buttons went into camera mode and the other one went into some Internet function. Hey guys, this is supposed to be a telephone. Calling (or messaging someone) needed 5 or 6 separate inputs and some positioning with a trackball. It was only when I found out how to reconfigure the beast that it actually became useable. Apparently a lot of phones do not allow reconfiguring.

Having said that, my next phone will probably be a Nokia as well, friends have Siemens phones - I will never go there - another friend has a Sony. The menus in both cases are simply too cryptic.
Whatever it is, it won't be a 7610. The keyboard layout is simply insane.

The advantage of a Nokia used to be that they were good phones which were really easy to use. Some of the more recent models are poorly designed toys, overloaded with too many useless functions which just added unnecessary complexity.

I've recently switched to a Nokia phone after using Motorola for a few years. It is *much* better for texting (SMS). I just wish that I could run the software that they offer through their website; unfortunately it all requires Windows. Supporting Linux might help them to get back at least a little of the market that they are losing.

Then....

This model looks kinda goofy, but anyway... S90 will have full support for mp3, AAC and so on.

I've been using Nokia 6600 with Salling Clicker for a while now and it works great.

It can control just about every program and SC ships with ready scripts for the most used, like iTunes, Keynote and Powerpoint.

I just got a nokia 6230, with a 512 mmc card off ebay (you can get a gig from mobymemory) and it is a great mp3 player, cell phone, and digital camera in one little box. You have to solder new headphones to get decent sound, but otherwise the quality is fine, and if you get a phone call, you push the button on the wire and it patches the call through.

I've always like the all-in-one gadget idea, and right now the cell phones are the only ones headed in that direction.

WiFi will be available on the new Communicator as well. The downside with that one, I hear, is the new "improved" keyboard.. But other than that, it looks set to continue the Communicator tradition of a really successful blend of phone and PDA.

This is not the only one. They will also have Wi-Fi in the new Nokia 9500 Communicator. See the Feature list on Nokia's site

A good example is mobile phones. My Nokia 7610 takes about 40 seconds from power on to being usable. Similar start up times exist for the SonyEricsson P800 and P900.

Personally, I would prefer it to be no more than 5 seconds, although I don't really have a particulary compelling reason why the extra 35 seconds means so much, other than it's a little annoying.

What I don't get is why Nokia didn't design it like the 6810. The 6810 even has a joystick! Just replace that keyboard with a DPad and buttons, and you'd be in business. Instead they thought that everyone would want to talk into something that looked like a reject from a Fischer Price factory. Go figure.

I don't want to spend money on 3D acceleration on my mobile phone. I begrudge even having to pay for a colour display!

I'd be comfortable with the really-old style number LEDs that were common when cell phones (usually called 'car phones') were first becoming popular. I want to have a phone to talk to people. Seriously, just look at some of the stuff built into These phones. I dont want to have the 'built in' cost of:

• bluetooth
• Infrared
• big screen
• color screen
• touch screen
• 3D graphics processor
• Address book
• web browser
• GPS
• Digital Music
• Java processing
• Camera, for streamed video and audio
• RealOne, MP3, AAC, Midi, Wav, and a dozen other formats supported
• A bunch of games (Tony Hawk's Pro Scater, Tomb Raider, Sonic, MLB Slam!, Super Monkey Ball, more...)
• stereo audio output with headphones

• big screen
• web browsing
• voice dialing
• Phone & address book
• Several games
• vibrating alert
• GPS (for E911)
• TTY/TTD

And that's it.

But the major companies WON'T do that, since that means they can't find convenient ways to charge you $50+ monthly. Well, there's always prepaid wireless...