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Nokia 9290 Finally Available in the US
AmyZ writes "The new Nokia 9290 Communicator has finally become available for US residents. Europe has had the 9210 for over a year now. Its a GSM based phone and well as a PDA that uses Symbian as its OS." I still don't quite feel that the PDA/Cellphone
combo has come of age, but its nice to see another entry. That machine does looks to
be sufficient for basic web tasks.
The actual URL is http://www.nokiausa.com/communicator/features/1,49 83,,00.html. I hope.
Symbian rocks.
--
Don't like it? Respond with words, not karma.
http://www.cnn.com/2002/SHOWBIZ/Music/05/31/eminem . rethinking.ap/index.html
http://www.nokiausa.com/communicator/features/1,49 83,,00.html
Here is a link to the phone that works.
The world moves for love. It kneels before it in awe.
The page you requested has moved. Click one of the links below to go to the new NokiaUSA Web site.
Go here: http://www.nokiausa.com/communicator/features/1,49 83,|SRC-P,00.html - if it doesn't work they are detecting via javascript that you came from slashdot or something.
With almost every punk kid, and teenager on the continent having a cell phone already, i wonder when people will have had enough. Should upgrading your cell phone really be like upgrading your computer, or will people eventually realize that they're paying for all these extra features on a device they still only have so that mommy and daddy can keep track of them..... As for the rest of the population, i'd like to know, just how many people, actually use all the fancy text messaging systems, that you're getting charged $0.04 per letter, for.
0110100100100000011000010110110100100000011000100
your talking into your car stereos removable face. Other than that it looks pretty sweet.
-Tolerate my intolerance
I have bouight one over a year ago, and its running windows CE on it,. IT has been very good , and i must reccomend it.
About the mobile phone/pda combo. Unless you're using an external headset or something similar, how can you take notes while you're on the phone? That's one of the things I use my pda for all the time.
Best Windows Freeware
a coworker just got a treo and i played with it for a while, and can't say that i like it at all.
contrary to what i've read here many times, you can talk on the phone using and ear piece and go through your schedule at the same time, and yes that could be useful. but combining them takes away from both products and the only advantage is carrying around 1 less gadget.
all you end up with is a tiny PDA and a huge cell phone.
i remember seeing a tiny concept pda a while ago with flip out screens that merge to make 1 big screen... if they could do that and keep the size to a standard (small) cell phone, that might be useful, but until then, a visor prism + cell serves my need much better.
MARIJUANA, SHROOMS, X: ONLINE?! - E
http://www.nokiausa.com/communicator/
Do you detect the strong possibility of pr0n sites aimed at wireless device browsers? I wonder if this thing has 16 or 8 bit colour. (teehee!)
Before anyone goes anal over the first "your" it should have been "you're". sheesh
-Tolerate my intolerance
Did anyone else read that as the "90210" model phone? I nearly had a wicked high school flashback of epic bad TV show proportions... So long as this phone doesn't just operate in Beverly Hills, everything is cool...
Jason
He's totally creeping out the Great One, eh...
It's made from pure gold, and it has Jennie Garth's home number pre-programmed.
So how widespread is GSM in the US nowadays? I thought you guys in the Trans-Atlantic Colonies had your own standard? Enlightenment, please.
I was actually at Symbian on Wednesday night at their Cambridge office. One of the things that struck me about the new things they are talking about is that application installation will be a lot easier on the newer phones they are working with. This will help with the PDA / cellphone merge, since the behaviour of the phone is no longer "hard-baked" with the release. If nothing else, it may mean that bug-fixes may become available without having to send off your phone.
:)
Some of the new phones look very cool indeed. Japan is a good indicator, as it tends to be about 1.5 years ahead of Britain (and, ooh, a decade or so ahead of the U.S.
Henry
i don't do sigs. oops.
when countries in the middle east have stuff like the 9290 months or even years before the US?
The Nokia 9290 combines crystal clear sound with text and voice messaging, "browsing," and the best technical support this side of the Atlantic.
My company recently switched from the old Motorola 362z to the 9290 for all of our inter-office and transcontinental communication, and the results have so far been superlative. These babies integrate seamlessly with Windows, Mac, and even Linux productivity apps, and transition costs were minimal.
Another strong point of these phones is data management. In that sense they function as PDAs. In our business we must gather and keep track of thousands of valid email addresses, and the 9290 offers best-of-breed features that make my life a breeze.
Another home run, Nokia...keep up the great work!
Karma: Good (despite my invention of the Karma: sig)
Sony P800
Symbian?
I thought that was one of those vibrator machines those chicks sit on in those movies i found on Kazaa.
Beer, now there's a temporary solution -- Homer Jay S.
I type Dvorak as a preventative measure against RSI. I don't actually have RSI, and I like it that way. I can't even type QWERTY anymore. (Try installing Windows, and entering the CD key in this state; you'll feel like you've locked your keys in the car.)
They should really offer alternate keyboard layouts for nitpicking bastards like me, but more importantly, for those who have injuries that a Dvorak layout helps with.
I use the Kyocera QCP-6035, and find that it does everything I want it to. It's basically just a Palm 3 with cell phone capability. Sprint has them for like $150 right now, and I hear they can be had for cheaper.
i work for a large software company that makes, among other things, video software. (it shall remain nameless.) we started going around the world early last year, showing off how we could make video appear anywhere. the guy who does our demos pulled me aside before the first keynote we did to show me 'something new that nokia was working on.'
my reaction at the time was: um, it's a phone that opens up and has a little computer. fine.
i excitedly open the slashdot link, and see a familiar phone. my reaction now is: um, that's an old phone that opens up and has a little computer.
i've played with this thing a little, and (in case you hadn't picked up on it) it doesn't do much for me. and i love gadgets, yo. i track where i go with a gps device just to draw little maps. but as for this -- i'll stick with my ibook and cell, thanks.
go get it
Here's a great site for finding software for your 9210 or 9290:
http://www.my-communicator.com/
Try playing DOOM or boot Linux/Elks on the IBM XT emulator. Cool stuff!
"I have opinions of my own, strong opinions, but I don't always agree with them." -- George H. W. Bush
Best phone ever: My Qualcomm. I can send/receive calls on it, use the stupid text-based inet if I want, receive inet-phone text messages if someone sends one, and IT FITS IN MY POCKET in a somewhat perfect ergonomic way.
I don't care how good this Nokia thing might be. How I would get it around without feeling like I'm hauling half a brick, I do not know.
Why Apple doesn't yet make a GSM phone, I do not know. (Because there sure as shit isn't someone who gives a toss about tactile function anywhere else.)
For $600, you don't get:
So you've paid a lot of money for a PDA/phone, and then you've still got to fork out more for additional memory, yet another phone to cover the other two bands, and (if applicable) a Mac OS sync program (which isn't even compatible with Mac OS X). And what's with the non-standard units of measurement on the specification page? Nokia are probably trying to disguise the fact that this sucker is 16 cm long and weighs 250 g.
I know there is a Tarantella client for the 9210. I assume it will work on the 9290. Anyone know for sure?
By the way, Voicestream SUX! They are the WORST! Customer service is rude, and they don't care what their own contracts say.
I skipped and got the 6510 instead, which is a damn finde phone which appears to agree very much with how I use a cell.
The killer criteria was size. And being an ascii kind guy and not really seeing a need to browse /. on the road I skipped, reluctantly.
It's a damn fine phone and has cult status herearound nevertheless.
ich bin der musikant
mit taschenrechner in der hand
kraftwerk
Am I the only one who finds that phrase funny? To me, a 'machine' is something that, at minimum, has moving parts. My desktop PC here is a machine, it's got fans, hard drives, eject buttons... I just don't think that a completely solid-state device qualifies as a machine. Buttons don't count as moving parts!!
If all the world's a stage, anyone who says they want better lighting spends far too much time in a dark theatre.
I currently use a Nokia 8890 in combination with a Palm V. They look great and cost about the same as the 9290. (My 8890 weights a lot less and gets "compliments" from chicks, but that's OT.)
Is the browsing experience better for the 9290 than it is on a Palm V using my 8890 as a wireless modem ? (Enough to justify spending $600?)
--Al
I'm just wondering how good cell phone can be if it's running outlook. Eck, blah.
-Customer Service
"We're sorry, your service has been deactivated do to the fact that your phone is spreading the nimda virus."
-Tolerate my intolerance
In general, eventually all phones will come heavy with PDA features, as discussed on Cnet here.
The full specifications page for the 9290 mentions that the phone has "GSM phase 2 signaling," but this doesn't tell me much. It must work on 1900 MHz because VoiceStream is selling it, but will it work on 900/1800 MHz too?
It seems like a great phone, but can it sync with my Linux workstation?
I'm thinking of buying my niece one of these. Anyone know if someone has hacked-up some 802.11b support for these?
It's still a GSM phone, and as we all know GSM phones stink as far as service goes.
As James Earl Jones says, "The phone is only as good as the network it's on" and in this case, the networks all suck.
The two things that I wished that the communicator had are: tri-band GSM for better roaming and GPRS for faster data transfers (which would provide better web page load times and possibly more audio or other data to be transferred.
I wonder how well the Handspring Treo compares to the Nokia 9290. They both seem fairly versatile, and I'll be interested to see which one becomes more popular.
mund freud.
Just install the NFS server on it and mount the Communicator on your Linux machine:
NFS server for Nokia 9210/9290
"I have opinions of my own, strong opinions, but I don't always agree with them." -- George H. W. Bush
My employer gave me two for testing earlier this year. (We're an integrator; Nokia was talking to us about selling them, and we were talking to other companies [such as IBM] about developing/selling applications for our end users.)
As phones, they rock. The best feature (by far) is the speakerphone. I could set it on my monitor, lean back in my chair, and talk to customers without them ever knowing that I was using a speaker phone (when I called my mom, she said it sounded no worse than a regular cell phone call). Setting it up with Outlook contacts is a cinch (I didn't try synching it with any other contact management prorams). The nice wide screen is nice for HTTP: browing (compared to, say, the iPaq, where you have to scroll over to the right to see the rest of the page). I had several movie clips (Spider-man, Episode II, Jurassic Park, etc.) that I would use to show customers just how awesome that little screen was...
As organizers, however, they SUCK ASS. There is NO stylus, and you can't touch the screen like you can on a Palm. You change one contact's info, and it takes fucking forever to replicate those new changes over (an eternity compared to Palm's Hotsynch). While a few features are cool (they've got programs in there open up Word, Excel, and PowerPoint documents), overall it is very unimpressive compared to the many other PDAs out there (Palm, iPaq, etc.).
I'm not sure why the transfer rate is so bad. It takes an eternity to backup over a serial cable (the prototype NFS unit I had, at least, didn't come with any sort of firewire, USB, etc. cable). When you back it up for the first time (everything on the little hard drive to your desktop), you might as well do something else for the next several hours.
I had all sorts of weird bugs on my prototype. The first software version that they gave us was very buggy (I couldn't even synch it with Outlook). Finally I got in touch with a Nokia engineer who FedExed me a copy of their latest one. While that fixed my Outlook problems, I still had all sorts of weird synching problems under Windows 98 and 2000. (For example, my computer would all of a sudden stop seeing my Communicator. I would have to reboot just to see the Communicator again.) This was like 3 months ago, so hopefully they fixed all that in their latest release.
All in all, I've spent hundreds of hours testing them. (Setting them up for sales reps to show customers, recording bugs, installing all sorts of programs [yes, even DOOM!], racking up 5000 minutes on my long commutes each month...etc.). All this testing, and I still can't say that I'd recommend this for the average PDA user. (There are, however, certain niche markets that could definitely benefits from this sorta gadget.)
The sales manager in our company wanted me to set it up so that sales reps could access a 5000 record ACT! database on a Citrix server via these communicators. Because of other more important projects, I put that on the back burner. Has anyone else done anything similar with them?
This thing looks soooo much like the phone used by Val Kilmer in The Saint. Very cool. Don't know if I'll ever get one, but it's still cool.
-- DuckWing
* Tried, 32-bit, multitasking OS (Symbian EPOC)
* Java
* Opera
(forgot to mention)
For the pure software features and power, the price difference is worth it.
Only drawback is size.
Other than receiving headlines e-mailed to me, I honestly don't use it everyday. However, it has helped me on a few occasions:
- We were on vacation, and were supposed to meet someone in Chicago. We wanted to find out something about our meeting, but wasn't sure what number she would be at, but knew she was checking a HotMail-type account. So, we e-mailed her, and got our answer.
- My team has pagers with alpha capaiblity (yes, the phone could fill in, but there are other requirements for the pager). I frequently send a text-page from my phone this way, regardless of where I might be.
- When I'm out of town on business, my wife and I exchanged a series of e-mails. Nice to be in touch on the road randomly.
I admit that I probably could cancel it and only occasionally notice, however, it is providing enough value to be worth it to me.My provider has indicated that they are likely to provide chatting with AOL IM users. Bridging the phone-to-IM gap will be nice.
VNC!
Or am I the only net admin who has to dial in to fix something at the most inconvenient times?
Is the GPF problem solved ?
The Nokia 9110 used to freeze at random times.
Same problem exists with the 9210.
I have my second Nokia 9210 for some months and every week it just stops working for no reason. Worse, it's impossible to turn it on again. Even after removing the battery and Sim-card this Nokia stays frozen for about an hour.
A search on google reveils that i'm not the only one with that problem.
Argh! it would be a great phone if only it were tri-band!
A cell phone is all I really need (and even that is somewhat questionable; more like a cell phone is all I really want). If I need to take notes, I carry around a small notebook (about 3" x 5") and a pencil. Smaller than most PDAs, and I can write faster on it (especially using an informal sort of shorthand) than most people can enter data into PDAs. And I can flip through pages a lot faster than you can scroll on a PDA.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
The reason why we're finally seeing the Nokia 9290 and the Handspring Treo shipping in the USA is the fact both AT&T Wireless and Cingular Wireless are doing large-scale rollouts of GSM digital cellular systems here in the USA, and the 9290 and Treo were designed for GSM operation.
Given that AT&T and Cingular are huge cellular companies, that at once provides a large enough user base for these types of advanced cellphones here in the USA. That means the USA could be riding the wave of 3GSM third-generation cellphones almost as fast as folks in Europe and Japan, since everyone will be using roughly the same digital cellular standard.
Raymond in Mountain View, CA
When a client of mine (in Brussels, Belgium) bought himself a shiny new 9210 with color screen et.al., I traded a few hours of support time for his 'old' Nokia 9110.
The 9110 is pretty cool as well, except it's black & white and runs GEOS, not Symbian. As delivered, it comes with software for managing the data on the device, and has a system for synchronizing data with Outlook.
But beyond the software delivered with the phone are the various programs downloadable on the net. Many things, including documentation, games and utilities are available from sites like http://www.my-communicator.com/ or http://www.9110.ch/nokia/default.htm, including Linux versions of the backup/transfer server.
But I actually use the device as a phone more than anything else--because it's a SPEAKERPHONE! This is the killer app for this device, is that you just open it up and it's a tiny, portable speakerphone with a great menu and lookup system for the phone book. Using the hand free adapter (kind of a tray where the phone is firmly held open--see http://www.9110.ch/nokia/handfree.htm) mounted with two strips of velcro on my car's steering column, I've got a great handsfree phone that I can pop out and use in my office as well.
I'd like to use the calender features more, but I don't use Outlook (I've been using Now up-to-date and Now Contact for years, and they run great under Classic on my Mac OS X G4 desktop).
Using mgetty for PPP logins onto a linux box, I can access my clients' servers Webmin systems using HTTPS, and I keep a machine running Telnet, from where I can ssh to my clients' servers for maintenance and configuration.
In conclusion, the 9110 is above and a great cell phone/speaker phone with a clear, usable interface for phone book use. It's got a decent keyboard for SMS, and uses MMC cards for additional storage. It a good email checker (runs POP3 and especially IMAP is especially useful with this type of mobile use), and the Web interface is usable, albeit painfully slow at 9600 bps.
If your primary PDA use is communications, the Nokia Communicator series is definitely worth checking out.
As a lazy person, I can't be bothered.
In reality, I rarely even carry around a small notebook. I do carry around a pencil, but when I want to write things down, I do it on the back of receipts or napkins.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
I have just one question: can you run an SSH session with them? (For a system administrator or programmer who gets a call about the webserver/application being down and wants to securely login to one over his cell phone...)
--LP
and compared to other cell phones it simply outdoes them. The company that I worked for some time ago was asked to redo the pim applications for the phone and it was going to run (you guessed it) linux. I probably can't say much about it because of NDA's but all in all the development group was wondering when this phone would hit the US market. For what you got it didn't seem all that bulky and had a ton of features.
A totally working version of DOOM in your mobile phone and even in color!
:-) Communicator can also run games from ZX Spectrum (freeware)! If this is not the ultimate gaming phone, I don't know what is.
(actually there's even two versions, Hannu Viitala's CDoom (open source) and a commercial version by Wildpalm)
It has also other great games like Terra Force
But wait, this is not all
I'm still waiting for the first games, which support multiplayer-modes. Unfortunately this may require the GPRS version of Comminicator, which hopefully is out quite soon..
Ville
ps. I'm no way connected to Nokia or Wildpalm..
i've used the 9210 quite a bit in finland,
and they're not too bad, although a little too
bulky for me. i like to carry my mobile in my
pocket beside my wallet. an ethernet / firewire
/ usb port would be nice too.
one thing that size gets you though is a
half size VGA screen. this means you can use
SSH's version of secure shell on it. go to
http://www.ssh.com to check it out. besides
normal SSH2 protocol compatability, it can
do local port forwarding, meaning you can tunnel
the IMAP connection from the built in email client
securely, as well as web traffic using the
browser. pretty slick.
Rami
I wanted a phone that was international but alas as usual this one is GSM/1900 which is only good for the US not 179 countries the GSM900/1900 work in.
I agree that the PDA-Phone has not yet "come of age" because it's just too damn big and clumsy. Not to mention that most normal humans use a phone more than a PDA. The Phone-PDA is a much more viable solution TODAY for most people because the honest truth is that many more people need a mobile phone with limited PDA functions than they need a mobile PC with limited phone functions.
The fact is that TODAY a PDA with add-on phone functions or add-on GPS functions or add-on camera functions is simply much worse than a dedicated device. A PDA is only good TODAY as a dedicated organizer or mini-computer (Palm or PocketPC).
That's why Nokia's solutions work and the Treo solutions do not -- the reason is that Nokia makes Phone-PDA's and Handspring makes PDA-Phones.
Yes, it does (Google is your friend :-)
F-Secure's version exists and there's also
(not so suprisingly SSH's version.
Ville
You don't feel the PDA/Cellphone combo has come of age because the cellular coverage in the US is not ubiquitous enough to make it really useful?
The ability to be anywhere in europe & have datacomm for your pda & voice etc..... is a huge plus when it comes to this.
My employer was nice enough to supply me with an Ericsson R380e. It is also Symbian based, with a (in my eyes) nicer design than the Nokia. /. in my WAP browser).
It has a flipable keypad which reveals a tapscreen. What I like about it is the stylus, the "inbox", voicecontrol (answering calls and calling "voicemarks") and the size.
Downsides are batterytime which Nokia are superior in and it's a bit sluggy in the menus.
The built in email client has pop3 and IMAP support.
It also has WAP support (altho, I consider WAP generally useless, unless someone can direct me to where I can read
English is not my first language, so cut me some slack -: Om du kan lasa det har sa kan du Svenska
http://www.nokiausa.com/communicator/features/1,49 83,,00.html
I saw this thing when I was in Beijing. Ugly as sin, not to mention you have to hold the phone upside down to talk out of it, so the dialpad is on the other side. What happens if you have to enter an extension or something, after you connect?
I dunno about the functionality of it tho.. I couldn't read any of the hanzi characters on the LCD screen.
I'm married.
I would like to point out the SonyEricsson P800 though (look in the products->coming soon). It is another phone running the Symbian OS, but a newer version. It will use the new UIQ interface, so it will have a touch screen and a stylus! It is also smaller than the 9290. It supports GPRS, and bluetooth as well. Oh ya, it has a digital camera built in too...:) It "should" be around $600-700 as well. It is also a world phone. Too bad it isn't coming out till this fall (probably later this year I'm guessing though).
One thing I would like to know about the 9290: Does it support Mac OS X? I don't know if the P800 will yet either. SonyEricsson said they won't know till later if the P800 will.
Another phone that has been on slashdot is the HipTop over a Danger This phone should be out really soon. They told me end of May begining of June...but that is now. So we will see...:)
Hope that is some intresting news for everyone! If anyone has any power at sonyericsson, I would LOVE to test a P800...:)
serff
That's because we have decent land lines, they don't. So they are actually backwards.
Mobiles are better than landlines and make more sense from a communications point of view. Most of the time you don't call buildings, you call people.
Being ahead in watching TV is nothing to brag about. Besides, the programming there sucks even more than in the US.
I think not. Take the BBC for example. Their purpose is to make high quality TV, and they do it well. They turn out a lot of really excellent stuff. (They turn out some shit too, but it's mostly great). They don't exist to make money, which means there's no adverts and it's actually slightly intellectual rather than appealing to the lowest common denominator like 90% of American TV
Their music is total shit. I am prepared to pony up $10,000 cash to anyone who can name ANY good European pop musician who is not a rip-off of an American. Hint: that disqualifies Led Zeppelin, The Who, the Stones, etc.
What about all the European trance producers? It probably isn't to your taste but it has a big following. Oh, and what about The Beatles?
I've got a handspring + visorphone, and it allows me to bounce about while on the phone.
Guess I won't be 'upgrading' to the treo.
I've used the 9000 for a few years. It was a great remote terminal (telnet/ssh) for a lot of sysadmin tasks; it saved me more than once while working at various startups around the south SF bay area. When the 8890 came out, I took to carrying that instead due to it's immensely small size and good IrDA-modem capabilities (just set it beside the laptop and rock on)... as I finally had a tiny Sony VAIO laptop I could keep with me.
.WAV (or with extra software, .MP3) files for ringtones, coupled with the possibility of assigning a ring-tone to every contact entry in the phone, memory permitting. Having one's phone ring like a Daft Punk song or a friend's call announced by a good Pulp Fiction quote is just _way_ too much fun.
The VAIO is long gone, replaced by a meaty Dell 8200. The 9290 finally made it here after 8 months of waiting. The battery life is 8-10x that of the 9000 communicator, the screen is actually useable, the MMC additional memory comes in very handy, and the keyboard is no worse than before. It's a lot faster than the 9000 too.
Things Palmies will hate:
1. No touchscreen
2. Thumboarding-only
3. Most of the good software is from the UK market, and overall there's a lot less of it
It drives my ex-roomie (the Visor freak) nuts, but my friends who are WinCE users took to it pretty quickly. We're playing with the SDK now, trying to get some of our more favored clients to work on the device.
#1 "Geek Factor" the phone has: The ability to play
NOTE: For you California types, poor ol' behind-the-times Cingular has no clue this phone exists, and if you tell them you're using it on their network they tend to freak at you. It takes some serious arguing to get the SIM set up right (for 3 numbers, data/fax/voice) but they will eventually do it... and none of their tech group knows how to configure the WAP browser to work with their network. Their half-assed "my wireless web" product just doesn't cope well. Within a month or two they will hopefully come up to speed on it. I had the advantage of having gone through the 3-number setup for the older 9000, so I got off pretty easy. Once configured properly, it'll forward data calls to an attached laptop or receive faxes in the background, no user intervention required.
For those who asked earlier... yes, you can flip it open and keep working while you talk. You have your choice of speakerphone or ear-piece (depending on how public you want your convo to be). While the phone will intially default to a display showing the calling parties (up to 5 can be in a conference call at once, depending on your network), you can swap to whatever app you wish, for taking notes or reading from a spreadsheet, etc. The 'sound recorder' app will also operate during a call, and will capture both sides of the phone conversation very nicely.
It's not the 'uber PDA'. It's pretty big for a phone. As a combo-device, however, it does very well. The apps integrate with the GSM functions nicely. All my basic PDA needs are met: note taking, contact management, SMS management, faxing, email and simple web browsing. All the phone needs are there too, with the same features as most any Nokia phone, with nice GUI add-ons if you desire... with a battery lifespan that'll compete with any modern phone. These basic needs are quite well met by a device that still fits on the hip and only has to be charged at the end of the work-week, letting me leave the bulky laptop on the desk most of the time. If I really need to do more, I'll be sure to pack up the laptop and bring it along -- and even then, I can use the 9290 as a GSM-modem.
those bloody buttons look pathetic
This phone can run ssh and has a querty keyboard. I fail to see what more you want? If you're a techy then a 80x24 screen is enough to do your entire job. The phone is not that large and 4 people in our office use them constantly for remote admin for Europes most popular content website. Personally I can type at over 20wpm on the keyboard which means SMS and ssh sessions are easy. Having to carry two devices might be okay but one of them would have to be roughly this size anyway to cater for the keyboard and screen. 9210i comes out shortly and will allow streamed realmedia at up to 42kbps (HCSD), so you could get video or radio stations in your palm almost anywhere (well in Europe anyway, the USA is a tad backwards in the mobile phone world).
Afterall it is basically a Psion with GSM capabilities. Its even has the same format, so why no 'fair dinkum' Psion keys instead of those poxie buttons.?
Maybe an S-video output to do presentations from for the true executive.
Pocket PC
I have personally seen and used this phone. It has amazing voice quality, which some phone companies do not spend so much time on, and it is a fully functional iPaq. Slim and sexy, it is the perfect form factor, and drops in a pocket nicely.
Using GPRS, this phone provides an always-on internet connection, so you can browse the web while you are talking to someone! I know I am going to get bashed for promoting a MS powered product, but this one is just plain phat. You gotta try and get your hands on this beaut.
-TinyManCan
Easy. I'll go in reverse order. The Spice Girls had a big following, too. So I guess they are great musicians. Trance makes N'sync look like Buddy Guy. They fail test #1 (none of them are good).
The Beatles fail on both tests. They are a rip off of American musicians. The fact that you selected the Beatles proves that you have the IQ of pocket lint. Do you have any idea they are even called the Beatles? Because they could not come up with an original name and picked a name derived from Buddy Holly & the Crickets, who were American. The fact that the Beatles were popular nearly 40 years ago doesn't make them good. They were the Backstreet Boys of their day. Looks like my ten grand is safe.
The BBC is a load of shit. Christ, they think Monty Python is funny (as do many slashbots, I'm sure). That blows that theory out the window.
As for land lines, both systems have advantages & disadvantages. Ultimately wireless is better. But the point is that the US was successful in getting decent, cheap service using land lines, giving wireless a more difficult time in getting wide market acceptance. That is definitely NOT the case with Europe.
Looks like you are 0 for 3, Ace.
The term "sports cars" implies high performance. As far as performance cars are concerned, Eurpoe is dead last, with Japan not too far ahead of them. Sorry, but the US has a tighter monopoly on performance cars than MS has on the desktop.
European performance cars is an oxymoron. Don't believe me? Compare ANY Porsche, regardless of cost of streetability to a Hemi Cuda or an LS6 Chevelle. What a joke. Care to prove me wrong? Get out your Porsche (which you cannot afford because you are a loser slashbot), and put it up against my Chevelle. The winner goes home with both cars. I won't get many takers, unfortunately. I could use some free money.
Another comparison. Compare a Testarossa to a Viper. There is no comparison. A Viper will eat the Ferrari's doors at 1/4 the cost.
I've had a 9210 (European model) for about 6 months now, so just to clear up some of the conjecture above: Yes it's big. But it fits nicely in my jacket pocket. People look at it and laugh. You open it up, show Doom running (or a java app to a techie), and they stop laughing. Yes there's no touchscreen, and the keyboard's not brilliant. But the keyboard is infinitely better than scratching out letters with a separate pen. I can flip it open, compose a properly punctuated and capitalised text message, attach a picture, and send it off before most other phone users manage to click out CUL8R. Touchscreen users are still looking for their stylus. The screen is great, lots of real-estate for taking notes in a meeting, viewing an incoming fax, remote admin via Telnet/SSH, or browsing the web. Good brightness and colour (12bit - don't know where the 4098 came from above, it's 4096). Battery life is very, very good. No problems taking it away for the weekend without the charger. The speakerphone is, as mentioned above, superb. Bad points now: No vibration alert, but apart from that the phone side is fine, pretty much good standard Nokia fare. Major design flaw - there's too little RAM supplied. You have to use a 3rd party app to close down running programs in order to open up other ones. You can't flash a new OS release yourself, annoyingly you have to send it away for a week or so to an approved service centre. Slow - it's only running at 52MHz, so you can't do full screen or decent framerate video, and will never see some of the apps that a regular 206MHz PocketPC can handle. Sound - basic audio spec for the device is 8KHz 16bit Mono - Completely useless as a MP3 player replacement. Symbian - OK it's not Microsoft, it's quite reasonable for a PDA, but it's got a long way to go from a developer's perspective. It may be a preemptive multitasking OS, but the standard application framework is based around cooperative multitasking, so if you're running anything processor intensive, everything else grinds. The memory design issue cripples the OS, and there's no way of accessing more memory (short of writing your own paging software to offload stuff to the MMC - incidentally this is well slow). There's no concept of security in the OS - a bad program can trash everything. The OS is 'mostly' open for developers, but there are lots of closed private APIs. Synching to your desktop - Absolutely awful. Serial cable!? Is this the 1980s? The connection is unstable and the PC software was written by monkeys. I gave up and brought a USB MMC reader and do my synching manually. The web browser is HTML3.2, with frames added. No CSS or javascript. One page at a time. A large majority of sites just don't work very well (though /. is readable). There was an Opera6 browser promised, but this is unlikely to materialise due to the memory problems.
Java is pretty much unusable (unless you're very careful and close everything else down beforehand) again because of the memory issues.
The killer - the connection speed is 9.6Kbps. You may be able to use 14.4 or HSCSD if your provider offers it, but most don't. Be prepared to wait 30 seconds between each page, with all graphics turned off. I rarely use it for web browsing, except in an emergency. A little bit of email is bearable, but my no means quick.
All in all - If you want a clamshell PDA/Phone with a large screen and a half-decent keyboard, then it's bearable; as there's no other device out there like this, you might as well get one. If you're in Europe, wait for the 9210i as it fixes some of the memory problems.
Hard_Code wrote
...and a big fat BEAT ME UP PLEASE sign on your back, right?
-Tolerate my intolerance
I guess you are also carrying around little lead figures for your priest and your wizard?
perhaps we can put the link in the main page that atually works.!!
Its not that brick phone is it that has a screen?
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www.emotioncafe.com
I'm still waiting for America to get The Matrix phones you can get in Australia..... we can't have them all because of some silly power consumption rules. :-P