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Nokia 3650 Released in US Market
A Swing Dancing Dork writes "Check out the new Nokia 3650! Video and still imaging, MMS support,Bluetooth,Triband, and polyphonic bliss all wraped up in a uber-modern package." I was looking phones all morning so I'm glad this showed up. Anyone have advice on cel phones? I'd like IMAP, HTTP, and IM, as well as PDA functionality that can sync via bluetooth to a Mac. I was looking at the Sony Ericsons, but this may work as well.
What about something that can sync up with Linux using bluetooth.
Am I the only one that doesn't care if I can play games and take pictures with a PHONE? These things bug the hell out of me. They REALLY need to come up with a better word than PHONE to use for something where the communicative abilities have obviously taken a back seat to solitaire.
ALSO, is there anything more COMPLETELY FUCKING STUPID than TEXT MESSAGING someone from a PHONE, where you could type less and ACTUALLY CALL THEM? GRRRRRRR......
'Standards' in computing only impress those who are impressed by things like 'standards'.
I have a Handspring Treo that I really get a kick out of. It works as a regular (although larger) flip phone when I need a phone, and as a PDA when I need a PDA. Today I was waiting at the salon to get my hair done, and while I was waiting, I was surfing Google and trying to find a good software package for one of my clients.
The Treo has AIM/Yahoo/MSN support thanks to VeriChat, which I highly recommend. I also use Top Gun SSH to SSH into my servers from anywhere.
Treo Central is the hookup for new software, and is also a good site for ringtones (if you're into them -- I like the wide selection of ringtones that come by default.)
Also, PalmNet lets you connect your Treo to your laptop and get 10K/sec Internet access wherever you can find a Sprint PCS connection.
All in all, if you need more than just a phone, the Treo is a winner. If you want just a phone, get just a phone... but even my boyfriend, who has one of those LG phones that you get for free with Verizon, gets jealous of me surfing around the Internet, playing games, and chatting when we're waiting in line for something.
The Treo is $149 right now. If you are a current Sprint PCS customer and you sign another 1-year Advantage agreement, you may be able to receive a service credit. I got a $200 credit [4 1/2 months free] just for signing up for another year, but I had to negotiate heavily.
Hope this helps...
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I wish this was a CDMA phone, from the web site it had it listed as GSM
n nor.net
I am looking forward to the point when they have a bluetooth CDMA cell phone, I have the palm pilot tungsten t and a bluetooth adaptor for my laptop. I found that Jabra makes a bluetooth headset for non-bluetooth phones, but it only works for audio it does not do data. Here is the response I got from them when I asked about the headset.
The Bluetooth profile supports audio but not data. Sorry.
Thank you for contacting JABRA Customer Service.
Heather A. Fox
Customer Service Representative
800-327-2230
-----Original Message-----
From: Michael P. O'Connor [mailto:m.p.oconnor@verizon.net]
Sent: Wednesday, April 16, 2003 4:10 PM
To: info@jabra.com
Subject: question about the FreeSpeak for non-bluetooth phone
I have the Qualcomm QCP-2760 phone and was wondering if this will also let other Bluetooth device to connect to the cell phone, so that I can use a Bluetooth pda to dial the phone, and to use both a laptop and the pda to connect to the internet via the cell phone thought the dial connection I have setup for the phone. Can I do data over the Bluetooth adaptor? Thanks for your time.
Michael P. O'Connor
m.p.oconnor@verizon.net
http://mikeoco
This has been talked about a lot on the Tungsten T mailing list on yahoo groups ( http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Tungsten_T/
You can download an updated version of the Videorecorder app from the Nokia site as well, instead of video only, you get video & audio.
I especially like the PC-Suite, you can drag 'n drop an mp3 to your mobile (if it's linked through cable, IR or BT) and it automatically is converted to aThe best weapon of a dictatorship is secrecy, but the best weapon of a democracy should be the weapon of openness.
You know what I want in a phone?
- The ability to make calls
- The ability to receive calls
That's it. My 2-year-old Sprint PCS phone recently got a crack in the LCD, so I've been looking to buy a new unit to replace it.
So far, I haven't found any models that cost less than $100, because they're all crammed full of features that I don't need, like color LCDs and voice recognition and built-in cameras and programmable polyphonic MIDI ringtone generators and speakerphone and integrated PDA features...
Why isn't anyone serving the low-end market?
The best thing about T-Mobile's data support: it's not a stupid CDMA "cell modem". It's an "always-on" packet protocol, GPRS. Instead of paying for connect time, your pay for the amount of bandwidth you use. If I weren't broke, I'd trash my obsolete, poorly-designed SCH-3500 and get one of these.
Or maybe not. I've been wondering why there hasn't been more buzz about the widespread availability of GPRS. Are there interface issues using it to run a web browser? Or are people just unenthused by the 56K bandwidth? Hey, it's fast enough to access slashdot! What more do you need?!
When cells first came out, a lot of people in the U.S. already had "mobile" telephones. These were basicaly point-to-point radios that tied into the phone network. Expensive, because they tied up a lot of radio spectrum. Obviously, you need a word other than "mobile" to describe the new service.
I bought one of these off of eBay a couple of months ago, and sold it shortly after I bought it despite having invested in a 128MB MMC card. A few key comments:
1. While I thought the keypad would be interesting and innovative, it's actually a disaster in consumer product design. The standard 3x4 keypad design is so commonly employed that people now input numbers/PINs/etc. as much for the pattern of the digits as the number the combined digits form. I found while using the device that even numbers I have known and dialed for years did not easily come to memory as the phone lacks the visual queues the familiar layout provides.
2. The device supports a limited set of Bluetooth profiles, so that Jabra headset you bought or the first few generations of SonyEricsson headsets (through the HBH-30) won't work with it.
3. IMAP over SSL/TLS? Forget it. Doesn't work.
4. The user interface feels childish and inelegant. This is just my opinion, but when you compare it to either UIQ on the SonyEricsson P800 or PocketPC 2002 it appears more to be the product of an early-stage, open source project than commercial UI design.
5. The video camera only captures ~12 seconds of video. This is NOT a storage limitation, as this restriction exists no matter how much storage you have available.
6. Also personal opinion, the construction of the device feels cheap and "plasticy".
Still, the device category has come a hell of a long way since the IBM/BellSouth Simon...
Then, don't write here!!! Who made you post to this forum??
I have a 7650 (first Series 60 phone), that I've bought in a promotion that my telco was offering. My phone costed me just about $75. I wasn't going to buy a $700 phone by then. My first impression of the device was that it was quite "useless" at the beginning. Then I started to configure the e-mail. Because I travel a lot, and most of the time I'm away from a "NETed" computer, I started to see if I had important e-mails in my mail box. Then I started to use the Callendar function, started to add some extra programs (yes, this works like a PDA!!!) and games!
The camera has been usefull quite a few times (like in an accident a friend had, so that we could take pictures of the car and send them to the insurance company)
All of this can be syncronised with a PIM program like Outlook or Lotus.
The only four drawbacks the 7650 has are:
The 3650 addresses all this problems, because it has a longer battery life, BT audio profile, Multimedia Card for extra storage of programs, contacts, pictures, videos and last but not least: TRIBAND!!
If you want a phone that just does phone calls, you can buy some models from Nokia that just plain do that!!
mazevedo
"If you travel at ALL, then GSM is currently the only way to go."
I can travel in a country of 300 million people that is three times the size of Western Europe and never pay roaming fees or need to switch my phone. Not to mention coverage in Canada.
"slight technological advance that the CDMA air interface has"
2x more people per cell, as well as much larger cell sizes is not "slight". It's massive. That's why I have unlimited calling to anyone else on the same CDMA network. That's why I get unlimited off peak minutes and 500 free peak minutes. That's why I get unlimited 144kbps data service.
GSM doesn't work in the US. The cell size is simply too small. If you look at the carriers who have adopted GSM (AT&T, T-Mobile, Cingular) vs. the carriers who have adopted CDMA (Sprint, Verizon), the CDMA services have far better coverage.
17km cells may be fine when your country is the size of California. The US has fewer people than Western Europe, yet it is nearly three times larger. Much of that area is sparsely populated. Covering Wyoming using GSM cells is sinply not feasable.
"The sooner CDMA and other US-centric telecom technologies buy the farm, the better for consumers."
Nope. Having a diverse set of technologies is good for consumers. Being locked into a fast-aging standard is bad. What's good for consumers is having both standards available and letting the free market choose the best option.
Most people in the US will rarely need to leave the country. Europeans may travel from country to country often, but Americans do not. Interoperability with other systems is not a criteria most Americans care about.
So far, people in the US have chosen CDMA over GSM technologies. CDMA does more and costs less.
The parent article makes some good points about the relative suitability of GSM and CDMA in a large and sparsely-populated area such as North America, however one point needs addressing:
Diversity in available technologies is only beneficial to consumers if those consumers are free to easily switch between technologies, and if the technologies are interoperable from the consumers' point of view. This is an often-forgotten tenet of competition; if there are barriers to switching between competing providers, you don't have competition, you have overlapping monopolies.
Consider the application of the above statement to Internet standards:
... and imagine that Internet devices could only speak either TCP/IP and HTTP or the other (proprietary) standard, not both. The result would be market fragmentation, consumer bewilderment, and the maintenance of proprietary monopolies.
I'm not arguing that GSM is superior to CDMA, or the reverse - they both have good and bad points. But don't be fooled into believing that it was the "free market" which put CDMA in place and keeps it there in North America; it's quite the reverse.