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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.
Two words - T-Mobile's Sidekick. Color units are coming in a month or two. Has SMS, full HTML web browsing (not WAP!), POP3 email, AIM messaging, scheduler, notes, games, hidden keyboard! GSM/GPRS device. Uber c00l!
All of your data is fully backed up to Danger's servers so there is never a chance of losing anything. Unbeatable deal for less than $100 with unlimited data for $39.95 a month.
No IMAP or syncing via Bluetooth though.
I was just about to buy one yesterday but they were just too big. I really wanted a phone with speakerphone and BT, and this seems to be the only one that I can get on T-Mobile or Cingular.
Went for a T68i instead. It'll have to do for now (atleast it has BT).
OLIVER
Better VDF than VD...check it out: Data Access
how irritatating it would be to try and dial that thing, with the buttons not layed out in the traditional, muscle memory configuration. Oh sure, you can use voice recognition, or look up numbers on a list, but even with all that enabled, I still end up *dialing* my phone about 50 - 60% of the time, and trying to deal with that keypad combination would suck, especially with numbers where you can only remember it by dialing it.
Dude, I think I can see my house from here.
I saw this device yesterday at the AT&T wireless store in the mall of america. Two word - it sucked. Sure it had a great camera, and big screen - but the buttons felt cheap, the device is huge, and feels realy lcheap in your hands. The 5 way navigator didn't click down very well, and.. you get my point. I think the size of this thing kills it. Sitting right next to it was some uber tiny color nokia that i really liked . It had a much nicer feel to it - nokia has good and bad designs.
As for a perfect cell phone i would wait for the Sony Ericsson T608 and T610 (CDMA/GPRS respectivly) They are compeltly new phones with the features of the t68i and more. I can't wait for them to be released.
Anybody see the unauthorized realistic but bootleg commercial advertising this phone on the Net? I had a link to it but it has been since taken down by Nokia's Lawyars.
.mpg's I have seen in a while.
It depicted a couple of zany guys taking a picture of a cat swinging from a celieng fan with this phone. Had the realistic Nokia logo and everything.
Rumor had it that the commercial was put together by one of the ad firms in charge of (or denided) Nokia's account and leaked on to the Net from there.
Definatly one of the most halarious
I just got call tags sent so that I can return mine to ATT. The phone is good. It has good rf performance, better than my T68i. But... It claims to be bluetooth audio, but doesn't work with any bluetooth headset but Nokias. It only works with the bluetooth 'handsfree' profile, not the headset profile that most bluetooth headsets obviously support.
It does synch over bluetooth with outlook, but the alarm for calendar events is fixed. You can't shut it off without silencing the whole phone (or turning it off). I was awakened at midnight the other night by an alarm for my mom's birthday. I like my mom and all, but that sucks. I want to be able to have just visual alarms for calendar events.
For $150, it's a nice phone, it just has a few issues. I'll wait for the P800 to be available through ATT. For now, I really do like my old T68i better.
Here is the latest story from an advertising trade rag. Here is the link to the commercial if you just can't wait.
I love my Sidekick.
They use the same scripts that Amazon.com uses, so that they can market to people based upon their prior purchases. Kinda sucks that you can't go back and edit your post, doesn't it?
I've been working on a project with the 3650 over the past 2 1/2 months and, what can I say, it's a piece of shit. If other Nokias are going to be like this, then they will fall off their pedestal - Nokia is popular as hell, but they're not a monopoly. Their total disregard for quality has pushed a lot of users, including me, to Motorola, Samsung, SonyEricsson and Siemens. The 6210 was a fiasco, bluetooth in the 6310 was buggy as hell (fixed a bit into the 6310i).
Anyway, what sucks in the 3650?
* The keypad. This is definately the *worst* element, it flies in the face of convention and not in a cool and edgy way. I've been using this phone non-stop for the last 11 weeks and I haven't gotten used to it.
* Usability. Nokia took over by offering good usability. Phones used to have a different button for everything, Nokia took that, stripped it down (in the 3110, 51x0, etc) to a single nav key. It's been worse lately - the 6310 has like 13 or 14 main menu options so you can't even use shortcuts (like menu, 2, 2, 1 to write an SMS) to control all the functions.
While it's been slowly getting worse, the 3650 is just a leap ahead. The menus are organized so poorly that it took me 10 minutes to find the clock, took me a cab ride home (25km) to figure out how to turn the keypad tones off. It's just... complicated. Plus, the software is inconsistent - you can link some elements, you can't link others - even tough they seem identical to you.
Anyway, the phone is a total pain in the ass, I hope we start doing something for a newer model but - knowing my luck - it'll be this model all the way until autumn.
Ugh.
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...
"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.