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Nokia 5100 Reviewed
An anonymous reader writes "Just read a review of Nokia's 5100 mobile phone. This phone has an integrated flashlight, FM tuner, a calorie burn application, sound meter and thermometer. And yet there is no Bluetooth capabilites. Is the cell phone market getting so desperate that companies are adding everything including the kitchen sink to sell these phones? Why would you want a sound meter or a calorie tracking application in a cell phone?" Looks like a good phone for people who like phones to look gaudy. Bells and whistles aside, the flashlight feature sounds pretty practical. A sound meter though?
The phones today are becoming the one thing you don't go out of home without one. This is the reason we are seeing more and more things integrated in phones. A picture is word 1000 words? then take it. You want to remember something? record yourself speaking. etc...
Are all this possibilities usefull? One nevers knows. I'd really like to take a termometer and a sound meter to my work place. Then I would have objectives reasons to say "I'm feeling cold" and "It's really noisy in here".
This way perhaps my workmates wouldn't find strange that I am with t-shirt, shirt, sweeter and sport jacket in my workplace (It's nearly summer, I want to sweat dammit!)
Be happy.
So, when do we all just sit down and admit that our phones have acqured way too many useless features. I'm sorry, but who needs a calorie counter in their phone? All the atheletes I know who use such a device wouldn't want a low-end one like this; they'd use the higher-end systems like Polar makes. Ditto with the FM radio: beyond the question of who actually listens to the radio beyond their desk, car or gym, who would want to burn their phone battery doing this? It all seems pretty nuts...
"Stumble before you crawl"
Out of all the cell phones I've ever had, I've always admired the usability of Nokia's menus.
But what the heck are they thinking with these stupid non-standard dialpad layouts? Do they assume that everyone likes using voice dial? I like the ability to be able to blindly use my phone without looking at it, navigating by feel and memory.
Could be a LED flashlight? Low voltage requirements, and are bright too.
These features aren't aimed at women, they're aimed at teenagers.
Teenagers are far more fashion-concious than any other demographic grouping, and are far more likely to upgrade their handsets for cosmetic reasons than adults who'll use a phone until it breaks down of they have a compelling reason to upgrade (eg, Bluetooth).
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
This is why cell manufacturers need to get together and develop a protocol for some sort of suggested operating mode. They could use RFIDs or something... the movie theatres could purchase them and as people walked in the tags would "suggest" to the phone to switch to vibrate. Of course the user could tell the phone to ignore these suggestions, but the default state would be to follow them. Expand it to things like putting it in cars... the phone can automatically answer itself for you, assuming you;ve got some kind of hands free setup. etc. I don't think it would be terribly exspensive either.
Why not fork?
No offense, but open source software does this too. Some applications have features that I can't begin to think of a practical use for. But the cool thing about OSS is you can usually choose whether or not to include the questionable features during the build.
The question still remains...does it work as a phone? Sony-Ericsson and the 8200 series and many other new "tech phones" drop calls, have bad conncection, and break after the first drop. 3 decades of cell-phone technology and they still don't realize that the best phones have an external antenna. I'll stick iwth my old billy-club-size mobile until they can solve those frequent problems.
This would be rather easy to implement as a bluetooth feature. Every theater I have ever been in has had a single point of entry, and two or three points of exit.
The main door, and the emergency exits would all have a bluetooth device that tells phones it is ok to go audio ringing again.
The doors into the auditorium would have bluetooth devices that tell phones to go to vibrate mode.
Phones could vibrate as they are told to go to that mode, (briefly) then chirp as they are told to go to audible ring. With a 30 foot range, the phones would have to know which device was the closest, but if the emergency exit transmiters are 20 or so feet from the actual emergency door, that should cover most situations. (I don't know of anyone who willingly sits in the first five rows of a movie theater.)
Granted it does require that all phones support the feature, and manufacturers seem to loath to add a feature like this. So consider it just an idea.
-Rusty
You never know...
The sound meter seems pretty useless to me, but i guess, since a phone typicly has a microphone build in (d'oh), all it takes is a piece of software.
Actually, that could be really useful if it works slightly differently than as advertised. Frequently, I will be using my phone in a semi-public (or, worse yet, public) place, and after hanging up, I'll realize that I've been more or less screaming into the mouthpiece. I have no idea of why I do this, but if grocery store phone-talkers are any indicator, this is a common behavior. I'd like to see a sound meter built into a phone that monitors the volume of my own speech. When I get too damned loud, the phone would gently beep at me, or light up a little light at the base of the handset, thus reminding me that I'm being annoying.
-Waldo Jaquith
This is one thing that I can never work out on ./
Putting a USB memory stick in a watch is cool,
Putting a PC in a toaster/playstation/other novel object is cool,
Getting a pc to do something new is cool....
but as soon as someone puts extra features into a phone it becomes excessive.
Mobile phones are becoming more and more ubiquitous, they are probably the only electronic device (other than a watch) that we are likely to have with us at all times. They are toys, fashion accessories, and PDAs'. Manufacturers are experimenting, seeing what users want and will use. Surely this is a good thing.
Remember that mobile phones are going to be soon if they are not already more common place than PCs. If you just want to use them to make calls that is fine but if you can have something as powerful as a 386* on you, it may as well allow you to do other things on it
* Crude estimate, based on the fact that both can play wolf 3d.
Seems to me that the sound meter would be fun for people with booming sound systems in their cars and trucks, both for bragging rights and as a possible defense against getting ticketed for violating noise ordinances.
The design, feature set, and price is not intended to make this phone "compete" directly against other phones, it is instead supposed to make certain people - who the /. crowd almost by definition will not identify with - say "hey, that's MY phone!"
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