Slashdot Mirror
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 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.
Sound meter actually quite cool, phone automatically adjust speaker volume depending how much there is background noise while speaking. It rocks! ;)
http://archonon.sytes.net/
Nokia used to make the best phones -- compact, reliable, with modern features. Now their phones look like Nokia raided Ideo's discard pile. These phones look great as objects, but each new Nokia suggests "phone" to me less and less.
If you want a feature packed monster, go for the Sony-Ericsson P800. Now THAT is a phone!
It blows my mind that they throw all of this stuff in there. Yet again a company packages bloatware and throws it out into the market so many people can buy it for many reasons. It is me or are these phones becoming the new "Microsoft-ish" bloatware repositories?
Too much, too expensive.
why would the leave out the bluetooth connectivity?
I think that bluetooth would be more valuable than a flashlight, or the thermometer.
They include stuff that just about nobody will use, and leave out bluetooth. I think that a great selling point of Bluetooth would be local wireless multiplayer games. Then you would convince people to get this phone so that you can play games.
If I have nothing to hide, don't search me
That is a little simplistic (not to mention quite sexist) - I think it is marketed at the kind of person who would buy useless upgrades like the glow in the dark alloys.
Or the kind of people who buy SUV's, that is more the target 'demographic'
At the end of the day, what I want from a mobile phone is the ability to make calls, a battery that lasts ages, and the ability to recieve text messages. All the rest of this shite doesn't interest me in the slightest. I have a torch I carry around anyway.
An infinite number of monkeys will eventually come up with the complete works of
Hmmm.... I ride bicycles, motorcycles, go camping, skiing, etc. I think I lead a fairly active lifestyle. And yet I would not touch this Nokia with a 10ft pole. I like Nokia, my 2 year old 8260 has 700 hours of talktime on it (I have no landline for those who are wondering). It's still working well, after a few faceplate and backplate changes and a couple of thorough cleanups inside (dropping your phone while biking will tend to crack stuff)
I can understand rugged designs, but why did they have to make it look like a 2 year-old's toy? I'd really like to see the design team that thought this cell phone was attractive, because most people will hate it. Why are most companies unable to create a rugged design while keeping a professional-looking exterior? Panasonic proved it can be done with their Toughbooks, but in terms of cellphones I'm yet to see such a product.
But I guess for everything there is a market niche, no matter how small. This phone is probably targeted to those who install led lit cases and antenas on their mobiles. To each his own I suppose.
As someone who designs embedded hardware, I can probably explain a couple of the hardware-based features for those wondering why they're included.
:-)
- Sound level metering is relatively trivial to implement when you're already digitizing a sound stream
- The phone's battery pack might well already feature an IC containing a temperature sensor. It's not unusual for so-caleld "smart" battery monitor chipsets (such as the Dallas Semiconductor DS2438) to have onboard temperature sensing, because "smart" charging of modern battery cells requires this.
So, the designers of the phone just found novel ways to use the existing components. Often made even easier as a lot of the separate ICs in phones these days are actually sitting on a 1, 2 or 3-wire bus (1-wire, I2C, SPI, etc).
FYI...just in case anyone cares
-psy
Unlike the Samsung TGH-500, which is really targeted at women. I don't think many men have use for the menstruation calendar that this phone offers unless it's... um don't shoot me... for tracking the mood swings of his female companion.
Would be pretty interesting in a club or a concert to see just how damaged my ears are getting.
Probably it's used for the automatic volume control and someone figured it'd be a fun little toy to let the user have access to it as well.
Everything that's wrong with the telecom industry (or at the very least, the mobile phone industry) is encapsulated in this phone. Why do I own a DVD player? To play DVD's. Why do I own an air conditioner? To cool my house. Why do I own a phone? To communicate with other people.
I need all this other garbage on this phone like I need a dishwasher on my VCR. Meanwhile, call quality has actually dropped with the increasing use of built-in antennas (like on the Nokia 5100), at the same time as all these useless new features like calorie counters have been added to the mix.
Service providers are not exempt from the same criticism (and let's face it; they're the ones who ask phone manufacturers to include or not include certain features, so the phones are partly their fault to begin with). They've spent the last several years adding new features to their services such as downloadable graphics and ring tones, video games, etc. without doing much of anything at all to increase their basic service quality itself despite an increasing number of complaints about signal strength, even in major metro areas. And let's not even talk about 3G, shall we?
The last time I bought a new phone it was because I physically destroyed my old one in a fit of anger at about my 20th lost call in a row (I threw it at the wall, and it shattered). The next time I buy a new phone will probably be the next time that happens - it certainly won't be because of any of the new features in any of these phones. The industry needs to realize that adoption rates and sales of phones to existing customers are slowing because of serious and basic issues like these, not because our phones don't have calorie counters or FM radios built in.
I used to work for a cell phone company and the we had far more defective returns on higher end phones than anything else... and it's much harder to explain to your manager why you swapped out a $400 phone than a $20 phone.
"Under the spreading chestnut tree, I sold you and you sold me."