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?

Comments

Features

[JustKidding]

The flashlight would seem practical indeed, but i doubt it would be very bright, considering there is no room for a decent mirror to focus the beam. Besided that, i think it would quickly drain those precious milliamps from the battery.

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.

Re:Features

[pete-classic]

This thing is tiny. And it is mostly battery. If it runs off of the phone's battery its size and power consumption would both be negligable.

LEDs generally have an itty bitty mirror built in. Look at a clear one that is off some time, it is pretty easy to spot.

-Peter

Sound meter

[archonon]

Sound meter actually quite cool, phone automatically adjust speaker volume depending how much there is background noise while speaking. It rocks! ;)

Re:Sound meter

[mgarraha]

I suppose you could also use it to tell whether it's quiet enough to make yourself heard without shouting. What the world really needs, though, is a cell phone that automatically switches to vibrate mode in a movie theater or concert hall. A light sensor wouldn't help because so many people carry their phones in purses or bookbags - and have to dig for 10 seconds before they can make them stop ringing.

sad

[appleLaserWriter]

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!

Everything but the kitchen sink?

[corsec67]

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.

Re:It's because of the women

[SkArcher]

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 explanation of extra features

[psyconaut]

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

Always choose the penny phone

[Go Aptran]

When you start a cell phone plan, just pick the cheapest phone that they offer. Often it's free. It has the fewest features but as a result, it tends to have a longer battery life, the sound quality is usually indistinguishable from the more expensive phones and if it breaks, the company won't mind giving you a free replacement, since it's only the "penny phone". Heck, most of the time they'll swap it out for you on the spot if you're polite to the sale assistant.

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.