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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?
This phone has an integrated flashlight, FM tuner, a calorie burn application, sound meter and thermometer.
Nokia 5200 has a built in microwave
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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/
I guess it beats using my old nokia green blacklit screen to find my missing contact when it falls out at the movies...
"You had this look that of an angel, it was such a bad disguise" --Dishwalla
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
So I don't have to suffer taping a mini mag-light to my handset now? Phew.
"It's not your information. It's information about you" - John Ford, Vice President, Equifax
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.
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
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.
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
I'm not quite sure about the Calorie Burn meter, that might just be to throw off the CIA or FBI, but the rest of the functionality is obvious:
Flashlight - So the Finnish spies can see where they're going and crack safes.
FM Tuner - To receive secret messages coded as Finnish boy-band songs.
Sound Meter - So they know when they're about to go over the threshold of security systems based on sound volume.
Thermometer - Same thing, but temperature based.
It pretty much looks like a bunch of devices from Sneakers rolled into one without the thermal suit. Good thinking on the Calorie burn meter, that'd throw anyone off.
Karma: Not Particularly Funny.
With the sound meter you can measure how loud that dude has to say "Can you hear me now?" to be hear over the static.
Couple of years ago, me and some friends were going snowboarding. We were going to a cabin belonging to the parents of one of us. It was a long drive and when we finally got there it was quite dark.
Problem was, the cabin were in the woods, some distance from any road, and the one who were supposed to know where it was, hadn't been there in about ten years. So.. we ended up stranded in a dark forest, with no idea where we were or where the cars were, with snow up to our thighs. When we finally found a cabin, we found ten of them.
Since it was pitch dark and extremely cold, fiddling with a key trying to find a keyhole in ten cabins were almost hopeless. Until we remembered that we had mobile phones. With the light from the panel of five Nokia phones, we finally managed to find and open the right cabin. So, yeah. Americans suck.
How small a thought it takes to fill a whole life