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Nokia Enters PVR Market
Daaelar writes "Nokia has just recently announced their entrance into the PVR market with the realease of their Mediamaster 260 S. It apparently has PVR capabilities as well as the ability to receive small images via Bluetooth for viewing on a larger screen, i.e. your television. It also includes some built-in games, as well as a feature to record from a digital camera or camcorder."
Wow, if the pictures taken on a mobile phone didn't look bad enough..wait until they get transmitted to a 36" TV...yikes!
here. The flash intro linked in the article doesnt even provide any specifications.
As long as I can stick a flashing antenna or two on it, I'm game.
The Human Cow - bringing you scrumtrelescence since 1995
Screw the PVR capabilities. IT PLAYS GAMES!
Only partially kidding...
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Crudely Drawn Games
this was supposed to be a microsoft article. It's sco, riaa, microsoft, not sco, riaa, nokia.
With the Nokia Mediamaster 260 S, you can pause live TV, answer the door, and continue watching right from where you left off.
Ah, the satisfaction of putting the Commander in Chief on hold.
The coolest voice ever.
It will be flashy but work poorly and if it somehow falls onto the floor it will break into 5 or 6 different pieces...
it apparently can play video games
Like the Amiga?
it apparently has a framebuffer
Like the Amiga?
It apparently hooks up to your TV
Like the Amiga?
(sorry...not dissing the Tivo, but why are Slashdot readers dissing competition in one area, (PVRs) while whining about the lack of it in another? (Microsoft)
Bah. Nokia was a tire (yes, those rubber thingys that goes on car wheels) company from the beginning. Their willing to expand into new markets and doing reasonably well is what has made it a succesful company. This is a much shorter leap.
Why not play between programs? The Nokia Mediamaster 260 S has games built-in so you and your family can play
Man, what would my family do without those built-in games? Interact?
Nokia classics, such as Snake, Tic-Tac-Toe, and Card Deck
Dude! Nokia invented Tic-Tac-Toe? I have all sorts of overdue kudos to give them!
The coolest voice ever.
But does the Nokia go the other way, from the DVR to my Nokia handset?
With my Windows Media Center, I have DVR functionality where I can transfer recordings directly to my Smartphone/PPC. I can also burn them to DVD for archiving. This is where MCE beats TiVo.
Wasn't this one of the problems in the dot-bomb? Haven't companies learned that it's better to be really good at one thing, and stay out of markets for which they are not suited, rather than be mediocre and lose money hand over fist? Not that I have a problem with companies trying to innovate, but I just wonder how wise this move is for them.
Overrated / Underrated : Moderation
There's no information anywhere with the most important information about the box: how many tuners it has. You need more than one tuner, if you want to watch one program while recording another. And, I wonder if it has good electronic program info (with program information, times etc). The technical specs are extremely weak: System Resources * Processor: 32-bit / 166 MHz * Flash memory: 4 Mbytes * SDRAM: 16 Mbytes * Display: 720 x 576 * Colors: 256 You can't really do too much fancy stuff with a 166MHz processor and 16MB (!) of SDRAM.
The company I work for ordered several Nokia firewall devices. They list for about $35,000 US.
Not one of them worked.
We ended up having their top tech staff in the country give us a visit, with everyone wondering why a six figure purchase should be quite so DOA. At first, there was a lot of head scratching, but it turned out that the machines had a variety of hardware and some software problems.
Allegedly these systems are well tested prior to shipping. At that price, you'd hope so! I hope they test these PVRs well, otherwise they're in for a world of support pain.
I would like to buy a replacement for my VCR, but have been holding out for a few reasons.
1. If I'm going to get another device that has a TV tuner in it, it will have to be ATSC as well as NTSC (satellite ready would be nice, but not entirely necessary);
2. I'm not keen on additional charges for watching/recording TV (I'm already paying way too much for cable TV as it is). I have seen other Tivo like devices, but the quality has been lacking. RCA makes one, but it's from RCA. The Home-Theater PCs are way too expensive and the quality is worse than a VCR;
3. I'm not impressed by the current array of DVD-recorders that are on the market. See point one above. Also the quality of recordings is a joke. You'd think that for $600 or more it would be a leap ahead of VCRs in terms of ease of use and versatility.
I'm sticking with my old VCR. Doesn't care about macrovision or blue-coatings. Gives me just as good a picture as TV recorded on DVD at a fraction of the price.
Ok, so I could probably find out what a PVR was easily by googling, but instead I'm going to make a suggestion and see what people say.
Why don't Slashdot stories have abbreviations surrounded by ABBR or ACRONYM tags? This way you can insert a title="Expanded form of Acronynm" inside the ABBR/ACRONYM tag and when you hover your mouse over the acronym (in browsers other than MSIE) a little tooltip will pop with the fully expanded acronym displayed!
In Mozilla ABBR/ACRONYMs are even highlighted with a special dashed underline to alert the user that this particular acronym can be decoded without the use of ones imagination.
Here's an example or two.
So, PVRs should be...ummmm
The Recordomatic 9000?
The Automatic Recording System of Entertainment?
My organization uses a Linksys BEFSR41 for firewalling. Works great.
I was thinking the same thing. But check here for a list of countries where this PVR is currently available.
No Canada, or US for that matter. All European. I didn't see any specific reason why. Maybe it's a PAL/NTSC thing, or a patent thing, or simply an early stage of the product rollout thing. Too bad, it's a pretty nice looking box.
You can watch other channels while recording using the tuner in your TV. That's how people used to tape shows on their VCR while watching another on the TV.
Multiple tuners only comes into play if you want to record multiple shows simultaneously. Which would be kinda sketchy anyhow due to limits on how fast the hardware they're listing could do video compression on more than one stream.
The bold print giveth, and the fine print taketh away
Have a look at KnoppMyth Haven't tried it yet as I didn't have any trouble getting MythTV working, but it might be what you're looking for.
Software tends to get developed for new models as they are released. See Linux-based software for the 9000 series here. Most of the stuff is for Windows (see here, for example) and written in Europe. Also here. "MMedit" is a good word to Google on.
Actually, Nokia has been making Digital TV decoder set-top boxes for a while in the UK - probably Europe, too.
I can't imagine it's much of a stretch, therefore, to move into the PVR market.
It doesn't review as well as the Sharp, though the support for DVD-RAM is nice. Note, the Japanese-spec players tend to automatically delete stuff after 31 days to comply with Japanese copyright laws. But yes, any of these products make the Nokia distinctly an also-ran.
Nokia what you do?
You once made phones that are poo
DVR is too
True, but you'll notice that this is being released in countries that don't have access to TiVo. Not all of us have access to cool stuff like commercially-available PVR's yet.
Get a clue.
Nokia has been bulding TVs and (first analog and then) digital satellite receivers for a LONG time. I think this even started before their phone business.
The Linux DVB API was developed by them about 3 years ago and they funded implementations of it for the most popular cards here in Europe.
The API (after some changes) basically is still in use and part of the 2.6.x kernel.
This is also not the first digital PVR box developed by Nokia. Not all of them made it to the market but at least one is available here for months now.
The information on TV reception mentions Analog and Digital reception. For Digital, they talk about DVB digital Satellite TV, which is used in Europe. In the US, we use a terrestrial broadcast mechanism (ATSC).
Zenith/LG has an . But it doesn't do satellite..
Tivo has been rumored to have an HD/ATSC DirecTivo for forever. Who knows if it will ever come out.
This can happen to anything. I ordered an APC UPS for a data center and this thing was a mess. First it had the wrong badging on it (said 8kVA instead of 4kVA) and after the electrician wired the data center for 8kVA i noticed the mistake. The elctircian wouldn't hook it up as 4kVA because of electric code issues. We had to ship it back and after much deliberation (APC says this never happens) they shipped us the 8kVA UPS at no extra cost. The only problem was that the 8kVA model they sent us was dead and APC was shocked. They said this never happens. The third they shipped was alright.
At my present company we use Nokia firewalls / checkpoint VPN software and we've never had a problem with them.
This type of stuff can happen to any company.
I love the smell of Karma in the morning
Actually they started out as a paper company. Tires came later.
But not here in North America. Nope, everything here has to be proprietary. We have to "let the market decide" (translation: "let the corps screw us over"). The result less competition and little innovation. I am guessing Europe is at least three years ahead on TV tech and they are pulling away because they picked ONE standard and ran with it.
Serve Gonk.
Right.. get clue:
The roots of Nokia go back to the year 1865 with the establishment of a forest industry enterprise in South-Western Finland by mining engineer Fredrik Idestam. Elsewhere, the year 1898 witnessed the foundation of Finnish Rubber Works Ltd, and in 1912 Finnish Cable Works began operations. Gradually, the ownership of these two companies and Nokia began to shift into hands of just a few owners. Finally in 1967 the three companies were merged to form Nokia Corporation.
At the beginning of the 1980s, Nokia strengthened its position in the telecommunications and consumer electronics markets through the acquisitions of Mobira, Salora, Televa and Luxor of Sweden. In 1987, Nokia acquired the consumer electronics operations and part of the component business of the German Standard Elektrik Lorenz, as well as the French consumer electronics company Oceanic. In 1987, Nokia also purchased the Swiss cable machinery company Maillefer.
In the late 1980s, Nokia became the largest Scandinavian information technology company through the acquisition of Ericsson's data systems division. In 1989, Nokia conducted a significant expansion of its cable industry into Continental Europe by acquiring the Dutch cable company NKF.
Since the beginning of the 1990's, Nokia has concentrated on its core business, telecommunications, by divesting its information technology and basic industry operations.
(More at http://www.nokia.com/nokia/0,8764,1125,00.html)
You can find out about the UK's digital transmitters here.
Of course, DVB is just an output format.. DTT (digital terrestrial tv) is a way of delivering DVB).
The Nokia Mediamaster 9600 digital satellite reciever had SCSI connector. You could plug a HDD or PC to it and after OS upgrade (DVB2000) you had a perfect PVR which recorded nice MPEG-2 files without any stuped DRM etc restrictions. I just hope this new model allows me to burn those recorded show on DVD.
- Raynet --> .
OK, well, this might have been your experience, but to be honest, I know of much more people who had an excellent experience with Nokia routers. Some said that they are considered some of the best available, in fact. I wouldn't vouch for one or the other opinion, but fact is, you are the first case of nonworking equipment that I have ever heard of, in contrast with tens of positive feedback.
Sigged!