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Nokia Announces Hard-Drive Phone
blorg writes "The new N91 features a 4gb microdrive and a 2 megapixel digital camera, and plays music in MP3, AAC and WMV formats. With this phone, Nokia reckons it has an iPod killer and aims to become the largest seller of portable MP3 players this year, having already outstripped camera manufacturers in the photography market. However, as the BBC points out, people are not necessarily buying these phones for their camera or music features."
Sounds great until you see the price tag - it's nearly $800!
3 .phones.reut/index.html
http://www.cnn.com/2005/TECH/ptech/04/27/nokia.mp
If the Motorola Razr is any indication, you can't get insurance through Cingular. My boss told me that Lockline refused to insure his Razr when he bought it.
Screw that!
Since when was WMV a music format? I believe they mean WMA. That is, unless the phone plays videos as well (which wouldn't be suprising).
Well, that capability has been out for at least a couple of years. I've been using ssh on my Nokia 3650 for a while now. The version I use is Putty for Symbian, but there is another SSH client written for the Java VM that comes on most cell phones.
You can't buy a pre-paid SIM in the USA. The closest thing we have is pre-paid phone cards. You buy a $50 phone card, and then using your manufacturers pre-chosen phone, you call it in and add the money to your account.
Last time I checked, those Virgin Moble and TracPhone cards were very expensive, over a dime a minute. If you talk 10 minutes a day, every day, that is 300 minutes a month, or $30 bucks in pre-paid. Many monthly plans start at $30 a month and give closer to 1000 minutes.
I would love to see the pre-paid market get in touch with reality. No more crap like "you must buy a card every X days or lose your credits and phone number" or "we only have 2 phones to chose from".
If I could get a motorola flip phone and use prepay without losing my credites just because I don't use them all in 30 days, and not be threatened with losing my phone number if I don't buy more credits, I would consider pre-pay. Also, if the yearly contracts can get you 2 cents per minute, why do some pre-pay charge 25 cents per minute. It is dumb.
Rosco: "If brains were gunpowder, Enos couldn't blow his nose."
With respect, this is hardly true. Just because they shipped more devices than camera manufacturers doesn't mean they outstipped them in the photography market.
You can't really classify a camera phone as being in the "photography market". They are in the "camera phone" market, and there is a large difference. Anyone looking for decent optics, a zoom, good resolution and a raft other other features that camera phone's lack, will still need to buy a real camera.
Granted they may replace the bottom of the range camera's with very few features as it is, or even if they get good enough the really compact ones (saves you carrying two devices), but for those of us who want half decent photos not just "happy snaps", we'll stick to a real photographical camera thank you very much.
Will.
Nokia announced a whole new line of phones, the Nokia Nseries (press release).
In this series, three models were introduced:
I have a Nokia 7610 with a 512M RS-MMC card in it. I had to try really hard to fill that up :-). Anyway, I hacked a script together that rips dvds and re-encodes them as QCIF h.263 + AMR audio (3gpp videos) for my phone. You have to download some stuff from the 3g site and pass a few extra options to ffmpeg's ./configure (the README documents it and it's not hard).
When I had a Real Job (tm) and I took my lunch breaks I'd prop the phone up and watch episodes of Futurama while eating lunch. It was nice.
For letterbox movies, I rip them to my HD first and crop them to 4:3 (on a 1.5" screen I'm more concerned with everything being big enough to see and couldn't care less about preserving the entire picture) first. On long car trips it keeps me busy (well, the few times I'm not driving).
The only downside is that it eats the battery. If I turn down the backlight to half strength it gets a little better, but I can still only get about a two hours movie in before the battery is too low to make calls with. I can almost fit a BL-6C from the N-Gage into my phone...that'd get me an extra half an hour. If I'm in the car the cigarette light adaptor works. Battery tech needs to advance more, damnit..
HAL 7000, fewer features than the HAL 9000, but just as homicidal!
"I'm all for the convenience of an all-in-one device but have we gone far enough into the technologies that everything works well/reliably? "
Yes. My Nokia 3650 has been doing the phone/PDA/Camera thing quite well since 03.
"Derp de derp."
I believe it is a double superlative.
Also fun are double comparitives (more better), and forgetting the correct comparitive or superlative form (gooder, goodest), and of course absolutely bizzare errors: betterer, more gooder, bestest...
In Australia at least, these aren't confined to 4 year olds leaning to speak or uneducated boobs whose main cultural activity involves watching other uneducated boobs in Big Brother, I've actually seen a news reader use a double superlative (it could be argued that said news reader was just an uneducated boob, but is that really an excuse?:)
// It had been Fat's delusion for years that he could help people. --Philip K. Dick, Valis
Nokia 6021 (out soon, maybe even now [check the various online retailer]).
Bluetooth, no camera. There you go :-)
HAL 7000, fewer features than the HAL 9000, but just as homicidal!
all the ones I've seen are not compatible with the songs from the iTunes Music Store. So what's the deal?
The deal is that "AAC" is a public standard (MP4 audio, pretty much) but "Protected AAC" uses Fairplay, which is Apple's proprietary DRM. I'll leave the explanation of why there's no open DRM as an exercise for the reader.
It works great. I'm not sure if it supports stereo operation (the standard Symbian sound device was mono-only until recently). If it doesn't, the source is there and everything is well documented so it shouldn't be too hard to change that.
HAL 7000, fewer features than the HAL 9000, but just as homicidal!
My Samsung camera phone can easily be configured to not make a shutter sound through the settings menu.
Thankfully, it looks like this new phone has a headphone socket - a REAL headphones socket, not a stupid proprietory connection. My current Nokia has a MMC flash card MP3 player built in, but I've only ever used it once because you can only use their hands-free kit with it, which is a pain in the butt (and not very good quality).
Any phone that wants to provide a decent music listening system MUST have a headphone socket, and according the technical specs here, this does.
(warning - horrible Flash usecrime ahoy!)