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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."
The only downside is the long extension cord.
However, as the BBC points out, people are not necessarily buying these phones for their camera or music features."
Really! This pub chef story was carried by the BBC World Service, this morning (California time) regarding a chef bitten by a spider and had the presence of mind to snap a picture or two of it, which helped identify which spider it was and how to treat the venom. I think this link carries and actual photo from the phone.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
I've got a 40 GB iPod that I take with me when I'm planning on taking a long trip, but I don't carry it with me everywhere I go because I'd have to put it in my pocket and I don't want it to get damanged. If this thing is priced right, I'd buy it and use it as a second mp3 player. It would always be with me because I always carry my cell phone. For long trips, I'd grab the iPod, otherwise I could just plug into the phone.
We may not be getting the flying cars promised to us in the sixties and seventies by Hannah-Barbara and company, but the day of handheld devices that can do nearly anything is quickly approaching. As the BBC points out, this device, though not quite there yet, is a big step in that direction.
It is important, however, to reflect upon the advancements of the late twentieth century and how they've impacted our way of life. In particular, have TV, the internet, computers, and all the rest of today's modern miracles made us more virtuous? Have they made us less virtuous? What are the dangers inherent in having everything at our fingertips?
There's a great deal of social criticism these days about the so-called "Generation Now," the sense of entitlement and so forth. These matters are especially important for us, as afficianados of technology, to consider, particularly in an open forum such as this.
-- Molly Lipton, Born Again Technologist.
So we have a phone that can take pictures and play music. Possibly do video as well. Might as well add all the PDA capabilities of e-mail, address book, grocery shopping list, etc.
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? I remember the old 3-in-1 printer devices that weren't all that reliable.
If done well (and compact), gadget convergence would be a great thing. Might as well add a TV remote to it while they're at it.
There's been some studies in the US (sorry, no link) which show that folks will actually watch feature-length films on their phones. Until recently this was thought to be entirely ridiculous. Now, with a 4GB drive and some nice MPEG4 encoding, I could conceivably get 100 hours (!) of video content onto my mobile. (MPEG4, well compressed, uses about 40MB per hour of audiovisual content.) That's really something - more amazing than having 600-or-so songs on my mobile... And that's going to lead to some interesting content being developed for this platform... TiVo on your mobile, anyone?
I am quite looking forward to the time when I only have to carry one device around, and it will do everything! (including allowing me to SSH into my home computer) :)
I agree. But I think they are moving in the right direction. Thank god the did away with those HUGE palm looking phones. Those were so big. Smaller is nicer when it comes to something you want to keep in the pocket.
The 2MP is a huge jump forward for cell phones. For the longest time, finding a reasonably priced 1MP phone was difficult. Even the less than 1MP phones were well over $150. I hope this new 2MP phone pushes prices down a bit.
But the huge winner is the 4 gig hard drive. It is a breakthrough for a cell phone.
I think with cell phones you will always be a couple years behind everything else because the tecnhology needs to shrink. But the days of 10 and 20 gig hard drives on phones are comming.
Since cell phones are so small, I can see new applications like voice recognition tied into the OS. You want to write a report? Talk into your cell phone.
I see so many uses here. This will be fantastic. The only worry I have is with cell phone camera's getting such high resolution, it will invade the privacy of people. Nobody will be free to walk in public anymore and protect their image. For example, say you live down south where black people and white people don't date because of social pressure. You see two kids flirting and take a picture. Post it on the web, and now two people's lives will become miserable.
Or you are in a store and some woman is trying to look at the bottom shelve. Unfortunatly she is wearing a skirt, and the kid clicks a picture. Up on the web it goes.
Rosco: "If brains were gunpowder, Enos couldn't blow his nose."
In the future, a combined device might be acceptable; but it's likely that dedicated devices will still be better, as the technology for both the convergent and dedicated devices improve. Of course its a tradeoff and matter of preference, but I've decided no more 'convergent' devices for me...
Whoo hoo, another person who sees a phone as a tool not a toy. Where I work I AM NOT ALLOWED cameras, so I stick with the cheapest thing I can find. Unfortunately I also want bluetooth so I can syncronise my phone book and carry a diary on my phone, but that is not possible until you also buy something with so many wank features that it becomes a toy.
"Largest vendor of MP3 players with a year"???
And they think Apple users drink Kool-Aid. That is some serious crack they must be smoking in the Nokia marketing department.
60GB iPod with great UI, integration to iTunes & music Store, 0.99 songs, tons of acessories - vs - 4GB phone, inferior UI, no computer integration, and $3 songs, no accesories. And the phone is twice the price!
I think they put the Words "iPod Killer" in the title just hoping it might cause someone to notice them in the crowded marketplace - but then the marketplace is also over-crowded with failed "iPod Killer"s.
Is it true that the loudest death knell for a product might be when the term "iPod Killer" is applied to it? If that is true this could be dead before it even gets launched.
A better business plan might be to build a device that expands the capabilities of the rapidly growing numbers of iPods out there. (530% profit growth over last Q2 - Wow).
The retail price of most phones is a few hundred dollars. But the monthly payment offsets the cost, so you end up paying this over a year or two, depending on the contract. So this might come out to a few hundred dollars on top of the plan. Which is on target with an iPod.
I have a Sony Ericsson T610 wich looks startingly similar to this new phone (Nokia N91), but with the addition of the iPod -esque controls on the slider. The T610 is easily the best designed phone I've ever had, and I can't help thinking that Nokia took a few design tips from S-E (and aPple). So, I'm psyched about it!
- Interface
- Style
- Marketing
Like it or not, Apple has the golden touch of style that Nokia never had, and it seems that Nokia has really gone off the deep end with some of their recent phones (lets not even talk about the DOA N-gage).Specifics? This thing has a joystick, 4 buttons around it (like my clunky T610), a play/pause, forward, back, stop, and (im guessing) a popout-button to shift the playpad down to get the number pad. I'm not going to go into all the possible confusion, but it looks busy.
As if that weren't all.. the color seems to aim for the stylish/classy 20-30s market, but the features (cameraphone, music) seem to really gear towards a younger market (think teens - 20s).
I wish them well, but from just looking at it, it seems a bit misguided.
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Has anyone tried this? What was the reaction of the seller, who was no doubt expecting further income from a telephone plan?
Perhaps that is an indicator of when a mobile phone's 'other' services come up to scratch, when people buy them with a view to ignoring the telephone function?
Camera phones in Japan and South Korea are actually legally required to play a sound everytime you take a picture, to prevent those upskirt shots. Does anything like that exist in the US? Though there are supposedly some shady shops that will get rid of the noise...
Why do I not care for any games or apps or cameras or music being stored on my phone?
Because currently, and I'm sure this applies to a hell of a lot of travellers - I can't turn on my phone mid flight to listen to some music. Do phone manufacturers understand this in the slightest? What's the point of putting all my portable music into a device that I cannot use say in my car on a plane, probably the two most common places other than walking or exercising where such devices are used.
I own a Motorola RAZR V3 and have found it's nowhere near worth $500. The menu system and phone book are a joke, the battery life is negligible if bluetooth or any serious use of the screen comes into play. The interface is absolutely hideous. Internet via cell phone even to check on movie times is nightmarishly slow and pointless and probably costs more than calling a service. The camera often gets smudged by virtue of its placement and the photos arre hideous.
Anything else I need to do - I turn on my powerbook, latch onto a wifi connection. Done.
So what I'm left with is an expensive phone that has only served as a status symbol and little more.
For all the talk of iPod competitors, yes it is priced more - but furthermore no single device has music software and an interface anywhere near as good, and that's to say nothing of the preamp and headphones quality. My Razr can play MP3s, horribly, distortedly.
Phones are ubiquitous and not a single sci fi writer saw that coming - but here in the US we are lagging far behind some other worldwide markets in what can be done with such devices.
** http://www.nkhumanrights.or.kr/ ** Human rights in North Korea. 1 million estimated dead from starvation.
iPod killer? No. iPod mini competitor? Yes.
The target market is obviously somewhat similar to Apple's target for the iPod Mini.
HAL 7000, fewer features than the HAL 9000, but just as homicidal!
Depending on where in the world you are, the price tag could be the cause of this phone becoming a best seller. Many Asian countries have no contracts and phones are always bought at full price so people try to show off their wealth by getting the most expensive phone.
A recent best seller is the Nokia 7280 that's just a plain Series 40 phone (with no keypad) but sells for the same price as the 6680, their top-line 3G phone.
This one may be a 5.0V, but nonetheless it will sacrafice size and weight (not to mention battery life) if it were used as a music player.
Only so many Watts of power can be crammed into an electronic device these days, and I seriously doubt that one could get even 6 hours of continual, uninterrupted music without a power adapter plugged in. The hard drive and the RAM just consume too much power.
Now that other companies are releasing similarly featured products I wonder when they'll figure out that they need to sell the whole widget: easy to use jukebox with easy to use player and style to boot.
I don't think Apple will stay on top forever, but they do deserve the lead. Take the controversy over the Motorolla iTunes phone. Apple wants to make a phone that hooks up to one's PC/Mac and interfaces like an iPod. This means you purchase your songs or add them to iTunes and download them into your phone. You would manage playlists exactly as you do with an iPod. The phone industry wants you to purchase them for $3 a pop over their phone service directly to your phone instead. Although I like the idea of direct to phone purchase and download, I don't like the pricing structure and I'm not certain those songs can ever make it off that phone without third party hacks. MP3 makers haven't figured out how Apple's been winning the game, and now the phone companies are just as clueless.
From a Business Week article:
You may not have to be a genius to see it, but am I the only one who sees the flaw with that argument? Those billion phones in use aren't going to be able to use these new music features. That means consumers will have to buy new phones, and that means those phones are competing with iPods, iRivers, etc for a whole lot less than $3 a song.Someone may figure it out someday, but until then none of these new toys are going to do much more than nibble at Apple's bottomline for some time. Still, I'm glad to see there's so much energy about this market out there. They should keep Apple on their toes for some time. And we all win in the long run with better products to play with.
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