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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
How many ringtones can I download on this thing?
Montreal - Best city to live in!
Arrrrrrrrrrghhhhhhhhh! So, I guess I see my chances of EVER just buying a phone slipping even further away. Sigh.
Press, press, press, press, press, press, press..... Send..... Shoot! Was just trying to call home, and created a playlist, no wait!, took an upskirt (illegal in WA) and sent it to Mom, no wait!, ordered pizza from Amazon!
Does this mean that we get to choose the music we get to listen to when we're on hold?
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.
With Nokia's history of exploding batteries, they could be closer to the truth than they realise!
Will this be anything like or as successful as their Gameboy killer?
At the moment, these devices that do everything don't really to anything really well. A stand-alone camera has better quality than the phone. ...but we are starting to see that change. As technology continues to develop, and manufacturers are able to pack more and more into a device, the quality of the combined unit might start to be acceptable for more and more people.
:)
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 store my recipes online (the way nature intended)
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!
The reason people like the iPod is because of the interface. You could legally (and illegal) get music before the iPod. Companies made mp3 players. But the reason people got the iPod is because it had a good interface which people liked. Then the hype came in and it became large. If you are going to make an iPod killer your interface has to be natural and easy to use. Now what cell phone has that good an interface? Sure, some cell phones have okay interfaces, but it has have as easy to use an interface as a walkman or iPod to be an iPod killer. Otherwise, it is just so much typical marketing fertilizer.
"Those that start by burning books, will end by burning men."
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.
...with all these gadgets and non-cell phone functions, what's the battery life on these things? i remember my old 'big' cellphone (it didn't even flip open, oh the humanity) that would last for days on one charge....my new one (yea it looks cool and all) lasts for maybe 72 hours before i gotta plug it back in. imagine having a HD sucking juice from it too...
This sig contains repetition and redundancy.
people are not necessarily buying these phones for their camera or music features.
Maybe they're buying them to...talk on?
Give me a good, solid, long lasting phone with an easy to use interface. Leave the rest of that crap on some other device.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
http://www.nokiausa.com/phones/7610
http://www.nokiausa.com/phones/3660
http://www.nokiausa.com/phones/3205
Wake me up when Nokia can make a phone look like this:
http://www.sonyericsson.com/spg.jsp?cc=hk&lc=zh& ver=4000&template=pp1_loader&php=php1_10235&zone=p p&lm=pp1&pid=10235
Yes, I know Nokia is the top manufacturer of phone and their phones tend to work better as phones than other manufacturers, but seriously, they need to hire some designers and usability experts!
http://www.rayn.net . Funny. Stuff.
Uh, yeah I didn't get that call you see because unfortunately, I drained my celly battery listening to Kraftwerk.
cat
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?
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).
Nokia expects to become the largest seller of portable MP3 players this year.
Then why not make a really good MP3 player? I'm not going to drop another chunk of change just because Nokia crams another "feature" into a cell phone.
If I want a digital camera, I'll buy a good digital camera. If I want a PDA, I'll buy a good PDA. If I want an MP3 player, I'll buy a good MP3 player.
My Swiss Army knife has lots of all-in-one features, but I'm not likely to use it to open my soup or screw in a new door knob. I have real tools for that.
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.
Cos we all know how well the Ngage did in the portable games market.
Hint: not too well.
Chicken fried butter sticks? Do
Bulky phone with poor battery life, not enough storage to be a serious music player, screen too small for a PDA, not fast enough to run games.
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."
Cell phone makers don't seem to understand a major problem with throwing every possible gadget in the world into one's cell phone: battery life. What happens when there's an emergency, and I need to call someone, but my phone is dead because I've been listening to MP3s, playing games, and taking pictures all day? What if I accidentally forget to stop the music when I stop listening, and it plays all day in my backpack? I'd rather separate my "fun" gadgets from my "necessity/emergency" gadgets, just in case.
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.
The new N91 features a 4gb microdrive and a 2 megapixel digital camera, and plays music in MP3, AAC and WMV formats.
gb? Is that gram bits or gravity bits?
Ogg Ogg Ogg Ogg Ogg ... How many times do you have to say it for frig'n sake?!!!
:T:R:A:N:S:
the Beeb's analysis is flawed methinks.
4Gb is a sweet spot on storage, but more importantly *everyone* is already carrying a phone.
if the phone means i don't have to worry about keeping and charging an ipod mini then it's a winner for me and mine.
'There is a Light that never goes out.'
I think that this is a cool sounding device but in my house a cell phone doesn't last longer than a year or so before it gets dropped, goes bad, or some other malady strikes it. If I dropped my 800 dollar cellphone/mp3 player/camera, I'd be irate to say the least. I'd also be interested to know what realistic battery life I could expect out of my phone when I've been playing music on it for half of the day.
Yes. Every single manufacturer out there makes a base model phone that is just a phone. And every fucking time slashdot posts a story about a new phone all of you retards come out with the same annoying fucking comment. How about you open your eyes and go look. Plain phones are easy and cheap to find.
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.
Make sure everyone's vote counts: Verified Voting
In basic terms you said, I want someone to make this, but I'm not going to buy it
Or to put it realistically, I just want to bitch and moan about something, so I'll complain that phones have too many features...
This is a news for nerds site, celebrate technological advances...
Nokia announced a whole new line of phones, the Nokia Nseries (press release).
In this series, three models were introduced:
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?
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.
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.
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!
what good is bluetooth if there's nothing you'd want to get out from the phone or to the phone? these now announced phones are 3g so there's bluetooth usability right there as well.
,say, 300$ for just a bluetooth phone(whatever that might be, t610 or whatever but even that's not "just bluetooth") when you could get one that plays movies for 301$?
all the now announced n-series have bluetooth.
or hell, just get the n-gage off from somewhere cheapo cheap... it's got bluetooth too.
and would you really pay
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Why do I not care for any games or apps or cameras or music being stored on my phone?
I don't for the same reason I don't want any of that stuff on my PDA. Because telephones have enough battery problems as it is, and it's aggravating and embarassing and even dangerous to have your phone not work because you were listening to NiN and John Denver.
My ideal phone is a 4" long fat old-fashioned Nokia with a monochrome display and hours of talk time. Too bad you can't GET one any more because everyone's making phones with cameras and hard disks and laser pointers and sex toys, or at the very least color screens you can't read in sunlight.
It's a phone. It makes phone calls. It doesn't need to do any of these other things, badly and expensively, especially when they make it less effective at being a phone.
I wouldn't buy one of these for several reasons.
1: I drop my cellphone all the time. When I get mad, I throw it against a wall. So far Nokia phones have been the sturdiest, but with a hard drive in it, it wouldn't last me a week.
2: because it's got a hard drive in it, battery life would suck. I'm on call 24/7.
3: I've already got a phone.
4: I've already got a digital camera that does a pissy 5 megapixels.
5: I've got a mini-disc player which plays MP3, ATRAC, and I think WMA (but wfc anyway)
6: I've already got a portable device which plays movies/music -- my laptop. It's got 40GB of drive space.
The reason girls and Windows users don't understand UNIX is because all the documentation is in Man files.
If you're on the road / down-town / whatever and you see something and would like to take a picture of it, you could..
:)
A. Go home, get camera, return, take picture
B. Whip out the camera phone, take picture, carry on
If your boss calls you up telling you that he would like to see you on saturday at 7pm for a meeting, you could...
A. Remember it, program it into your PDA when you get home
B. Write it down on a piece of paper, program it into your PDA when you get home
C. Whip out your phone and toss it into the calendar app
I have no argument for the MP3 player as I have none
However, if you're a music lover, then why would you run around with a yet-another-device if your phone can play back MP3s just as good as your run-of-the-mill mp3 player ?
Sure, there's interface (hello iPod), but most people really don't use the interface that often. Point in case: iPod Shuffle
Back to your real life example...
Say you're in the bathroom, you open a cupboard door, and notice the knob's a bit loose. You could...
A. Walk into your toolshed / hobby area and fetch yourself a screwdriver, fasten the screw, return the screwdriver
B. Whip out your swiss army knife and fasten the screw
Nobody's saying that these phones will replace DSLRs, a blackberry, an iPod, or your (semi-)professional craftsman tools.
But if my phone had all the tools of my utility knife built-in, I just might find reason not to carry the utility knife around in my pants.
I'm tired of people recycling this garbage every time the issue of cell phones comes up. Think about what you're saying. You have a Swiss Army knife. You've probably been somewhere you needed a knife, or pliers or whatever. You whip out your multi-tool and get the job done. Sure, you could have done the job better if you had been carrying a power drill but that makes little sense, right? The whole point of having a multi-function tool is convenience. It may not be the best tool for the job, but you get stuff done.
I can think of several times where it would have been handy to have a camera phone. Usually it's some strange scene, like a funny sign. It would be cool to have an MP3 player on the phone if I run into an unexpected wait and feel like listening to some tunes.
To sum up, if you want to carry all of those devices around all the time, then do it and quit complaining when they add new features for cell phones. There are plenty of folks like myself that would like to have a sort-of digital Swiss Army knife that can do things like check a calendar or listen to some music in a pinch (but not quite at that price--ouch!)
harmonious design
iPod killer? Far fetched. The best I could claim would be iPod mini 4GB killer - and even then, that only depends on design, UI and tight integration with iTunes (haha, like Apple will let this one run through).
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.
The Splintered Mind - Overcoming
See, no, you are braindead. If you agree to get a provider locked phone for $50 instead of paying $350 outright for your phone you will have to stay with that provider. So if you see a plan with another provider that would cost you less you can't switch to it without playing another $50. Besides which, when you pay $50 for a phone you invariably get locked into a contract for 2 years which means you can't even change to another provider even if you wanted to pay the $50. What's more, because there's plenty of people just like you the provider has no incentive what-so-ever to reduce their prices. They know they can lock you in for 2 years so they don't bother competing. The result is that everyone gets very bad service and prices from the cell phone providers. Oh, and you can't even argue that what I'm saying isn't really so because of X factor or Y factor, the fact is that the US has the worse cell phone providers in the world simply because the rest of the world either refuse to lock themselves into schemes like this, or their government has passed deregulations which force the providers to compete.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Will this be anything like or as successful as their Gameboy killer?
The difference is that ipod is very easy to kill. It's an mp3 player, there is nothing special about it.
A gaming platform is a different thing altogether, because it represents a different level of "commitment", and is influenced by such things as availability of games.
Save your wrists today - switch to Dvorak
How long is the HD going to last in a phone???
I've have four Nokia phones as I got a new one with each job i took over the past 7 years. Each on has been dropped on the floor a number of times, and generally subjected to a fair bit of abuse. All four of them work, and I have never had a problem with any them.
I doubt a small hard drive could take this kind of punishment. One hard knock, and somethings going to break. I'd much prefer 1G of flash memory in a phone that I know will last me a few years.
Offtopic, Inflammatory, Inappropriate, Illegal, or Offensive comments might be moderated up.
The BBC article claims that this 4Gb device can hold "up to 3000 songs in CD quality".
Bollocks it does. My 4Gb iPod Mini claims to hold 1000 songs (I actually hit around 800, due to having some long stuff on there), and I don't know anyone that claims 128kbps lossy compression is actually "CD Quality". God only knows how they fudge the numbers to get that value.
"I Know You Are But What Am I?"
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!)