Slashdot Mirror
Nokia's New All-In-One Phone
conq writes "BusinessWeek has a piece on Nokia's new phone, introduced today and hitting the shelves in July. The N93, costing $660, will supposedly fill all of your needs for electronic equipment on the go. From the article: 'Should anyone miss the point, Nokia's press extravaganza in a spiffed-up Berlin warehouse ended with a video in which the camera slowly panned across a tableau of dusty, discarded electronic equipment -- including digital cameras and a cobweb-covered iPod. The message: Nokia plans to make these products obsolete.'"
...and the article does not mention how usable the device is.
(fumble fingers here has a hard enough time using a plain vanilla Nokia phone with its chicklet keys.)
The Roman Rule: The one who says it cannot be done shall not interrupt the one who is doing it.
The problem with browsing songs on a cell phone is the lack of an iPod-like wheel to navigate with. Well you know how the iPod has tactile buttons under the scroll wheel? The cell phone solution to add twelve buttons instead of five like the ipod has. Put the buttons in a standard dial-pad orientation. Then replace the wheel shape with a rectangular touchpad. Print the image of the wheel and the numbers on top, and put a protective clear coating as the final layer. End result: A touchpad with cursor functionality if desired, standard dialing with the numbers in the right locations and tactile feedback, and iPod wheel navigation!
For naysayers out there who might complain the touchpad can't be made accurately enough for a cursor, fine. Forget that part. But the iPod wheel and dial-pad could be created today. It's just taking Apple's tech to the next step.
image of phone
one thing is for sure, Nokia are pretty consistant in making phones asthetically ugly as they can, still looks like a Motorall flip phone from the early 90's, its as if a good display, touchscreen , hi-res etc isnt important to them, unlike the massive surge of smart phones with hi-res screens, touchscreens to replace aging remote controls, handwriting recognition, etc etc
Wonderful. Another phone I can't use because every freaking version of it comes with a camera. Why are these companies not at least attempting to court the market of professionals who can't bring cameras into their place of business? Samsung does a decent job, as they at least offer flip-phones without cameras, but Nokias are uniformly awful with this.
but here in U.S. I'd be happy to have a cellular telephone that can actually place an occasional PHONE CALL! Keep your camera/MP3player/PDA/whatever technology and just give me a trustworthy cellular network. Then we'll talk about extras.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
I guess there is obviously a market for this stuff but am I alone in prefering a few different devices that do what they are supposed to do well, rather than a single device that half asses everything. I gave up on the PDA because they kept trying to "converge" it making the latest incarnations mostly crap. I go out of my way for a simple phone, my big requirements are signal and sound quality. I guess I was brought up on the KISS principle, its hard to believe that im alone in that.
...ended with a video in which the camera slowly panned across a tableau...
If they shot this with the actual phone, then maybe it will make all that other stuff obsolete.
Unless they somehow make a new battery that's dramatically better than the ones we have, people aren't really going to take these all-in-wonders seriously. I wanted to get a new phone last Christmas, that had an mp3 player and could play good games. Didn't want to have to carry so many gadgets in my pockets everytime I went out. So I got myself an SE Walkman phone. I won't do a review on that here, but to sum things up, the sound was ok, I could play games, make calls, etc. (Also had a camera and and FM radio btw.)
In the end, I had to make up my mind each day what I was going to use it for since I had to recharge every so often. (Much more often than what I would have liked.) A phone? A camera? Or a player? Maybe a little of each?
I ended up buying a small Creative flash player. A single battery lasted about 18 hours, could hold much more songs, etc. In practice, since I use it about 2 hours a day, I could go on a single charge for a week. (And no more calls or text messages interrupting my music or games.)
Instead of shelling out more than half a grand for an ultra-phone, I think money's better spent buying a regular phone, plus a dedicated gadget. (Player, camera, etc.)
(And on a slightly unrelated note, a lot of people still prefer regular calculators over the ones in their PCs.)
Seriously, have you tried finding a phone that is stylish, small, has good battery life, and yet doesn't cost an arm and a leg because all it does is voice/text?
Yes, there are plenty of small-ish, plastic phones that do this. But they lack the elegance of, say, a Motorola V3 or a high end Nokia or Sony.
I think there is certainly an untapped market for the following phone:
- metal body
- slimline and actually fashionable design (may I suggest sleek, matte-silver or black, no clear plastic or flourescent colours?)
- integrated aerial
- 4-6 day battery life
- medium sized colour screen
- adequate sized buttons for SMS
- speakerphone feature
- compatible with ordinary (wired) handsfree
- robust and preferably semi-hardened against water and dust
- FAST and bug free software
- price reflecting the functionality and manufacture cost, not the desirability of the device
Leave out bluetooth, photos, videos, IR, memory card functionality, internal hard disk or flash drive, huge colour screen and any other crap you might consider adding 'because it's cool' that would drive up the price.
I and many others will buy this phone.
Read Pynchon.
While that might not be all that important, I am curious as to whether it's possible to get it to sync with linux and OS X. The next phone I get I'd like to be able to sync without being forced to use Outlook.
"The N93, costing $660, will supposedly fill all of your needs for electronic equipment on the go."
Let's see:
simple -- no
cheap -- no
long battery life -- no
Sorry. Looks like it will fufill none of my needs.
In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.
The only phone company where I live with GSM service requires a two-year contract, regardless of where you get your phone. Also they don't subsidize phones, except to give away the bottom-end model that they're trying to get rid of. Since they're the only GSM game in town, nobody else sells GSM phones, so you're pretty much SOL unless you want to order one online. Which I will do.. to replace the freebie I got. At least I can swap out the SIM card and there's nothing they can do about it.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
If you don't want to sign up for a two-year commitment, buy your phone on the open market
Where is this "open market" you speak of? Does it have a store in Fort Wayne, Indiana? If you mean online, what close substitute is there for inspecting a phone in person before I purchase it?
You are already allowed to bring your own phone to their network.
The carriers make it seem like the opposite. I know little about GSM; can you show me that this is true despite what the carriers say? How do I determine whether any carrier serving my area offers SIM-only service (that is, without phone rental)? And if I put the carrier's SIM card into my phone, won't that let the carrier lock the phone, or can the carrier refuse service to SIM cards inserted in phones that aren't locked? If I am clueless about GSM, what do you suggest that I read in order to become no longer clueless?
You don't pay more for a non-provider-provided phone [...] spend the $200 extra for an unlocked phone.
Am I supposed to not see a contradiction here?
Yep. I find it rather strange that people stare at specs of some multimedia-phones, and then complain that it has (shock and horror!) multimedia-features. Nokia has plenty of phones for business, like the e-series (which are meant specificly for business) or Communicators.
Lesbian Nazi Hookers Abducted by UFOs and Forced Into Weight Loss Programs - -all next week on Town Talk.
I like the way the people on Slashdot always complain about new multitalented phones. Don't buy them if they don't suit your needs or work properly in your networks!
Nokia and all other manufacturers have plenty of entry level, sub $100, "calls only" style phones in the product portfolio for you critical consumers to purchase.
I like my 9500, soon to be replaced with an E70 (I want more CPU power and 3G). Yes, I use the camera daily (sending MMSes to friends/moblog).. I listen to MP3s and C-64 SIDs often from my 1GB MMC card. I use it for GPS navigation with TomTom mobile when I'm driving in an unknown town. I use PuTTY over GPRS or WLAN for remote terminals every day on it.
They wouldn't make these if there weren't people willing to buy them.. And usually the will to buy comes from a need for some certain features.
-Jope
He makes a valid point. If you'd ever tried to get a decent phone with no camera you'd know.
I used to work in defense contracting and camera phones weren't permitted in a lot of the buildings. So I went shopping for a camera-less phone. The best phone I could find for a carrier with good service in my area was the LG VX3200.
There's a bigger market for camera-less phones than you think, but phone makers today aren't releasing many phones without cameras.
Your analogy of the VW bug doesn't fit either. He's not trying to use something for a different purposes than it was intended (as with the bug) he's trying to use a phone as a phone.
It's more like he is trying to get a car but manufacturers keep installing factory standard radar detectors in all cars but the Ford Pinto. But radar detectors are illegal in Virginia and require voiding your warranty to remove them!
Question everything