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.'"

Comments

Awesome phone? Carriers will cripple it.

[crazyjeremy]

This is essentially a computer.

It may or may not be as much of a computer as a Treo or a Pocket PC, but it has many trademarks of a computer. Pictures, music, videos, wifi and even voip services are possible. This in particular make phones in direct competition with their carriers. Why pay $150 a month for cell phone service when you can get a "Multimedia Enabled" voip capable phone with a $50 dataplan and talk all you want through Skype or other similar services?

Bottom line? If we let carriers like Verizon continue to cripple these awesome phones, we lose money, ease of use and a significant portion of usability. But if we keep taking them to court and winning, we will have the ability to use all of the features the manufacturers intended and save money in the process.

iPod obsolete?

[Microlith]

So this thing will have 2-60GB of storage in it?

And high resolution, non-shitty CCD+Lenses in the camera?

And last as long or longer than both devices, on the same battery?

Somehow I doubt it, and this is Nokia sticking their collective foot in their mouth again, just like they did with the ngage.

Re:Awesome phone? Carriers will cripple it.

[MBCook]

There is no way to fix this in the US without pro-consumer laws. The market would sort it out, but the locks in place (including crippled phones, 2 year commitments, locked phones, etc.) prevent the market from being as effective as it should be.

I'm not normally pro-reguilation, but we need a few simple laws to fix this. Let's start with this:

1. You must publish phone prices just as large as the prices after discounts
2. You may not charge more for service to a customer who didn't buy their phone with you
3. Users must be able to take their phones to/from competitors with the same kind of network (from Sprint to Verizon, both CDMA)
4. You may not disable features of a phone or cripple them (no file uploads, no locking bluetooth down, no 'you must e-mail your photos, can't download them from your phone bypassing our extra charge')
5. You must clearly list which features of the phone would require extra service (i.e. most camera phone functionality on Sprint) and what it would cost. None of that "Extra charges may apply" bull at the end of a list of 40 features.

I'd like to just outlaw contracts longer than 6 months and bundling phones with service, but the above will do as a start. Hell, a government mandated network standard (instead of GSM/CDMA/EDGE) could be an improvement, even if in the form of a mandate for the industry to pick their own standard with some regulatory backing to the mandate ($1,000,000 per day per company per metropolitan area if they go over the deadline to decide or the deadline to implement sounds good to me).

Re:Awesome phone? Carriers will cripple it.

[plover]

As much as I loathe the business of cell phones, and feel as if I have been "trapped" in one contract or another for several iterations of phones now, I think regulation is completely the wrong answer to fix the "problems" you mention.

First, you enter any of these contracts completely by choice. If you don't want to sign up for a two-year commitment, buy your phone on the open market -- without their discount. It's an incentive, not an imperative.

You are already allowed to bring your own phone to their network. You don't pay more for a non-provider-provided phone.

If you want a phone that's portable between carriers, again, you're free to buy one on the open market. (AFAIK, not counting locked phones, GSM phones are more portable between carriers than CDMA phones. Analog is a few months from death, and I have no idea whatever became of TDMA or PCM.)

If you want a phone that's not crippled by Verizon (the worst) or another carrier, buy one on the open market.

Basically, the reason contracts are as bad as they are is that people are very attracted to the "free" phones, or the steeply discounted phones available from the cellular providers. That's the idea. But the free market is still out there. Quit whining about locked-down phones and insane contracts and spend the $200 extra for an unlocked phone. Or take their discount and STFU about it.

What I'd rather see is sanity brought to the plans. Having to "guess" at how many minutes you'll use in a month is a pretty lame way to force us to make a purchase. But all of the "pay as you go" plans cost far more for anyone but a mime.

Seriously though...

[spectrokid]

I know Nokia's R&D gets paid by 16 year olds doing overtime at the local McDonnalds, but it keeps on amazing me how nobady develops the business marked. My phone can synch with Bluetooth and IR. Guess what? The average corporate desktop has neither. How about a intelligent USB craddle? When I put the phone in it, it not only recharges, but automatically forwards all calls to the desktop phone standing just beside it, and all text messages to my email inbox? How many mobile phone owners sit 8 hours a day at the same desk? Why does nobady cater for them?