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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.'"
As the greatest stupidity in consumer electronics.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
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.
Funnypics
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
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.)