last100 » Nokia

Hands-on with the Nokia E55 (or how I learned to live with half a QWERTY)

Steve O'Hear — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 14:42:30 +0000

I’m generally a fan of Nokia’s business focused Eseries smartphones, while for day-to-day use I require a device with a QWERTY keyboard (preferably a portrait one). Combine the two and the Nokia E71, released around 18 months ago here in the UK, is as close as I’ve got yet to the “perfect” smartphone — I even named it in my top ten Digital Lifestyle products of 08 — although, obviously, it’s far from perfect. Perfection is, of course, a moving target in the world of smartphones.

The subsequently released Nokia E75, which features both a traditional numeric keyboard and a generously large landscape slide-out QWERTY, came in at a close second and even offers a few of improvements over the E71, such as a faster processor, updated software, better camera and a 3.5mm headphone jack.

I was therefore keen to try out Nokia’s attempt at a third QWERTY touting form factor, with the announcement of the E55. As you can see from the photo above, the device adopts the traditional candy bar shape by featuring something the handset maker is calling a “compact QWERTY”. Essentially housing two QWERTY letters per key (can I say half a QWERTY?) and utilizing predictive text to bridge the gap. But, in everyday use, how does the E55’s keyboard perform?

Before we get to that, let me just say a little bit more about the phone’s form factor, aside from the choice of keyboard. Like all recent Eseries devices, more than not, the Nokia E55 oozes style. It’s incredibly thin, feels rock solid, and features enough of a metal trim to shout class. Having said that, the phone feels particularly light in the hand, especially coming from an E71, which subjectively makes it feel a little cheaper. Part of the weight loss I’m sure is down to the fact that the battery cover is no longer made of metal, although it retains a textured finish for improved grip.

The Nokia E55 (bottom-right) with the E52 (top) and E71 (bottom-left)

Thankfully, however, none of this comes at the expense of a smaller battery. The E55 uses the same high capacity 1500mAh battery as the E71, with Nokia boasting up to 6 hours talk time on 3G and a whopping 29 days of standby. In my fairly heavy usage — moderate WiFi, 3G, push email etc. — I was able to go at least a couple of days without the need to recharge.

Back to that keyboard

This was always going to be the biggest issue for me, although, surprisingly, it actually turned out to be a bit of a non-issue. The trick is to trust the phone’s predictive text algorithm — just type as you normally would on a full smartphone QWERTY and for the most part the device will pick the word you intended.

Pushing down on the D-pad will offer you a list of alternatives and if the E55 is really stumped it will give out an obnoxious ‘beep’ and drop you into non-predictive spelling mode.

You then single or double tap to type out the word you really intended and the phone will add it to your custom dictionary for future use. In other words, the system gets smarter the more you use it.

One slight let down is that the predictive text system insists that you use an apostrophe in words like “you’re” rather than using auto-correction — if you don’t then it determines that you meant a completely different word. On the plus side, when typing URLs in Nokia’s bundled web browser, the E55 is sensible enough to turn off predictive text altogether (unfortunately, Google’s YouTube app for Nokia S60 isn’t quite as clever, requiring you to manually turn off predictive text when doing a search).

Verdict

After even just a weekend of prolonged usage, I had very little trouble adapting to half a QWERTY — I could certainly live with it if I had to — although, as I get to choose, I still prefer the full QWERTY on the E71. The bottom line: If you want a candy bar form factor and hate T9 on a traditional numeric keyboard — I certainly do — then the E55 is your answer.

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Nokia’s all-you-can eat music service now “comes with” its own flagship touch screen phone – Nokia X6

Steve O'Hear — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 19:02:57 +0000

Although I’d put poor marketing, carrier resistance, and possibly DRM, ahead of the lack of a flagship device to explain why Comes With Music, Nokia’s all-you-can-eat music service, hasn’t been the hit the handset maker had hoped for, the company’s newly announced X6 music phone is encouraging.

The device, unveiled at Nokia World today, is to be a Comes With Music exclusive offering, and sports a 3.2-inch touch screen display (16:9 ratio at 360 x 640 pixels), 32 GB of built-in storage, a 5 megapixel camera with Carl Zeiss optics and dual LED flash, A-GPS and WiFi, amongst its impressive stats. And in a first for Nokia, that touch screen is capacitive (not resistive), meaning that its should be a lot more responsive to the touch of a finger. Regular readers will know I’m not a fan of old skool stylus optimized resistive screens.

A quick recap of how Comes With Music works: you purchase a qualifying Nokia handset and then get access to the entire library of the Nokia Music Store for 12 – 18 months and get to keep any downloaded tracks once the subscription ends. For that privilege, the Nokia X6 has an estimated retail price of EUR 450, although the handset maker is stressing that ‘in many, many markets’, thanks to carrier subsidy, the device should be closer to “free”.

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Nokia dumps location-based service Friend View, falls in love with Facebook

Steve O'Hear — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 18:20:53 +0000

During the opening keynote at Nokia World, which kicked off today, CEO Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo was at pains to point out that the handset maker didn’t view Internet “services” as an interesting side business but that it was still the future of the company.

And along with music, messaging and turn-by-turn navigation, location-aware social networking, which the company calls SoLo, and other types of location-based services are key to this future. After all, Nokia has invested heavily in GPS-related technologies and applications, the boldest example being the $8.1 billion purchase of Navteq in late 2007.

What was and still is unclear is how much of Nokia’s SoLo strategy involves building out its own social networking offerings or partnering with and supporting established social networks. With today’s announcement of a tie up with Facebook and with it the death of the company’s own ‘Friend View’, with regards to the simplest of ‘SoLo’ applications — share my current location with friends — the handset maker has seen sense and decided to do the latter.

The new application called Lifecasting with Ovi, which will soon be available for the company’s flagship N97 (see my review) and newly announced N97 Mini (a smaller and slightly cheaper version of the N97), enables users to publish “their location and status updates directly to their Facebook account from the home screen of [there] mobile device.” Photos can also be uploaded as part of a status update and friends who are logged into Facebook are presented with an accompanying Ovi map displaying their buddy’s exact location.

When Google launched a similar location-based social networking app, dubbed Latitude, as part of their Google Maps service, I used it as an opportunity to criticize Nokia’s social networking strategy as a whole and in particular their own rival offering, the now defunct Friend View.

My argument was that if you’re going to launch a mobile social network you need to be platform (handset) agnostic. Google Latitude launched on multiple mobile platforms, while Nokia Friend View was for Nokia handsets (S60) only. As I wrote at the time: “Imagine if Nokia phones could only call other Nokia phones. That’s not dissimilar to how Nokia’s social networking strategy works.”

By embracing Facebook for its SoLo ‘Ovi Lifecasting’ app, not being device agnostic is no longer an issue. Instead, Nokia is leaning more towards being ’social network’ agnostic. The voice over in the video promo for Ovi Lifecasting aludes to this U-turn with the line “lifecasting is sharing where you are, where we all are”. Where we all are being Facebook.

In the future, of course, Nokia could easily add a Twitter extension to its Ovi Lifecasting app. While, as it stands today, the tie-in with Facebook is also a clever way to get its Ovi Maps service in front of all of those extra millions of users.

In more Facebook love, Nokia also announced today an extension of its Nokia Messaging service (currently push email and IM) called Social Messaging. The plan is to develop a multi-protocol social networking app for Nokia handsets, with Facebook being the first social network to be supported. A beta of the app can be downloaded today for the S60-powered N97 and S40-based feature phone, the 6700 classic.

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Nokia can do UI design after all, Linux-based N900 unveiled

Steve O'Hear — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 14:03:49 +0000

It had already been leaked to death, but frankly, if the walk-through video that’s been published today is anything to go by, I don’t think any of the previous pics or screen shots do this thing justice.

I’m referring to Nokia’s new Linux-based smartphone come Internet tablet, the N900, which the handset maker officially unveiled today. The device is powered by the company’s Maemo 5 OS, of which previous versions were used for its non-phone Mobile Internet Devices (MIDs), such as the N810 that I reviewed all the way back in February 2008.

And boy has Maemo come a long way. Best of all (shock, horror), it looks like Nokia can design User Interfaces after all.

Despite being pitched as the closest thing to a PC that fits in your pocket (”PC-like experience on a handset-sized device”) — a common theme in the marketing of all recently released smartphones — the N900’s UI appears to be extremely finger-friendly and optimized for its 3.5 inch 800 x 480 pixel (resistive) touch screen, where the previous and slightly larger N810 (4.1 inch) was stuck in a PC-centric UI design paradigm.

And unlike the N810 and, for some critics, the company’s recently released flagship Symbian powered smartphone, the N97 (see my review), the N900, on paper at least, has the processing power to match its UI and computing ambitions – an ARM Cortex-A8 processor running at 600MHz with OpenGL ES 2.0 graphics acceleration.

Other notable specs and features (see All About Symbian for more):

Horizonal 3 row slide out QWERTY keyboard
GPS/WiFi/3G/Bluetooth 2.2
5 megapixel main camera with Carl Zeiss optics
FM transmitter
32GB of internal flash storage, microSD card slot
Mozilla-based web browser (Fennec) with full Flash 9.4 support

The gorgeous looking UI aside, and beyond the technical specs alone, perhaps the most interesting thing about the N900 is the way Nokia is positioning it. In the press release and other marketing material, the company is very keen to play up the device’s ability to multi-task — and from the looks of things, this is one of the UI’s strong points — an obvious dig at Apple’s iPhone. In fact, overall, the N900’s marketing, as had been previously reported, pitches the device right alongside the iPhone, especially in the sense that it’s a mobile computer first and phone second.

In fact, whatever Nokia tells you, the Maemo-powered N900 is looking a lot like the flagship device that the Symbian-powered N97 was meant to be. So where does Maemo leave Nokia’s investment in Symbian?

Symbian is going nowhere — why else would the company spend millions buying out the operating system’s other partners and then open source the damn thing? — but instead I see it gradually moving downwards as “dumb” phones are replaced by smartphones in the mid to low end of the market. The company’s XpressMusic 5800 and the just announced 5230 are a good example of this, with the latter priced at 150 euros before tax and carrier subsidy. This mid to low end smartphone market is an area that Apple has yet to address and may never do so.

In the PC arena Apple stays away from the low margin, low end of the market. In contrast, in the mobile world, Nokia doesn’t leave a single slice on the table. Therefore, Symbian’s biggest competitor, I believe, is Android. Hence the reason why the company chose to open source Symbian, essentially giving it away to competitors as Google does with its mobile OS.

As always, it’s hard to comment much further without getting my hands on the device, but from what I can gather, Maemo 5 and the N900 look very promising and could finally see Nokia having a product that competes with the iPhone and Palm Pres of this world on a user experience level not just tech specs or market oomph alone.

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Why is Nokia entering the crowded Netbook market? Answer: the mobile carrier subsidy merry-go-round

Steve O'Hear — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 13:01:04 +0000

In a move that might leave many a tech analyst scratching their head, Nokia have announced their own Windows Netbook, albeit a high-end one.

Why the world’s largest mobile phone maker would enter the crowded and low margin market of Netbooks, when it should be focusing on how to restore its lead in the much higher margin ’smartphone’ category, is a very good question. The answer, however, is simple.

Carrier subsidy.

Here in the UK, we lead the way in the carrier-subsidy merry-go-round where Nokia does very well indeed out of the whole facade.

The story goes something like this. Consumers sign up to an 18 month mobile contract paying, say, £35 per month (approx $57), and with it they get a ‘free’ and potentially high end smartphone. Of course, it’s not really free but much more akin to a ‘hire purchase’ whereby they’re paying for the device over the course of the 18 month contract. Then, once the contract is up, the carrier entices the consumer to sign on for a further 18 months in return for another shiny new phone, which once again the consumer is actually paying for, even if at a discount thanks to the negotiating ability of the carrier and economics of scale from the handset maker’s point of view.

Ask yourself this: name one other piece of consumer tech that ‘average’ consumers are persuaded to replace, almost without question, on an 18 (or 24 monthly) basis? It doesn’t happen with TVs, DVD or Blu-ray players, audio systems (iPods apart but that’s a different story i.e. poor build quality, brilliant marketing and non user replaceable batteries). And it certainly doesn’t happen with PCs. Until now.

Enter the carrier-subsidised Netbook. Every mobile carrier in the UK offers one of these, and so do PC World and independent mobile phone retailers on the high street, such as the almighty Carphone Warehouse. And Nokia has some of the best carrier relations and brand recognition outside of the U.S.

Why wouldn’t it want a piece of the Netbook action?

On that note, Nokia’s mini-laptop, dubbed the Booklet 3G, will offer built in 3G connectivity, GPS and a hot-swappable mobile phone SIM card slot. Perfectly aligned for carrier subsidy. It’s also a relatively high end Netbook, so presumably the margins will be higher along with the price point compared with some of the most cheep ‘n’ cheerful offerings currently on the market.

That of course won’t matter one bit if Nokia can persuade the carriers and retailers to take on enough stock, who in turn will persuade consumers to pay for their ‘free’ or ‘close to free’ PC over the course of their 18 or 24 month mobile broadband contract.

That’s the brilliance of the carrier subsidy merry-go-round.

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Can I survive on half a QWERTY? Nokia E55 in the house

Steve O'Hear — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 17:23:34 +0000

Regular readers of this blog – and anybody who’ll listen – will know that I’m a big fan of physical QWERTY keyboards on mobile phones. I’m much less fond of virtual ones, such as that found on the iPhone or my Android-powered HTC Magic.

My current day-to-day phone is a Nokia E71, which I’ve found to have the best QWERTY to-date, but my love affair with mobile QWERTYs started way back when I bought my first Palm Treo (see my GDGT profile, if you’re interested in my gadget history).

I was therefore intrigued when Nokia announced the E55 with a keyboard that the company describes as a compact-QWERTY. Similar to BackBerry’s sure-type layout, each key houses two letters. The option of predictive text helps to smooth over this obvious compromise but then on the other hand you get the advantage of a candy bar form factor, and in the E55’s case, a very slender one too.

Over the next few weeks I intend to put the Nokia E55 through its paces and see how well I do on half a QWERTY. Watch this space.

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Symbian Foundation crowdsourcing UI design

Steve O'Hear — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 17:04:45 +0000

The Symbian Foundation, Nokia’s ambitious open source project designed to give longevity to the Symbian OS, has launched a new blog inviting the ‘community’ to submit their own User Interface mockups.

UI of course is an area where Symbian is perceived to be lagging behind competitors, such as Apple’s iPhone, Android, and the Palm Pre’s Web OS. It’s also something so fundamental to the user experience that it seems odd, even in a small way, to farm this out to the community.

My fear is that, like many an open source project, you could end up with ‘design by committee’.

It’s seems to be the exact opposite approach to that taken by Steve Jobs and Apple, for example. Can you imagine Jobs inviting Apple fan boys for their UI contributions?

Here’s what Scott Weiss, UI Technology Manager at the Symbian Foundation, told IntoMobile earlier this month on the issue of UI design:

It is up to the community to take it forward. I’m here to help guide and support but… my title is not principle designer. I’m not an authoritative figure but I am an influencer and a supporter and a custodian of the User Interface, which is community-owned.

(via IntoMobile)

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Palm Pre to launch on O2 in the UK, just don’t mention the competition

Steve O'Hear — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 13:45:34 +0000

It’s now official: The Palm Pre will launch exclusively on Telefonica-owned O2 here in the UK.

When?

“In time for the holidays”, say Palm and O2, with no word yet on pricing. My guess is that we’re talking early October, enough time to ramp up for Christmas spending.

Either way, it’s a pretty long time to wait, especially since O2 will have been busy pimping its other flagship exclusive. Apple’s newly launched iPhone 3GS.

And then there’s the rest of the competition.

Handsets already on the market in the UK that will/are to varying degrees going head-to-head with the Pre and iPhone include Nokia’s N97 (see my review), which is already getting its own TV and other advertising blitz, Vodafone’s Android debut, the HTC Magic (reviewed here), and Samsung’s HD video capable touch screen monster, the i8910 HD.

But perhaps more significant are the growing number of handsets, announced or known to exist, that will debut closer to the Palm Pre’s UK release.

First out of the gate is HTC’s newest Android phone, the Hero, with its Palm Pre-esque custom User Interface. We also know of Samsung’s Android-powered I7500 (another O2 offering), Sony Ericsson’s Satio (previously known as Idou), another touch screen device but one with a headline grabbing 12 megapixel camera. There’s also the expected BlackBerry Storm 2, Sony Ericsson’s own Android debut, and likely another flagship from Nokia.

That’s one crowded smartphone market, and knowing the competitive nature of the mobile phone space here in the UK, most, if not all of these Palm Pre competitors will come highly subsidized (or made to look that way), with pricing closer to “free” with a 18-24 month contract.

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How I plan to use my HTC Magic Android phone

Steve O'Hear — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 14:08:55 +0000

Vodafone HTC Magic running on a SIM Zero contract on 3

As my obsession with mobile continues – the new frontier – I’ve made the decision to take out a second mobile phone contract. But with a twist. I don’t plan to make (or receive) a single call on handset number two. Instead, it will be used for data only (Web browsing, third-party Internet-connected apps and email).

Handset and contract number one will remain my trusty Nokia E71, with its fantastic physical QWERTY keyboard, superb voice call quality and reception, and huge battery life (3-4 days at a stretch). This will be my all rounder: voice, sms, email, BBC iPlayer, live radio streaming and occasional web.

Contract number two will power my shiny new HTC Magic, which runs Google’s Android OS. The phone is a Vodafone exclusive here in the UK but I picked one up on eBay – somebody’s unwanted upgrade – and the great thing about most Vodafone contract phones, as I’ve discovered, is that they come unlocked so that you can use them on any compatible network. In this case, I’ve signed up to a second contract with UK carrier 3.

Why choose 3?

The answer lies in their new “SIM Zero”, SIM-only 30 day rolling contract. Basically, it costs nothing per-month with no inclusive calls or texts – these are charged separately at fixed rates – but does allow you to pick from any of the available add-ons, in this case 1GB of mobile Internet (data) for just £5 per month. It will also be the SIM card that I’ll use most often when I’m sent a new phone to review.

The end result is that my all rounder, the Nokia E71 is costing me about £20 per month to run with an inclusive bundle of voice minutes, texts, free skype-to-skype, and 1GB of data. And my second handset – let’s call it my touch screen mini Internet tablet, the Android-powered HTC Magic – is costing me £5 per month to keep the lights on.

I know what you’re thinking, why not just carry one handset and save some money in the process. It comes down, in part, to the compromises of both devices. The Nokia E71 is super reliable – battery wise and reception – and has a keyboard I much prefer. The HTC Magic on the other hand has a superior web browser and much better over-the-air syncing with Google’s apps. And there’s the growing library of really cool third-party Internet-enabled applications and my general interest in Android as an up and coming mobile OS.

Besides, two or more mobile devices is just how I like to roll.

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Nokia testing “long form” video service

Steve O'Hear — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 16:29:13 +0000

We’ve known for a long time that Nokia wants to be seen as much as a services company as a handset maker, so it shouldn’t be all that surprising to learn that the company is exploring different ways to deliver online video to mobile phones.

According to a report in New Media Age, Nokia is particularly interested in “kick-starting” the consumption of long-form content on mobiles by utilizing a podcast style delivery method whereby users subscribe to various video feeds, presumably enabling content to be downloaded to the device “over-the-air” rather than being “side-loaded”.

While the service is said to be in trial mode only with about 600 users, 100 of which are Nokia employees, content partners already reportedly include BBC Worldwide, ITV, Sky and Paramount.

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Intel and Nokia announce “long-term relationship” to develop Intel-based mobile devices

Steve O'Hear — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 16:46:31 +0000

This one feels like a bit of a re-announcement but over time could well amount to more. Chip maker Intel and handset maker Nokia held a joint press call today to tell the world about a new “long term relationship” to share R&D and key technologies to develop a new mobile platform or range of devices that “go beyond today’s smartphones, notebooks and netbooks”.

Oh and said devices will be powered by future Intel processors, of course.

Which, as The Register points out, sounds a lot like the Mobile Internet Devices (MIDs) Intel has been to touting for years, and very similar to Nokia’s own – albeit non-Intel based – N810 Internet tablet (see my review).

See also: Should Nokia release a Netbook?

Both companies are already investing heavily in their own Linux-based mobile operating systems and this will continue. Intel will carry on working on the development of Moblin, designed to run on Netbooks and MIDs, and Nokia will keep plugging away at Maemo, which currently powers the N810 and is also being pitched as a Plan B for Nokia should its open sourcing of Symbian OS not bear the fruits that the company hopes for. This despite both companies talking up their partnership as a way of consolidating their open source efforts.

As a side note, Intel is of course a major partner for Apple and one would presume that the company had been hopeful that sometime in the future it could persuade the iPhone maker to put ‘Intel inside’ its future phones. That ambition may have now been squashed upon recent news that Cupertino has been busily recruiting its own chip-designing team.

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Flash 10 coming to smartphones this October? Apple and RIM still missing in action

Steve O'Hear — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 12:26:53 +0000

It seems that Adobe is well on track to deliver a version of Flash 10 for smartphones, with the first beta release due this October. Adobe President and CEO Shantanu Naraye said as much during the company’s latest earnings call, as well as revealing that “multiple partners have already received early versions of this release…”.

Naraye then goes on to name names, citing Android, Nokia’s Symbian, Windows Mobile and Palm’s WebOS as among the first smartphones to “support web browsing with the newsest Flash player.”

Missing in action is RIM’s BlackBerry and, less surprising, Apple’s iPhone and iPod touch devices. Apple’s official line has always been that the full version of Flash player – not the underpowered and less well supported Flash Lite – is too processor intensive to run properly on a smartphone, leading to a significant drain on battery life. However, with the new iPhone 3GS (the “S” stands for speed) that would appear to be less on an issue.

Instead, as we all should know by now, the real reason why Apple doesn’t want to embrace Adobe’s Flash is that it would offer third-party developers an alternative “runtime” on which to develop and, perhaps more importantly, distrubute apps for the iPhone, bypassing Apple’s control (and that of its partner carriers) and the iTunes App Store itself. And we can’t have that, can we? Instead, it’s been reported that Apple may be planning to add support for Flash video in particular through an update to the iPhone’s version of Apple’s QuickTime.

As for why RIM hasn’t jumped on board, well that’s anybody’s guess, although I’d suggest that making a decent web browser for BlackBerry – you know, one that renders HTML properly – should be a priority for RIM over adding the bells and whistles of Flash.

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