last100 » Nokia

Nokia Booklet 3G: Thoughts and first impressions

Steve O'Hear — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 19:29:20 +0000

I’m typing this from my local coffee shop on a Nokia Booklet 3G, the Finnish handset maker’s entry into the crowded Netbook ‘mini laptop’ space. And there’s no doubt that I’m in possession of one of the better looking devices of this type that are on the market.

Nokia’s design cues feel like they’ve been taken directly from Cupertino, the hardware aesthetics are certainly Apple-inspired.

But then so is the price.

Retailing for just shy of £650 from Nokia’s own online store, for what is for the most part under the hood an average Atom-powered (1st generation?) Netbook, seems a little ambitious. Then again, your average price savvy Netbook buyer clearly isn’t the customer.

As I’ve noted before, the real customer of the Booklet 3G is mobile carriers who, presumably, Nokia is hoping will sell the device onto their customers, subsidized over a 18-24 month mobile broadband contract. Technology-wise, the Booklet 3G – built-in SIM slot, up to 12 hours battery life and GPS – is perfectly suited to this scenario.

And although I haven’t yet seen such offers here in the UK, should they enable the Booklet 3G to reach a price point closer to £199, then next to some of the plasticky looking Netbooks from Asus, Accer or MSI, for example, Nokia’s ‘premium’ device could standout and do better with business types or corporate accounts.

The handset maker also has plenty of brand recognition in Europe and, of course, the Booklet ties into Nokia’s Ovi services – so there’s potential consumer appeal too.

That said, my first impressions are a mixed bag: Great looking, well built, decent keyboard and large multi-touch track pad and buttons. The slightly higher resolution than most Netbooks is also handy. On the downside, it feels sluggish running Windows 7 with 1GB of RAM and has pretty rubbish sound. The 12 hours of battery life is clearly overstated too but to be honest, it still seems very impressive. I’m getting a reported 7+ hours remaining with an 86% charge and I’ve been using WiFi for over an hour already.

I have the Nokia Booklet 3G on an extended review loan so I plan to write an update/fuller review further down the line. In the meantime, leave your questions in the comments.

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YouTube updated for Symbian, now supports user accounts

David Gilson — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 20:08:33 +0000

YouTube's new application homepage on S60

It’s taken a while but YouTube has finally added support for user accounts in its updated client for phones running the Nokia-led Symbian OS.

Announced on the 10th of March, users can now log into their YouTube account enabling them to access their favourites, subscriptions, and videos. YouTube stated that it has taken them this long because they wanted to focus on speed of search and playback. Also new to version 2.4 is suggested search terms as you type in a search query.

Version 2.4 is still missing social features, like sharing videos via Twitter or Facebook. Although, it went unmentioned in the official announcement that there is now a menu option to copy a video’s URL to the phone’s clipboard. While not the easiest of routes, this does present a way for users to direct their friends and followers to the latest skateboarding pet videos.

The new version can be downloaded directly from m.youtube.com/app, although N97 users will be disappointed to find that their device is not yet officially supported. Indeed, installing from the Ovi store will only get you version 2.2.29. However, someone from SymbianFrance.com has extracted an installer for the N97, on behalf of NokiaUsers.net. N97 users can download YouTube 2.4 from here.

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Intel and Nokia combine forces to battle Google Chrome, Android and Apple’s iPad

Steve O'Hear — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 20:40:39 +0000

They were already known to be sharing technology with regards to their separate Linux OS efforts but now Intel and Nokia are to merge their respective distributions.

Intel’s Moblin and Nokia’s Maemo operating systems are to be combined into a new Linux-based OS called MeeGo that will target “multiple hardware platforms across a wide range of computing devices, including pocketable mobile computers, netbooks, tablets, mediaphones, connected TVs and in-vehicle infotainment systems.”

Intel is desperate to get its chips into devices that aren’t a traditional PC and Nokia needs a viable and developer-friendly platform to replace Symbian as the latter moves further down into mass-market smart phones that in-turn are replacing feature phones.

But the array of devices targeted by MeeGo also suggests that the move is designed to go head on with Google, both Android, which is finding itself running on more and more non-smartphone hardware, and Chrome OS designed for netbooks. And by extension, Apple’s iPad too.

MWC: Symbian S^3 UI concept ticks all the right boxes!

Steve O'Hear — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 19:03:34 +0000

The Symbian Foundation, the custodians of the Nokia-led open source mobile OS of the same name, has published a concept video showcasing the User Interface changes we can expect in version 3. The UI is seen as a major weakness of Symbian, especially as it transitions away from its S60 ’scroll-and-click’ non-touch roots to something more finger-friendly. So how is Symbian S^3 shaping up?

Pretty darn good, if the video is to be believed.

The UI borrows plenty from the iPhone but also adds a splattering of Palm-esque app switching – similar to WebOS’ card view (see review) – as well as building on some of Nokia’s own UI ideas, such as the widgetized home screen we first saw on the N97. Only this time there are revolving homescreens – Android-style – so that a user can access many more widgets.

Check out the video after the jump…

Oh and we can expect devices running Symbian S^3 to begin shipping as early as Q3 this year, apparently.

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Nokia E72 in the house!

Steve O'Hear — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 22:46:02 +0000

Regular readers of last100 will know how much I like Nokia’s QWERTY touting E71, with it superb keyboard and BlackBerry-esque – only more svelte – form factor. I was therefore really looking forward to the E72 (see ‘My favorite smartphone just got superseded‘)

The E72 keeps much of the same design as the classic E71 but adds a slightly faster processor, an updated version of the operating system – Symbian S60 3rd edition feature pack 2 – better camera and a mini track pad for “easier” scrolling through web pages and email (luckily it can be turned off). The wait was a long time coming, however, as the E72 got delayed and delayed.

It finally went on sale last month in the UK and, shortly after, Nokia kindly sent me a loan unit, which I’ve been using as my main device for a few weeks and hope to write full review very soon. In the meantime, if you have any questions about the device, leave a comment and I’ll answer as best I can.

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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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