July 7th, 2009 | Posted in Mobile | 
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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.
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June 26th, 2009 | Posted in Mobile | View Comments
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).
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June 24th, 2009 | Posted in Mobile, Net TV | View Comments
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.
June 23rd, 2009 | Posted in Mobile | Comments Off
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).
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June 23rd, 2009 | Posted in Mobile | Comments Off
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.”
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June 15th, 2009 | Posted in Mobile | Comments Off
Nokia E72
I get through a fair number of smartphones here at last100 HQ — hey, it’s my job — but there’s one handset that continues to be my primary device. I’m talking about the Nokia E71, which admittedly doesn’t have the fun factor of the iPhone and nearly as many quality third-party apps (I have an iPod touch to compensate) but does have the best QWERTY keyboard on a mobile device that I’ve ever used, in a form factor that is perfect for my own particular needs.
Today, the Nokia E71 got superseded by a new handset from Nokia, the E72, which thankfully keeps the physical design relatively untouched, improves the keyboard layout, and ups the fairly feeble camera (my main complaint of the E71) to a more respectable 5 megapixels capable of shooting 30 15 fps VGA video.
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June 9th, 2009 | Posted in Mobile, Review | View Comments
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Having only had around 10 minutes hands-on time with Nokia’s new flagship mobile phone, the N97, at a recent press event in London in which my initial impressions were largely positive, I was really keen to source a loan unit for some quality time with the device. Thanks to Nokia’s PR reps in the UK, I did just that, taking delivery of an N97 on Friday. There is of course a world of difference between living with a phone for any meaningful length of time and having a quick play at a press event or trade show. And after 3 days of ‘real world’ use, I’ll offer up the first mea culpa: the keyboard isn’t nearly as good as I’d first reported (see below). Read on for a more in-depth review of the Nokia N97…
May 29th, 2009 | Posted in Mobile | View Comments
Nokia's N97 flagship phone
I’ve been pretty excited ever since Nokia announced it’s soon-to-be-released Nokia N97 all the way back in December. However, it wasn’t till earlier this week that I was actually able to get my hands-on the company’s new flagship device courtesy of Nokia Design Day, an all day press event held at Nokia’s design offices in London. I got to spend about ten minutes playing with the N97 and overall I was very pleased with the device, both hardware build and looks, along with the newly revamped touch UI based on Symbian S60 5th edition. Overall, Nokia appears to have provided exactly what I and many users have been calling for: a phone with the Nseries media production and playback features combined with an Eseries-style QWERTY keyboard and build quality.
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May 26th, 2009 | Posted in Mobile | Comments Off
Why isn't Gravity being promoted?
It’s day one of the Ovi Store, Nokia’s answer to the iPhone App Store, along with similar offerings from BlackBerry and Google. To say the roll out hasn’t been as smooth as the handset maker would have liked is an understatement to say the least. The service has been plagued by problems, such as really, and I mean really, slow load times, connection errors, the inability for some users to log-in using their existing Ovi account details, and applications disappearing and reappearing in the store itself.
However, as time has passed, things are beginning to settle down. My own experience on my Nokia E71 is that the mobile client for the Ovi Store has steadily improved in performance throughout the day, and at the time of publication – approx 5pm London time – the service is certainly usable, if not as speedy as the iPhone’s App Store — yet.
On the downside, I’m still unable to log-in to the Ovi Store on the desktop (Firefox running on a Mac) where I’m greeted each time with an error: “Sorry, you cannot sign in at this time. Try again later.” In its defense, Nokia says that it has been frantically adding additional servers to cope with “extraordinarily high spikes of traffic” — traffic that it surely should have anticipated. Teething issues aside, what about the store itself?
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May 25th, 2009 | Posted in Mobile | Comments Off
Nokia has begun rolling out its new app store – the Ovi Store – for both S60 and S40-powered handsets. It’s already available in Australia and a growing list of other countries. No UK or US availability — yet, however. I’ll update this post when and if that changes.
Update: the Ovi Store has launched in the UK and US now, although the service is slow and unreliable as Nokia, presumably, attempts to scale it live. Hopefully this will be sorted in the next day or so. It’s early days but not the best of starts.
Announced at Mobile World Congress back in February, the Ovi Store is the handset maker’s direct response to Apple’s phenomenally successful App Store for the company’s iPhone and iPod touch devices. Here’s what I wrote when the Ovi Store was first unveiled at MWC:
The Ovi Store will offer “a range of content including applications, games, videos, widgets, podcasts, location-based applications and personalised content”, and will be available on both S60 and Series 40 devices. The first handset to ship with the store pre-installed will be the recently announced Nokia N97, which is set to launch by June. Sensibly, Nokia will also make the Ovi Store available to existing S60 and Series 40 handsets through a simple download in May. Revenue from paid-for apps will be split 70/30 in the developer’s favor, exactly the same deal offered by the iPhone’s App Store. All very Apple-esqe, so far.
However, here’s where Nokia is at least attempting to be different: “Ovi Store is unique in its ability to target content based on where you are, when you’re there, why you are where you are and who else has downloaded similar content”, all of which fits perfectly with the company’s ambitious Social Location (SoLo) strategy.
For those countries where the Ovi Store is already available, users need to navigate to the now legacy Download! app and refresh for new content. The Ovi Store app can then be found in the “Nokia Extras” folder or “Promo” folder, depending on handset and region.
May 13th, 2009 | Posted in Mobile, Social | View Comments
Six months prior to its scheduled release, influential tech blogger Robert Scoble dubbed Nokia’s upcoming N97 the “ultimate Facebook phone“. And as impressive as the device promises to be, that seemed just a tad premature, especially as the handset maker was reportedly still working out how deeply it should integrate a rival’s web service into its flagship phone. The competition wasn’t going to stand still either.
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May 6th, 2009 | Posted in Mobile, Social | View Comments
(Credit: Jamie Gonzalez via twitpic)
I’ve written many times before that social networking, and Facebook in particular, is the killer application for mobile phones. It’s what’s driving take up of mobile data and the adoption of higher end so-called smartphones. The mobile networks have taken notice and jumped on the social networking bandwagon, heavily promoting access to Facebook as a key feature, and handset makers are doing the same.
RIM has been targeting consumers with an ad campaign that features the Blackberry’s Facebook application.
Ditto Apple with the iPhone.
And there’s INQ, a new entrant whose first device, the INQ1, has been dubbed ‘the Facebook phone‘ based on its deep integration with the social networking site.
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LONDON - Steve O'Hear reporting from the trenches of convergence (more)
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