Posts filed under Nokia

It’s hands-on review time again, and this time I’ve reviewed the Nokia N82. The N82 is a slim candybar N-Series phone, meaning it comes stacked with goodies. Featuring 5 megapixel camera, GPS, HSDPA, Wi-Fi, and virtually everything the N95 had, all in a package that’s a third thinner, the N82 looks like it could be another winner form Nokia.

Just how good is it in real-life, though? You’ll find out if you carry on reading my hands-on Nokia N82 review:

• Nokia N82 Review Part 1
• Nokia N82 Review Part 2 – Features
• Nokia N82 Review Part 3 – Software and Summary

A few months ago, my Nokia E90 stopped being able to connect to any Web page that required a secure connection (i.e. SSL). At first, I didn’t think all that much about it, but it very quickly started to annoy me. I couldn’t access my email, RSS reader, or any of a million different Web sites that I hadn’t even realised required SSL!

I updated the firmware to the very latest version, but to no effect. So I checked the mobile forums, where I found that a number of other users had been having the same problem with their Nokia phones – and not just the E90. It was a variety of Nokia phones that were having problems, but the one common theme was that they were all on the UK T-Mobile network, and they all used to work fine.

Then one day, without warning,and without doing anything to their phones, the Nokia’s simply stopped being able to establish SSL connections.

Every other network worked just fine – it was only Nokia phones on T-Mobile’s network that was the problem.

At the 3G.co.uk forum, one member speculated that this was a deliberate move by T-Mobile because they’d fallen out with Nokia over its Ovi music service.

This can’t really be the case, can it? The video above shows the problem. I’ve now finally got through to a teccie at T-Mobile and will be providing evidence of the problem over the coming days, with an assurance that they will sort it out for me. They’d better, as my contract runs out in November, and I’m not prepared to sign up with a network that only half works!

Stay tuned for more details on this saga.

I’ve got my hands on a Nokia N82 for review,and if there’s one thing I know about gadget freaks, they do like their unboxings! No idea why a box should cause such excitement, but who am I to buck a trend?!

So here, in true tech blog style, is my video of the Nokia N82 being unboxed.

I’ll have a complete review of the N82 early next week,with videos,pictures and more info than you could possibly need,so stay tuned.

Writing a Nokia E90 review is something I’ve been meaning to do for a while now, ever since I first bought one! The Nokia E90 Communicator is Nokia’s flagship smartphone, and with its unique blend of mobile office applications and multimedia wizardry, it perfectly mixes both business and pleasure. Its feature list is long, and includes 3.2 megapixel camera, VGA-quality video recording, GPS, HSDPA, a glorious 800 x 352 screen resolution and proper full screen Web browsing. In addition to its multimedia marvels, you can also read and edit Microsoft Office applications, which, when combined with its full-QWERTY keyboard, makes it the perfect business phone, too.

But a long list of features is all very well. The real question is are they any good? Do they actually work as intended, and can you use the E90 as a laptop replacement? Well, I’ve had an E90 for the past six months, so grab a cup of coffee and read on for my extensive Nokia E90 Communicator review to find out.

Nokia have begun to really push their new Nokia N96, which should be released within the next few weeks. They’ve set up a fantastic promotional site called Face the Task (no, I don’t now why it’s called that either – maybe it’s the last domain name left in the world!), which sort of shows a bit of what the N96 can do, but more importantly, looks seriously cool! You can also enter a competition to win an N96 limited edition before the phone itself hits the streets.

You can see a clip from the Face the Task web site above, but this really is only a teaser – the full site is far more impressive.

More details of the Nokia N96 after the jump.

The Nokia N96, Nokia’s latest multimedia smartphone, will be released in just a few weeks’ time. Despite no official announcement from Nokia yet, we have it on good authority that the N96 will be released in August, which is perfect timing for your holiday.

Why for your holiday? Well, not so you can sit on the beach and take calls (though you could if you wanted to, but if you do, you should really think about getting a life!). No, the N96 is a multimedia powerhouse, and is perfect for capturing pictures, video, watching TV, sending your pics and vids directly to Flickr and YouTube – and it’ll even help you navigate your way around foreign cities.

Nokia have finally announced the Nokia E71 (above) and E66 (below), two business-oriented smartphones that have been talked about in the mobile phone world for what seems like an age. Replacing the Blackberry-like E70 and E65 respectively, the two phones are designed primarily for business use, and so come with such business-oriented features as one touch access to calendars, notes, todo lists, etc., plus email software that enables these phones to connect to any of over 1,600 email services provided by ISPs across the globe.

There’s even built-in support for Microsoft Exchange, so your boss can get you no matter where you are at work.

The E71 is the more distinct of the two, featuring a full-QWERTY keyboard that makes text entry a breeze. In contrast, the E66 looks like a standard mobile phone, so data entry is going to be more difficult, but equally you have an arguably more stylish phone in your pocket. Other than the keyboard, the two phones are largely the same, except for one small feature: the E66 has an accelerometer, allowing you to block calls simply by turning the phone over onto its front. I like that – kind of like turning your back on the caller! Rude, but satisfying!

The E71 and E66 aren’t just fusty old business phones, though. Nokia appreciate that your average smart-phone touting business-person doesn’t just want a mobile email client, they want some multimedia fun too. So the new phones have been packed with enough multimedia features to make an N-Series blush. The E71, for example, comes with an MP3 player and 3.2 megapixel camera, as well as HSDPA, Wi-Fi, a-GPS and Nokia Maps. All this in a phone that’s just 10mm thin – hugely impressive.

In other words, it’s what a top-end phone came with last year, all packaged into a business phone that will cost around 350 Euros.

More details and pictures of the Nokia E71 and E66 after the jump.

Nokia has made certain attempts to encroach on Google’s territory over the past few months – or, rather, what it sees as Nokia territory. Take mobile advertising, for example. Nokia will ship over 35 million GPS-enabled mobile phones this year alone, each of which is capable of supporting location-based mobile advertising. This just happens to be fertile Google territory, as the search engine giant sees all forms of online advertising as its own, and location-based mobile advertising in particular is estimated to be worth billions in the near future.

Google may have the advertising prowess, however, but what it doesn’t have is control over the devices that will ultimately deliver mobile advertising. Step forward Nokia, who not only have the devices equipped with GPS, they’ve also just bought NavTeq, the mapping company that powers many of the world’s Sat-Nav systems and mapping software, including – yup – Google Maps!

Now this is where it gets really interesting. Nokia has been showing off a Google Maps-killer called Maps on Ovi at the O’Reilly Where 2.0 Conference in San Francisco that by all accounts makes Google Maps look like a dinosaur. Unlike Google Maps, which does all the processing on the server, Maps for Ovi is vector-based and does all the processing on the client – making its response time much faster.

Couple this with Nokia’s latest handset the Nokia Navigator, which comes with a built-in compass, and Nokia’s place in the location-based market suddenly looks a lot stronger than Google’s. Nokia are even releasing a series of APIs for Maps on Ovi, enabling anyone to create their own applications for it that will work not just on PCs, but on any Nokia device capable of supporting the new mapping service.

“Yelp is just a mashup. Twitter is just a mashup. If they want to make their applications work with our APIs, great,” said Nokia VP, Michael Halbherr. “But Google is our competitor.”

Disappointing news reaches us that Nokia will not be updating the glorious-looking Nokia N93 any time soon. In fact, the marvellous twisty form-factor will not be used on any new Nokia phone until at least 2010. This is sad, as the N93 was genuinely innovative and really makes the phone stand out head and shoulders above its competition.

The N93 was one of the first N-Series phones, and really helped established the brand as cutting edge. With its mix of shapes that it could pull, you were never entirely sure whether it was a phone, a camcorder or a PDA, but that was part of its appeal. Indeed, the form factor was validated by the fact that many new dedicated camcorders now sport a similar look. Sadly, though, Nokia has decided to leave the design to them, and have deemed it either to be too unwieldy or simply too fat for a mobile phone.

I guess this is only to be expected, as the recent trend has been for phones to slim down. By 2010, though, we can expect all of the technological marvels that were squeezed into the N93 to be small enough to fit into a device with a similar form factor, but that is much smaller, which I guess is good news. Until then, it might not be a bad idea to snap one of these beauties up either new or on EBay, as if ever a phone was destined to be a collectible, the N93 is it.

[Source: The Nokia Blog via BoyGeniusReport]

What do you do when you get your hands on five of Nokia’s shiniest top-end N-Series phones all at once? Review them all, of course, and take tonnes of pics of the buggers! And that’s just what the PhoneReport has done, lining up the Nokia N95 8GB, N78, N82, N81 8GB and (gasp!) the brand new Nokia N96.

Phew! As you can see from the pics (and they have dozens more on their site), it’s quite an impressive line up, and the review makes for interesting reading if you’re considering buying one of Nokia “multimedia computers”. Frustratingly, the review isn’t all that in-depth, covering only the dimensions and usability of the phones in terms of their form factors and a bit of the user interfaces, but a fuller review is promised sometime in the future.

More pics after the jump.