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Nokia 5230 review: Foot soldiers get smarter

admin — Sun, 13 Dec 2009 18:35:11 +0000

Introduction

When touchscreen handsets start to take over the lower segments of the market you know the rules of the game have changed. The Nokia 5230 is a smartphone but it doesn’t mind rubbing shoulders with the common run of handsets. So, it’s free to explore grounds where few smartphones have ever gone, let alone full touchscreen gadgets.

Nokia 5230 official photos

The land of affordability was the last territory for touchscreen phones to settle in and not quite the place smartphones would call home. So it was, but Nokia just won’t wait for a special invitation when a niche is wide open. And they’ve got quite a fleet already of low key touchscreen smartphones that’s certain to make an impact. The Nokia 5530 XpressMusic had a great bang for the buck and the 5230 is welcome to try and beat the bargain.

Cheap is nice but free is even better – and we guess the 5230 will be available both ways through retail stores and carriers. But let’s see what it has and what’s been left out.

Key features:

3.2″ 16M-color TFT LCD 16:9 touchscreen display (360 x 640 pixels)
Symbian S60 5th edition
ARM 11 434 MHz CPU, 128MB RAM memory
Quad-band GSM support
3G with HSDPA 3.6Mbps support
Built-in GPS receiver with A-GPS support; Ovi maps
2 megapixel fixed focus camera with and VGA@30fps video
microSD card memory expansion, ships with a 4GB card
FM radio with RDS
Bluetooth with A2DP and USB v2.0
Standard 3.5mm audio jack
Accelerometer sensor for automatic UI rotation, motion-based gaming and turn-to-mute
Ovi integration (direct image and video uploads, Ovi Contacts)
Landscape on-screen virtual QWERTY keyboard
Excellent audio quality
Price tag on the cheap side
Changeable color battery covers (two extra ones available in-box)
Plectrum dongle available in the retail package

Main disadvantages:

No Wi-Fi support
Display has poor sunlight legibility
Default font size is a bit small due to the smallish but high-res screen
3rd party software is still somewhat limited
Extremely limited camera
Doesn’t charge off its microUSB port
No smart dialing
No DivX/XviD video support out of the box
No TV-out functionality
No data-cable or memory card in retail package
No office document viewer
Below par speaker volume

It’s pretty obvious where Nokia are heading with the 5230. In this price range it is impossible to give users every available feature, so the Finns are at least giving them a choice.

There is Nokia 5230, 5530 XpressMusic,and that basically means you can choose between Wi-Fi and 3G with GPS. You can have them all in a single device too, but for a price premium (5800 XpressMusic). Custom made phones to completely match one’s taste and needs are not yet an option. You don’t get to choose the level of equipment like you would when buying a car. So, until that becomes available – if ever – we cannot see a better dealing with the problem than Nokia’s approach.

Nokia 5230 at ours

The R&D costs to release three similar models are probably low enough and there may be plenty of users to find the given choice absolutely adequate. What’s left to see is if there are any differences in performance or is it just the level of equipment that sets those three handsets apart.

The review begins on the next page, and all of you bargain-hunters are welcome to unboxing and hardware check up.

Nokia 8800 Erdos runs Symbian, has 5MP camera, Wi-Fi and GPS

admin — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 16:55:03 +0000

Nokia 8800 series of luxury phones have always focused on high quality materials and superior build quality, while holding back on the spec sheet. With the Nokia 8800 Erdos this reputation is about to change.

First off, “Erdos” is just a code name so expect that to change at some point. And second – this won’t be an Arte. The Arte phones have had largely the same design, differing in materials only. The 8800 Erdos changes not only the design but also the way the phones are built.

The Nokia Ardos body will be constructed out of a single piece of “bullet silver”. This apparently is marketing talk for stainless steel, so you probably can’t kill a werewolf with it, but carving out the body out of a single piece of metal is all the rage with high-end laptops and the ridiculously expensive luxury phones.

The screen of the Erdos however is covered with regular scratch-proof glass, rather than sapphire, which is the usual weapon of choice in such cases. The glass covering the screen though turns silver when the display is off, giving the impression that the phone is a single slab of stainless steel. The screen itself is an OLED unit with QVGA resolution and a diagonal of 2.4 inches.

Nokia 8800 Erdos

The high-end design of the Nokia 8800 Erdos includes a rather unique feature too – it’s a slider like the rest of its siblings, but the keypad raises to the level of the display when you slide it out. This should make the keys of the top row much more accessible.

Sounds good already, but we haven’t even gotten to the good part yet – the Nokia 8800 Erdos is the first of its breed to be a full-on smartphone. It’ll run the Symbian OS S60 and feature Wi-Fi and A-GPS. The internal memory is 8GB, though there’s no card slot.

The camera is the best in the luxury class with its 5 megapixels and Carl Zeiss lens with autofocus. There’s a dual-LED flash too.

Rounding off the specs is the reasonably compact size of the phone. The 8800 Erdos measures 116.9 x 50,3 x 15.0 mm, though its weight is kept on the hush-hush. There is also a dedicated noise reduction microphone on the back.

The Nokia 8800 Erdos will be available in October with tri-band GSM (900/1800/1900) and dual-band 3G/HSPA. The price is the other thing missing from the rumored specs, though this could easily top the price point of the Gold Arte.

Oh, and here’s a video to give you a better impression of the design:

Source

Nokia N900 is now officially outed

admin — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 20:02:24 +0000

Well, it seem Nokia have something even more exciting to announce at the upcoming Nokia World, so they’ve decided to fire early with the N900 tablet/smartphone announcement. N900 is a continuation of Nokia Nseries tablets. This time they’ve stepped out of the ultra portable computing turf and have ventured in the territory of Nokia Communicators.

Running on the new Linux-based Maemo 5 OS, the Nokia N900 power lies in the capable multi-tasking, which should make it stand out even among the ranks of the Symbian smartphones. According to Nokia reps, however, the new Maemo device is not meant to compete with the Nokia Symbian smartphones, but instead cater for different market needs.

With Nokia N900 you’ve got around-the-clock connectivity thanks to Wi-Fi and HSPA. The N900 offers phone features as well allowing full-featured telephony.

Nokia N900 runs on the Linux-based Maemo 5.0 OS

The Nokia N900 packs a powerful ARM Cortex-A8 CPU much like the Apple iPhone 3GS, Palm Pre and Samsug Omnia HD and offers hardware graphics acceleration and 256MB RAM.

Switching between applications is simple, as all running content is constantly available through the dashboard. The panoramic homescreen can be fully personalized with favorite shortcuts, widgets and applications. We wonder however how many of those features will be available in portrait mode though, as Maemo is Tablet OS that’s hardly been put to use in portrait mode before.

Interaction with the handset is available through the large 3.5-inch touchscreen display with a WVGA resolution (800 x 480 pixels) and the 3-row QWERTY keypad. The touch screen also offers a virtual on-screen keyboard and operating with a stylus is possible, though one doesn’t seem to be included with the N900 itself.

Nokia N900 is smarter than most other smartphones

Thanks to the web browser powered by Mozilla technology, websites should look just as they do on a desktop computer. Online videos and interactive applications are not a problem as the Maemo OS has full Adobe Flash 9.4 support.

The Nokia N900 has 32GB of storage, which is expandable up to 48GB via a microSD card. Other features include a GPS receiver with Ovi Maps, an FM transmitter, a 3.5mm audio jack with TV-out function, Bluetooth and DivX/XviD video playback support.

For photography on the go, the Maemo software and the N900 come with a new tag cloud user interface that helps users tag and share photos and videos more easily. The 5 megapixel with Carl Zeiss optics is also capable of recording 16:9 video with a resolution of up to 848×480 pixels@25fps.

Here’s the official demo video of the Nokia N900 where you can check how the new cloud photo tagging system works among other things:

The Nokia N900 should be available from October this year with an estimated retail price of 500 euro before taxes and subsidies.

Source

Official photos of N900 and N97 Mini lift the curtain of Nokia World

admin — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 10:23:48 +0000

With only several days remaining to the start of the Nokia World event, we can already feel the excitement building up. We already got one announcement yesterday just to warm us up but we are certainly hoping that more will follow once things get rolling in Stuttgart on 1 September.

After the preview that popped up yesterday we were quite confident in predicting that the Nokia N97 Mini will be one of the new devices to be announced at this year’s Nokia World. The trimmed-down version of the company multimedia flagship has now made another unofficial appearance, through a leaked press shot. It certainly doesn’t give any more information that we already have, but it’s another confirmation that the actual launch of the handset cannot be far away.

Nokia N97 mini

The other device that made an appearance in similar fashion is the Nokia N900 former tablet. Again previewed ahead of announcement, the Maemo-based smartphone is certainly quite far ahead in its development and it will hardly be a surprise if we see it announced next week. And it certainly looks like a real beauty at those official shots, right?

Nokia N900

So stay tuned as the Nokia World unveils next week and tells us if there is more left to unveil.

Source

Nokia Launches Mobile Payment Service

admin — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 09:07:55 +0000

Nokia is launching “Nokia Money,” a financial payment service for mobile phones that allows users to send money to another person, make a purchase or pay a bill using their handset.

The Finnish company said the new service will particularly benefit customers in rural areas and emerging economies — since it works anywhere in the world and saves travel costs.

“For urban consumers used to online services, we are enabling services such as payment of utility bills, purchase of train and movie tickets, top-ups, all through their mobile phones,” said Teppo Paavola, Nokia’s Head of Corporate Business Development. “Nokia Money is simple to use, secure and available across different operator networks and on virtually any mobile phone.”

The service will operate on the back of Obopay, a privately-owned mobile financial service company that Nokia invested in earlier this year.

Nokia’s movie into financial services comes as it deals with declining handset prices and increased competition from Apple’s iPhone and Research In Motion’s BlackBerry and Google’s Android devices.

Last quarter, the struggling handset maker reported a 66 percent drop in net profit from a year earlier.

Earlier this week, it said it will begin selling netbook. Last month, the company reached a deal with Microsoft to port Office to its handsets.

Nokia Money will be gradually rolled out starting early 2010.

Full touch Nokia 5230 announced, 3G and GPS onboard

admin — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 15:29:39 +0000

Nokia are obviously getting more and more serious about their touchscreen portfolio. Hot on the heels of the Nokia 5530 XpressMusic, they have announced the Nokia 5230 – an entry-level touchscreen handset. The newcomer has the same dimensions as the Nokia 5800 XpressMusic but looses the Wi-Fi and has only a 2 megapixel camera.

Much like the Nokia 5800, the Nokia 5230 sports a 3.2-inch resistive touchscreen with a resolution of 640 x 360 pixels, FM radio, 3.5 mm audio jack and microSD card slot. The camera has been downgraded to 2 megapixel resolution but manages the decent VGA@30fps video recording.

Nokia 5230 runs the latest Symbian S60 5th edition and is powered by the same battery as 5800 – a 1320 mAh one, which is good 320 mAh larger that that of the Nokia 5530 XpressMusic. According to the manufacturer the 5230 will be capable of 33 hours of non-stop music playback.

Nokia 5230

The final noteworthy features of the the 5230 include Ovi Maps and social networking integration such as Facebook, MySpace and YouTube.

The available inbox colors for the Nokia 5230 are black and white for the front panel and red, pink, blue, yellow, silver and dark silver for the rear covers.

The available inbox colors

The handset will be available in Q4 this year for a recommended price of 150 euro before taxes or subsides. It will also be distributed in a Comes With Music package in certain markets, priced at 259 euro before subsides and taxes.

And here is a short promo video of the new handset, that underlines, what Nokia consider to be its key features.

Source

Nokia N97 Mini previewed ahead of launch, fails to impress

admin — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 10:28:37 +0000

Some of our readers were still skeptical after the first two leaks of the Nokia N97 Mini but that should be enough to convince them that the handset is just round the corner. A live preview of the slightly downgraded version of the Nokia multimedia flagship appeared online, revealing almost everything there’s to reveal about the handset.

Being a sized-down version of the original Nokia N97, the N97 Mini-Me will come with 8GB of internal storage rather than 32 GB. There’s also no D-pad this time and the keypad size is reduced, which according to the author makes it uncomfortable for users with larger hands. While the camera module has remained unchanged, the protective cover is dropped, leaving the N97 Mini lens exposed to fingerprints and scratches.

Nokia N97 Mini

On the positive side the Nokia N97 Mini replaces the plastic battery cover with a much nicer metal one and has more solid build quality. There’s also kinetic scrolling throughout the interface, much like the newly released Nokia 5530 XpressMusic and the latest firmware of the Nokia 5800 XpressMusic.

The good news about the Nokia N97 users is that they will also be receiving kinetic scrolling as an update soon. The new firmware sporting it will be released in mid-September.

The main grudge that the author of the preview has against the Nokia N97 Mini is its pricing, which is said to be only about 100 euro less than that of the regular N97 but frankly we cannot quite agree with that. While we certainly consider the N97 slightly over-priced, we cannot help but feel that such a price difference is pretty reasonable. After all with the original handset nearing 400 euro, we cannot have hoped for its younger brother to sell for less than 300, right?

Nokia N97 mini

Leaving the pricing aside, the preview gives us some more spicy info about the Nokia touchscreen portfolio. Apparently it will be receiving some major update in the coming months with the first new editions right around the corner (presumably the Nokia 5230, announced this morning is one of them).

Source

Samsung B3310 Social Networking Phone

admin — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 04:29:18 +0000

Here’s the leaked pictures including details of Samsung’s upcoming B3310 social networking phone. This entry-level phone will feature a horizontal slide-out QWERTY keyboard, a 2.1-inch TFT LCD display with 176 x 220 pixels, a 2MP camera with video recording, a music player, an FM radio, a 40MB of internal memory, a microSD card slot, Bluetooth and comes pre-loaded with applications to access Facebook, MySpace and Flickr. The Samsung B3310 will hit UK in mid-September for unannounced price yet.

Nokia 5530 XpressMusic review: Winner by design

admin — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 10:19:09 +0000

Introduction

The XpressMusic lineup is fired up and coming after you with all they’ve got – from QWERTY smartphones to touchscreens. In fact, with the arrival of 5530 XpressMusic, the Nokia music line has more touch phones than the Nseries. We told you, they’re dead serious about it.

With the 5800 XpressMusic shaping up as quite a blockbuster, Nokia had hardly any choice but to build on that momentum. The way up from the 5800 goes into Nseries territory really, so a lower spec’d device with an even sweeter price tag seems quite the right thing to do to reach the masses. And well, strategically expand the user base for the Touch UI edition of Symbian S60.

Nokia 5530 XpressMusic official photos

The Nokia 5800 offered value-for-money that very few could match. The 5530 comes in even more affordable but tries to deliver as much goodies as possible, pushing the value-for-money meter well towards the “must have” end of the scale. Here’s what the 5530 XpressMusic offers and what was left out to keep the cost down:

Key features:

2.9″ 16M-color TFT LCD 16:9 touchscreen display (360 x 640 pixels)
Symbian S60 5th edition
ARM 11 434 MHz CPU, 128MB RAM memory
3.2 megapixel autofocus camera with LED flash and VGA@30fps video
Quad-band GSM support
Wi-Fi connectivity
microSD card memory expansion, ships with a 4GB card
FM radio with RDS
Bluetooth with A2DP and USB v2.0
Standard 3.5mm audio jack
Stereo speakers
Stylus, with its own compartment inside the phone
Proximity sensor for screen auto turn-off
Accelerometer sensor for automatic UI rotation, motion-based gaming and turn-to-mute
Office document viewer
OVI integration (direct image and video uploads, OVI Contacts)
Landscape on-screen virtual QWERTY keyboard
Excellent audio quality
Price tag on the cheap side

Main disadvantages:

No 3G support
No built-in GPS receiver
Display has poor sunlight legibility
Default font size is a bit small due to the smaller screen
Somewhat limited 3rd party software availability
Average camera image quality
Video recording quality is unimpressive
Doesn’t charge off its microUSB port
No smart dialing
No DivX/XviD video support out of the box
Shaky back cover compromises build quality
No TV-out functionality

Trade-offs were obviously inevitable but many of the important features are on par with the 5800 – the CPU, the Wi-Fi support, the camera. And further on the positive side, the 5530 is much more compact than the 5800.

Nokia 5530 XpressMusic live shots

The XpressMusic badge usually guarantees great music experience – from the audio quality to the way music is organized, played and delivered. With Nokia’s recent track record of excellent audio quality in the headphone department and the pair of nice sounding stereo speakers, the 5530 is a mini-jukebox.

What hurts it the most is the lack of 3G, especially for those with unlimited data plans. Others will barely wait to jump at this affordable touch-operated and WLAN-enabled smartphone. As always, we’re here to help you make the decision.

Size comparison between the iPhone, the 5530 and the 5730

It’s time that we set off exploring the Nokia 5530 ins and outs – so join us on the next page where a proper unboxing is due.

Microsoft and Nokia announce close cooperation, Office Mobile comes to Nokia smartphones

admin — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 09:51:46 +0000

This rumor has been circulating around for a while but now it is as official as it gets: Microsoft Office Mobile is coming to Nokia smartphones. This and other mobile productivity and connectivity solutions are the direct result of the global alliance between the two giants, which was announced today.

No, Nokia don’t have any plans of making a Windows Mobile device any time soon. As of today the two companies will start working together on the design, development and marketing of diverse productivity solutions. Target users of the new products will be the corporate users who will appreciate them most. So, it’s not a surprise that the first products to incorporate them will be the members of the renowned E-series.

This might sound strange at first to some but a second look at the written above reveals that this alliance does not only plan to bring the Microsoft Office Mobile to the Symbian powered smartphones (in fact, Quickoffice already does it quite successfully), but also to add new and useful mobile professional solutions.

As of next year Nokia should start shipping the Microsoft Office Communicator Mobile on its smartphones with plans to widen the range of apps in the future.

So, what can we actually expect from that alliance? Here is a clue:

The ability to view, edit, create and share Office documents on more devices in more places with mobile-optimized versions of Microsoft Word, Microsoft PowerPoint, Microsoft Excel and Microsoft OneNote
Enterprise instant messaging and presence, and optimized conferencing and collaboration experience with Microsoft Office Communicator Mobile
Mobile access to intranet and extranet portals built on Microsoft SharePoint Server
Enterprise device management with Microsoft System Center

With the over 200 million Nokia smartphones sold worldwide it’s not a surprise that Microsoft decided to start this alliance namely with the Finns. And as far as Nokia is concerned, its still young service Ovi will now have a strong reinforcement with Microsoft by its side.