Concept Nokias: Nokia Stealth and Nokia N82 Dragonfly

Just when all the phones are become minimalistic rectangular slates of touch screens, here are a couple of concept alphanumeric keyed candybars to give us a blast of some unconventional monoblock designs.

The first is the Nokia stealth, named after the pictured stealth bomber, Lockheed’s angular F-117 Nighthawk. The stealth theme reminds me somewhat of the Prism….actually no,…the rugged 5140

I would totally love a high end device called Stealth – sleek black smartphone/MeeGo pocket slate with a hidden “stealth” touch screen.

The second is a slightly more convenstional looking (at least from the top half) Nokia N82 dragonfly. The N82, apart from being the undisputed king of Nokia’s photography line (and possibly the mobile phone world) is also known for it’s slightly small and awkward keyboard. The look achieved here resembles something quite insect like, as expected being called the dragonfly (though there is a hint of Orange SPV)

The Bug Like quality also reminds me of another super durable Nokia – the 5100.

Reginald Shola Hingston via Concept Phones

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Video: Raemote – Maemo 5 N900 infra red remote for your for Mac Mini, MacBook and MacBook Pro

From perlinet, this Widget is an Apple Remote on your N900’s desktop, turning your N900 into an infra-red remote for your Mac Mini, MacBook and MacBook Pro

Download package

via thp

Now what about the TV-iR remote. Is that out yet? (Those were the first videos shown of N900 hacking abilities…)

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Quick Launch any four Nokia N900 Maemo 5 apps from the status bar!

Quick launch gives you immediate access to any four apps from the status bar. Just tap on the status bar and your panels will show up with your four chosen shortcuts. The four in the screenshot are just examples. And of course, with the N900, the new app is added amongst the many other windows you may be running simultaneously. Even though I’ve got quick access to apps from my main homescreen, this makes it even quicker for me to get open file manager/web/media player and calculator. Great if I’ve got a different homescreen in use, and/or within another app.

DOWNLOAD from App Manager. You may need to have additional catalogues to see Quick-lauch. CLICK

What’ll be your four quick launch apps?

By default, the choices are blank. To edit, go to settings.

Quick Launch settings are in the N900’s main settings panel.

You’ll get a choice of four shortcuts. Just tap to select

You’ll get a list of your installed apps

Then click save when done.

Now you have access to your chosen four apps extremely quickly from any view where the status bar is present.

Mauku behind.

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Nokia RANT: Response to Ovum’s “Report” on Nokia’s ‘failures’.

N900 vs X6 vs N97

Hmm, I doubt anyone will read this but I couldn’t sleep (trying to finish off some presentations…meh, they want us to use OHP :[) and seeing these “reports” circulated got me kinda worked up.

I haven’t made a proper Nokia rant in a while. Nokia’s been churning a lot of awesome sauce since N900 (Free Ovi Maps Navigation, Increased Q4 profits/market share, MeeGo, Qt, Symbian^3/4, Improved S60V5 Ovi Store, and generally other N900 related things). Check out this article from Mobile Industry Review: Nokia is back and beginning to rock

I read digitime’s take on Ovum’s “report” yesterday morning but ignored it as nonsense Nokia bashing bandwagon. But I’m seeing more sources passing off “reports”, e.g. V3 which have NO backing other than passing of “he said, she said”

Now I like ranting against Nokia and I’ll be the first to jump on Nokia bashing bandwagons – BUT only when it’s warranted. Let’s take the N97 as it’s such an easy shot.

• Nokia made huge mistake in not giving N97 more RAM. Huge failure. Ignore the numbers of 128MB ram, at startup you get around what – 40MB if you’re lucky?
• N97 should have been at least on 500MHz just for the sake of longevity (ideally the expected 600MHz). i.e. it was ok for use for a month of release but felt out dated soon after, and gets so much more painful to use when ever you try out faster competitors.
• N97 perhaps should have had a capacitive screen. I know there are those that are happy with resistive. I personally prefer the feather touch sensitivity that capacitive offers and don’t mind the frequently mentioned trade offs.
• N97 was bestowed with a miniscule amount of C: memory. 32GB memory but around 50MB for app installation. A few firmwares kinda sorted it out whereby any installating to E: no longer phantomly depleted C:.
• N97 has appalling quality control – batches weren’t all manufactured at the same standard.
• Symbian^1 and it’s awful bugginess, lacklustre appeal – seemingly S60 3rd edition with touch screen, i.e. no touch optimization was the biggest culprit to anyone’s frustrations with the N97. It has taken half a year and several firmware upgrades to get it to a relatively usable point. This was one of the major reasons O2 CPW ceased selling the N97 due to huge returns – same fate temporarily faced with the Symbian friendly Satio.
• There’s more but this post isn’t about bashing the N97, just an example to show I like you are very much aware of its faults and I’m not blindly singing Nokia’s praises.

Like I said, I don’t mind if Nokia’s bashed when it’s warranted. I maybe disappointed of Nokia but in cases like the points above, Nokia are indefensible so writers are just reporting it like they see it. It’s a warranted “attack”. But in this case it is not. Let’s take a look at what Ovum (and via V3/digitimes) says about Nokia’s failings.

1. “Nokia’s current smartphones, including the flagship N97 and N97 mini, run on ARM11 below 500MHz with an anaemic 128MB of RAM, a point that most other platforms have abandoned”

OK. Great. Ovum and co are fine with pointing out the lower specs but ignore publishing N900’s the ARM Cortex-A8 600 MHz, PowerVR SGX with OpenGL ES 2.0 support, 256 MB RAM, 768 MB virtual memory. Note how all sources that will mention this report by Ovum will easily brush this off, see point 2.

1.5 “Nokia’s flagship hardware is underpowered compared to rivals…”

Nokia’s biggest failure is continuing to market the N97 as the flagship. The N900 spins rings around the N97 and most of its competitors. Have you seen how well the N900 multitasks and surfs the entire web with flash?

Everyone knows the Maemo 5 pocket computer is the flagship, whether or not Nokia admit it. Nokia themselves confessed the failures of the N97. I always felt it was some sort of interim solution to keep some attention on Nokia ( i.e. not focus too much resources because something better on the horizon – aka N900) but it has been more detrimental due to poor consumer experiences.

That’s what I hate most about the N97 is that it hyped up so much, promised too many things but not only did not deliver, it contained frustrating faults that you’d be annoyed to see in 2007 let alone 2009. e.g. the constant need for hard reset. (now fixed for me but still affects a lot of users)

Plus, it is not all about hardware specification (even Ovum say it’s not all about clock speed despite the vibe of the article implying otherwise). I can’t find the benchmark tests webpost but the N900 on “only” 600MHz was performing extremely closely to Nexus One’s 1Ghz in rendering web pages. In terms of general UI navigation, iPhone 3G with 412Mhz (less than N97’s 434MHz) is arguably snappier with more appealing UI.

It’s not about numbers. Windows Mobile for quite a while NEEDED much higher spec’d hardware than Symbian as it was resource hungry.

“pound for pound” Nokia handsets can do a lot more with the given hardware. Software wise, Nokia’s have a lot more inbuilt features that I’m surprised competitors have to achieve by 3rd party apps or hacking their phone or waiting 2 years for an update *cough, copy paste, video*.

2. The N900 is the only Nokia handset to use a next-generation chipset, which Renowden described as “surprising” and potentially harmful to the firm’s market share.

Apple only has ONE phone using the next generation chip set. But of course, that doesn’t matter. As much as I’d like Nokia to SPAM us with high end smartphones like HTC, history says that with Nokia they CANNOT be too hasty. HTC (and Moto) can afford to churn out Android devices one after another as they’re not actively developing the OS, Google is. Maemo (now MeeGo) and Symbian is very much continuing publicly to be a work in progress. Despite the N97 taking 6/7 months after announcement to appear, it still was, a rushed handset.

Nokia have a vast range of smartphones of which a huge proportion cater for the Mid-low end, yet are still smartphones. E.G. 5230 with ARM 11, 434 MHz. So proportion wise, it seems confusing that the N900 perhaps is the sole handset with next gen chipset. Perhaps the X6 should have been on it too, but that’s another post.

3. “Another area where Nokia is struggling is screen resolution and technology. Of the 20 handsets with highest screen resolution, Nokia has just one – again, the N900″

A slower processor or poor touch-screen resolution affects users’ experiences of devices,

Phones of 2009

• N900 800×480
• N97 640X360
• N97 mini 640 x 360
• X6 640×360
• 5530 640×360
• 5800 640×360
• 5230 640×360
• HTC Hero 320×480
• iPhone 3GS 320×480
• Palm Pre 320×480

Excuse me, what’s this about Nokia’s poor screen resolution? The N900 is double the iPhone. Yes that’s one. Then there’s the N97, N97 mini, X6, 5530, etc. which are all still higher resolution.

And exactly what is this “highest screen resolution”? 800X480 isn’t the highest anyway available on smartphones today. This is just another blatant smear to paint Nokia as failing.

Please. There are actual places where you could have taken genuine shots at Nokia and I would have sung along with you, but his is just blatant misinformation.

4″A slower processor or poor touch-screen resolution affects users’ experiences of devices,”

Actually, ideally if you had a slower processor, you’d also want a lower screen resolution. The N97 probably would have been faster if it dealt with the lesser 320×480.

Most possibly, it’s to do with being RESISTIVE rather than CAPACITIVE (which the X6 already supports).

How can the Nokia touch phones be criticised on screen resolution when it has higher resolution than the Jebus phone?

Renowden added that the launch of Symbian^3 around the middle of the year could see Nokia announce several new products, but that until then the firm is caught between two stools.

“If Nokia announces new products in the coming months it could hurt sales of devices already on the market. However, due to the lack of announcements, people are wondering what the company has in the pipeline,” he said.

I don’t know what Nokia’s really got coming. Rumoured handsets (N98/N8) have some really enticing specs. The Symbian Roadmap points to tons of good things on Symbian’s future in terms of upcoming hardware to be utilized, such as multiple core processors.

Nokia has mentioned they will be cutting down on number of devices released to focus on some really excellent handsets instead of several diluted and dud ones.

I’d prefer Nokia to take their time and get their new flagship right than rush it and just disappoint everyone, most of all their fans.

The extract of Ovum’s report is available here http://www.ovum.com/news/euronews.asp?id=8453.

and it is the only major manufacturer still producing multiple smartphones in the candy bar/numeric keypad form factor.

And it is the only major phone manufacturer that’s number one in sales and market share? Why? Because of these multiple smarphones in candy bar/numeric keypad (and other factors). Some people just want a cheap phone, with a standard keypad. Because Nokia can accomplish it, that phone just happens to be a smartphone too! e.g. C5

And so what if there’s more than one alphanumeric smartphone from Nokia? If we talk this time on proportion, Nokia’s projected to continue increasing Touch, Touch Qwerty and QWERTY smartphones. Nokia already have 8 touch screen phones (not counting special editions), 7 symbian, and one Maemo.

The real issue maybe Nokia’s immediate ability to respond. They’re a big ship. The biggest one out there and it’s taking a while to make that U-turn. But they’ll definitely do it. The real unknown is whether Nokia will still be sailing in the same waters or if the game has shifted yet again.

It seems to win the next game, it’s not about being the best player, it’s changing the rules so that you’re the only one who scores points.

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Nokia OVI Player 2.1 released

Earlier today, Nokia released the latest 2.1 version of their OVI Player which boasts to have “Better performance and experience” as Maulik Sailor at OVI blog explains that Nokia have listened to our concerns and purposely designed and released this update with “quality, performance and user experience” in mind and they also mention it should improve the comes with music experiance.

So, what exactly is better?

We have re-worked music downloads functionality to make it more reliable. You can now pause and restart downloads from the Nokia and Ovi Music stores. Ovi Player will automatically retry any failed downloads and will also preserve uncompleted downloads on application restart.

With the latest Nokia Ovi Player you now can automatically import your music library from iTunes and all the manual playlists that you created in iTunes (however, iTunes DRM files and smart playlists will not be imported).

We have also provided a new ‘Play’ control above column headers in detailed view. Simply click this button and all the containing tracks will be added to the Player Queue and played sequentially.

There are new tooltips for tracks in the Playlists and Player Queue. These tooltips are visible when hovering over a track and will show you Artist, Album and Artwork for the track.

We’ve made it easier to select the Music Store for your region (note that you will need a credit card for that region to purchase any tracks) and change the Proxy settings. Just hit F4 key and all this pops up in the Options dialogue window.

The new version is more robust and memory efficient when compared to the previous version.

Finally, we have also made it possible to hide the start-up screen, so you can carry on using other applications without being interfered by the Nokia Ovi Player.

Nokia are always improving their services, and releasing game changing things like the Comes with Music and Free Voice Navigation. There are areas which Nokia can be proud of and hopefully we keep seeing more.

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The New Nokia C6 – the best keyboard from a Nokia touch/QWERTY hybrid?

3.2" touch screen, 640x360. 4 row QWERTY keyboard.

On Friday, a touch-qwerty hybrid from Nokia’s Cseries surfaced. The Nokia C6.

I wasn’t expecting anything like this from the core series. I thought they’d at least be non-touch like the recent C5.

The C6 seems like a QWERTY/Touch hybrid for the masses. This is exactly the reason why Nokia’s range of smartphones might have a significant proportion that’s technically ‘underpowered’ compared to the competition. (I’m assuming it doesn’t have 1GHz processor)

NOT because they are helplessly lagging behind as Ovum’s recent “report” suggested.

But because Nokia is catering for mid-low end consumers who may want a piece of the smartphone pie but can’t or don’t want to pay high end prices. (Eventually those high end features trickle down, take the 5800 – Nseries grade circa 2008). This might be big if it hits 150-240GBP range.

Superficially, the C6 appears to be one of Nokia’s 5800 with a side slider QWERTY keyboard. However, it has the tiled homescreen interface reserved for Nokia’s N97/mini/future Symbian^3 devices.

• Is it Symbian^3? It’s using the Symbian^3 style theme/wallpaper (and some other slight changes).
• But to have Symbian^3, it would need to have processing power much higher than the N97/mini right? (If not, great news for N97 users if it means you might get S^3).
• So could this be the first 600MHz Symbian touch phone from Nokia and NOT the fabled X10?
• That dialpad is more reminiscent of S60 5th Edition rather than having those “dot indicators” of which homescreen you’re in.
• Most likely, it is S60 5th.

Anyway, onto the keyboard. It seems a standard Nokia fare at first but there are some marked improvements.

THE KEYBOARD

• Love it or hate it, the C6 has a D-Pad which eats a lot of space that could have been better served by having more keys. (Potentially 8 more – see crude paint job below)
• I don’t know what Nokia has against having a dedicated numbers row.
  • When they have a 3-row, an extra row would bring numbers row with secondary symbols as standard keyboard layout, but no.
• However, Ignoring the dpad/arrows, C6 has the most buttons on a Nokia touch/QWERTY hybrid keyboard.
  • More than the N97 (33), N97 mini (34) and N900 (34) as C6 has 39 buttons!
• It has two shift buttons for toggling caps lock, one on the left, the other on the right.
• It retains the symbols button to get additional symbols (easier than maemo 5’s silly 2 button combination)
• There’s a Control button. It seems it can also put the phone into silent mode. Control might be for easier copy and paste.
• Function button. The diagonal arrow suggests this is for secondary keys (like N900).
• Basic punctuation keys have dedicated buttons so you won’t need to press a button first to activate full-stop, comma or apostrophe .,’ This was a silly flaw in the N97, slowly improving with the N900/N97 mini (though it was still stupid to have apostrophe on the M)
• The Spacebar is in the middle (technically) when you’re holding the C6 (again see crude paint job below)

The only uncertain thing is the tactile feedback which I can’t glean from images alone. But if it’s on the same level as the N97 mini or N900 (fingers crossed, better) the C6 might potentially have the best keyboard from a Nokia Touch/QWERTY hybrid.

That’s not to say it’s the best out there (hello Touch Pro 2). Nokia is slowly getting the idea that if it’s worth putting a QWERTY keyboard, there should be investment in making a really good one (as opposed to just ticking a box). Ideally I’d have something like the N920 concept keyboard – or this N900/n92o keyboard mashup but that’s just me.

Not shown as it would take too much time...A dedicated numbers row could be achieved if the QWERTY shifted one key to the right (like N900) so you have Function/Control/Symbols on one side, freeing up the bottom row to take the z-m row of letters. The spacebar would then move to the right like Nokia likes.

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Should you use Firefox Mobile or the stock N900 MicroB browser? [A Comparison]

There’s a browser war going on, but it’s not the typical IE vs. Firefox series of battles. No, on the N900 it’s Mozilla vs. Mozilla, brother vs. brother, with the stock MicroB browser on one side and the latest Firefox Mobile 1.0 on the other. Which one is better? It’s a tough call, that’s for sure.

I tested both browsers under the same conditions (Home wi-fi connection, clean reboot, empty caches) with my Nokia N900. For the timing tests, I used XNote Timer and took the average of three times.

And now for today’s events…

Startup Time

How long it takes each browser to open and load the default screen, after a clean reboot.

Firefox: 7.06 secs
MicroB: (stock browser) 3.79 secs

Loading Static Web Pages

How long it takes to open up the famous “Nokia Phone Blog” and others.

Firefox
The Nokia Phone Blog: 11.96 secs
Consumerist: 14.17 secs
eBay: 7.56 secs

MicroB
The Nokia Phone Blog: 8.75 secs
Consumerist: 13.47 secs
eBay: 7.09 secs

In addition to loading pages slightly faster than Firefox, MicroB seemed to be more responsive when scrolling around large web pages.

Loading Flash Web Pages

The time necessary to load Macromedia’s official Flash page with embedded video, and a Colbie Caillat YouTube music video – “Begin Again”.

Firefox
Flash.com (redirects to macromedia flash site): 32.42 secs
YouTube video: 12.45 secs

MicroB
Flash.com: 40.05 secs
YouTube video, same as above: 13.17 secs

Firefox definitely seems to handle Flash loading better than MicroB. I’m not quite sure why. When it came to actual videos, however, both browsers sucked pretty equally, with lots of choppiness.

Ease of Use/User Interface

Firefox
Firefox uses a finger-friendly swiping interface mechanic, with tabs on left side, options/bookmarks on the right, and the menu bar on top. Overall it’s quite intuitive, even though you’ll probably open the side menus accidentally at some point when navigating regular web sites.

My problems with the Firefox user interface were fairly minor – for some reason, Firefox tends to display nearly everything in a Times New Roman/Serif-ish type of font. I don’t know why. Nor did I see any options to change it (even in about:config, but I could have missed it). Keypad scrolling is painfully slow, since there’s no kinetic scrolling when using the arrow keys. And there’s definitely a lack of polish when it comes to icons, buttons, and other animations.

MicroB
MicroB interface is simple and clean. I liked being able to zoom in and out of web pages quickly by drawing circles on the screen, but at the same time the whole “mouseover” mode never really felt (or worked) right for me. And why is there no real “back” button? The back arrow goes to the History screen, which means an extra tap + another second or two waiting for the history screen to appear. Considering how much the back button gets used, I’m surprised that Nokia added an intermediate step instead of just emulating normal browser behavior of going back to the previous page immediately.

Bugginess/Stability

How often a browser crashes, or exhibits “unpredictable” behavior.

Firefox
Occasionally quit after opening. I couldn’t really duplicate the problem with much accuracy though.

MicroB
No issues, even when attempting to load bloatware sites like Yahoo! Mail.

Memory Usage

This one was probably the least scientific of all the tests. To measure memory usage, I power-cycled the phone, connected to my wi-fi network, opened up each browser, and went to Facebook.com. I then monitored the memory usage with the top command in X Terminal.

Firefox: 20.0% memory usage
MicroB: 27.9% total memory usage (12.8% browserd + 9.6% browserd + 5.5% browser)

I thought this was kind of interesting, considering that I have previously figured MicroB to be the smaller, leaner of the two when it came to memory footprints (not to mention that Firefox’s reputation with regards to memory usage hasn’t been too solid). However, apparently to decrease browser loading time, the MicroB browser was broken up into a couple different components – more about that here. So while MicroB definitely starts up faster, it also eats up more memory.

Extensions and Add-ons

Firefox
Decent support for extensions. There’s an add-on search and installation is as simple as tapping the “Add to Firefox” button. To get Flash working, however, you’ll need to follow these steps.

One extension of some note is Weave, which allows you to sync your Firefox settings over multiple devices, such as your phone and pc – keeping the same preferences, tabs, bookmarks, and history everywhere. It’s pretty cool to say the least.

MicroB
Bare-bones add-on support. No direct search capabilities, although you can always find extensions with Google. You’re also stuck with the “Nokia Single Sign On For Ovi” plug-in – it can’t be uninstalled. Bleh.

Browser-Exclusive Features

Firefox
Tabbed browsing, extensions search, Weave, customizability.

MicroB
Save webpages/images, find on page.

Conclusion

It’s hard to say with certainty which browser is truly “better”. If you’re looking for the speediest one of the two, the stock MicroB browser is quicker starting up and rendering static (non-Flash) pages. However, Firefox is slightly faster when it comes to Flash intensive pages like YouTube. It’s also more featured than the competition, even though it’s missing simple things like saving web pages and images.

Personally, I find myself using MicroB for the most part, except when I want to take advantage of Firefox’s Weave Sync plugin to view the tabs I currently have open on my pc. MicroB just seems faster, especially when scrolling around.

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