Nokia

N93 Short Shot By Gary Oldman Released
Hollywood hot shot Gary Oldman is today releasing his new short film, shot on the Nokia N93 we’re told.
He’s taking the short label pretty literally, as the puppy is two minutes long, featuring what is described as “a round reflection in rippling water set to a haunting soundtrack.” Sounds lovely.
We’d imagine that this has cost Nokia a pretty penny, but it all goes towards burning into your brains that Nokia is about film. Creating it as we’ve seen here and watching it on their handsets too.
To that end, completely unprompted (we’re certain), Gazzer said, “Mobile video devices like the Nokia N93 allow us to capture the extraordinary moments in our ordinary days and share them with the world. The image in Donut is one such fleeting moment I happened upon that inspired me to grab my mobile video device out of my pocket and record it to share with others. I hope my film encourages people to do the same and I look forward to seeing the results on the Nokia Nseries Studio.”
Mr Oldman’s short will be premiering online on the neatly mentioned Nokia Nseries Studio, where from today (another coincidence?) anyone can upload short films to share with the world.
Happy Slapping
Camera phones have been used by some on the streets to make their own films, sadly many with violent overtones. Unfortunately the Hollywood violence that these youth had been subjected to for the whole of their lives (in the name of entertainment) wasn’t staged as it is in films, but real. Happy Slapping video’s stormed around school playgrounds about 18 months and featured members of the public getting assaulted, while those with the camera phones recording it laughed.
DVD quality or not?
Nokia appear to be back tracking a little on their definition of the quality of the onboard camera. When the N93 was first mooted, it was DVD-quality, it’s now being labelled DVD-like.
Nokia aren’t calling the N93 a phone with a camera on it, but a multimedia computer. You may mock, but this isn’t too far from the truth – it’s got a ton of processing power on board and a 3.2 megapixel lens with Carl Zeiss optics, DVD-like video capture and 3x optical zoom.
DV camcorders beware
Discussion of DVD-quality or DVD-like aside, the N93 shows the direction that camera-phones are taking, despite this early example being pretty bulky. The quality of these is approaching that of a standard DV (Digital Video) camera putting pressure on the DV manufacturers. The response to this from them is the introduction of HiDef camcorders. Expect this to become the standard.
Nokia Nseries Studio
14 August, 2006
Europe Goes Nuts For Nokias, While The US Trumpets The Treo
According to figures compiled by mmetrics.com, a research firm who strut around in the exciting world of mobile market measurement, when it comes to mobile phones there’s a hefty transatlantic gulf in smartphone tastes.
In Europe, Nokias are the reigning kings and queens of the smartphone world, enjoying total top three domination in the big French, German and UK markets, while in the US the top two slots are held by the Palm Treo 650, with the Blackberry 7530 trailing in third.
The figures were based on a three month moving average up to the end of May 2006, with an impressively large number of subscribers surveyed (12,631 in France, 15,122 in Germany, 14,913 in UK and just under 34,000 in the States).
French say “Nous aimons Nokia”
Breaking the figures down per country, it seems that the French are keen to say ‘oui’ to the Nokia 6680, with an estimated 374,477 subscribers.
Coming in second was the Nokia 6630 with 287,723 subscribers and the Nokia 6600 bringing up the rear with 98,122 subscribers.
“Ja ist Nokia gut,” say Germans
It’s also a case of Nokia Über Alles in Deutschland, with the Nokia 6630 ratcheting up 278,818 subscribers, followed by the 6600 (250,682) and the 7650 (237,449).
Brits go waheey for the N70
In the UK, the smartphone of choice is the N70 with 471,874 subcribers, followed by the Nokia 6680 (433,405) and the Nokia 6630 (341,718).
Americans go ape for Palm
When it comes to the land of hotdogs, mad presidents and fevered flag waving, it’s an entirely different story with the trusty Palm Treo crushing all before it and ne’er a single Nokia making the top three.
The Treo 650 CDMA smart phone is by far the most popular smartphone with over half a million subscribers (573,660), with the GSM version coming in second with 269,053 users. In third place is the trusty Blackberry 7520 with 267, 912 users.
Mmetrics
21 July, 2006
Symbian Academy Launches: Free Teaching Aids For Universities
Symbian, the smartphone OS company, are pulling a smart move (pun intended) by offering free assistance to Universities and their lecturers to have Symbian programming skills built into courses. Very clever.
They’re designed to make it easy for universities to create courses that teach Symbian software development and to integrate a Symbian component into existing computer science courses.
Those who sign up are showered with free course materials, training, technical support, development literature, expert Symbian lecturers.
It’s all part of the idea to “maintain the growth of the thriving Symbian ecosystem,” what ever that means in English.
As a sweetener to the lecturers to get involved, Symbian will provide “exposure to Symbian’s industry partners.” Pretty healthy if you fancy running a software development company and want to get exposure for your potential products, or you’re getting a little bored of Uni life and fancy impressing those in industry that you’re a bit of visionary.
Nokia are the dominant shareholder in Symbian (47.9% share holding) and you can see how seriously they’re taking getting their software into education, they’ve even got a Head of Academic Relations, a Harri Pennanen.
If you fancy getting involved, just drop a mail to [email protected] and tell them that Digital-Lifestyles sent you.
Symbian Academy
22 June, 2006
Nokia 6080 Mobile Phone Announced
Slipping and slithering down the well oiled product slipway at Nokia is their latest swishy tri-band phone, the Nokia 6080 (no relation to their 1997 phone of the same name!).
Primarily targeted at Asian consumers, Nokia 6080 is a fairly bland, all-black looking affair with garish silver/gold highlights and a user interface akin to the popular Nokia Series 40 series.
There’s the usual raft of well-tuned Nokia features onboard, including a camera, Bluetooth, MP3 player, video recorder, FM Radio and MP3 ring tones.
Sporting a backlit keypad and bright colour display, the handset comes bundled with a stereo headset and offers all the usual customisation options (with wallpapers, themes, annoying ring tones etc) to keep da kidz happy.
There’s also an exclusive Sodoku game designed specially for the 6080 included if that’s how you like to waste away the hours.
Apart from the trusty phone functions, the Nokia 6080 also comes with Nokia’s Xpress audio messaging, email capabilities and a push to talk feature, with EDGE connectivity and an onboard XHTML browser for nippy browsing on the move.
Talk time is a distinctively average 3.5 hours with a standby time of up to 12 days.
The phone is expected to emerge around the fourth quarter of 2006 for about 180 Euros.
Nokia
20 June, 2006
The Siemens-Nokia Deal Examined
In the wake of the dot com boom, then the dot com collapse, equipment vendors have been feeling the fall-out and mergers seem to be the way to reconcile the collapsing markets. The Nokia-Siemens merger announcement bears witness to this.
Though the telecoms market is still expanding, increased competition from new entrants has made life very difficult for incumbent players.
The Siemens/Nokia merger is just the latest in what’s likely to be a continuing trend, both for vendors and telecoms companies.
Nokia brings expertise in the mobile space (they previously pulled out fixed markets), while Siemens has experience in the wired and broadband markets. Though there will be some overlaps, both companies mainly concentrate in non-competing spaces and as such, they should be able to move forwards with the best of both companies to offer a strong solution for next generation networks.
Siemens, a German giant
Even after disposing of their mobile arms (BenQ have already taken up the mobile phone division), Siemens is still a huge force in the world market, with over 600,000 employees. They have just disposed of parts of the companies in markets they’re not competing well in.
The BenQ buy-out of the mobile division of Siemens allows BenQ to sell phones under the Siemens brand for 18 months, and then under a joint BenQ/Siemens brand for a further 5 years, though BenQ may well drop the Siemens brand altogether. However, they are able to utilise Siemens’ retails channels and will actually based out of the Siemens mobile division in Munich.
This turns BenQ from a small phone player, to one of the larger ones. Siemens have always been good at making phone innards (radios), but their designs have been dated. BenQ must be hoping to imitate the Sony/Ericsson partnership where Ericsson made good phones that weren’t stylish, while Sony had the ergonomics, but dire insides.
Watch out for the Chinese
Though the west is merging like mad (most recently Lucent and Alcatel, both previously giants in the telecoms world) the real threat is coming from China.
Companies such as Huawei (“wu why” sometimes pronounced “who are we” which fits their appearance into markets that they had no presence in until recently) are starting to make serious dents into the Tier 1 telecoms/ISP markets.
A couple of years ago, no one had heard of them. They initially attacked the core ISP market with Internet routers, and offered Cisco “clone” hardware. While Cisco might sell you a system, then you add the software and then all the extra features, Huawei offered a system with everything on in the first place for 60% of the Cisco base price. Not surprisingly in an extremely competitive market, ISPs started utilising Huawei equipment. Huawei also have a huge development resource of 10’s of thousands of high class engineers out of Chinese universities. Where Cisco might take weeks to analyse and diagnose a problem, Huawei set of team of people on the problem and can release fixes in hours.
Now they’ve established themselves in the ISP market, the surrounding markets are being worked on (and since most ISPs are now owned by telecoms companies, it’s the telecoms markets that are easiest to move into).
The Chinese can make carrier class equipment much more cost effectively than their western counterparts, which is why they are suffering.
As networks move towards triple and quadruple plays (voice, video, Internet or voice, video, Internet and mobile) the equipment vendors now have to compete in all these areas. Triple plays are most common currently, but as can be seen from the likes of players like Orange and NTL (both offering quadruple plays), the market is moving in that direction (Vodafone recently announced they’re moving into fixed/broadband plays).
The combination of Nokia as the mobile infrastructure side of the business and Siemens Communications as the broadband/fixed player should allow them to offer a complete solution to their existing and new customers. If they can get the synergies right, the combined might of both has a good chance of competing and ultimately surviving in this crowded arena.
Only time will tell if they can defend against the power against them.
20 June, 2006
Mobile Linux: Powerhouse Foundation Formed
We all know the mobile handset is totally fragmented. Sure there’s a standard – it’s called Nokia – but everyone who isn’t Nokia isn’t very happy about that.
Vodafone, Motorola, NEC, NTT DoCoMo, Panasonic Mobile Communications and Samsung Electronics have today announced that they hope to change that. They’re getting together to embrace mobile Linux to “create world’s first globally adopted open mobile Linux platform.”
They’re intending to form an independent foundation whose primary focus is the joint development and marketing of an API specification, architecture, supporting source code-based reference implementation components and tools. Pretty comprehensive sounding, but only time will reveal the level of independence afforded to the foundation.
While we understand that they ‘intend to leverage the benefits of community-based’, we’re not really sure where their aims of proprietary development fit in to this. It is after all supposed to be an Open project.
Who’s in? Who’s out?
It’s not surprising to see that Nokia _aren’t_ part of it. Vodafone have for a long time been concerned that, when asked, their subscribers say they have, for example, a Nokia handset rather than a Vodafone service. Nokia also dominate with Symbian.
Also coming in the ‘Obviously’ category, is the lack of Microsoft. They’ve been desperate for years to try and become accepted as the mobile platform of choice, but despite a few successes haven’t managed it. Today’s announcement combined with the strength of Symbian will give them a bit of a kicking.
The other major who’s missing is Sony Ericsson.
Beyond the handset makers, it’s interesting to include NTT DoCoMo. Vodafone and NTT DoCoMo were competitors in the Japanese market – up to the point that they sold Vodafone Japan to Softback back in April. Now that barrier is removed, we’re sure that they’ll love to get closer to DoCoMo to learn the lessons of how they’ve made content such a success in Japan.
Symbian supporters two-time them
Both Samsung and Motorola have in the past sold handsets that use the Symbian OS, but since Nokia have been tightening their clutched on Symbian, it’s likely that they’re becoming increasingly nervous of using it.
The idea of being in control of their own destiny – at least to the software platform – will be much more appealing.
What’s driving this?
Mobile operators are always looking at finding ways for more people to sign to their networks, so decreasing handset costs while maximising features is of the utmost importance for them. This is made clear by Kiyohito Nagata, Vice President and Managing Director of NTT DoCoMo’s Product Department
Open is the new proprietory
Clearly being ‘open’ (the interpretation of which is highly variable) is quite the trend in mobile, with Nokia open sourcing their s60 browser a couple of weeks back.
Much excitement is being generated by those companies already using Linux in their handsets. In a ‘don’t forget we’ve been doing this for ages’ way, Yoshiharu Tamura, Executive General Manager, Mobile Terminals Business Unit, NEC Corporation expounded , “As one of the leading pioneers with almost two years of experience shipping Linux-based mobile phones, we are delighted to participate in this initiative. We expect the foundation activities will accelerate further expansion of mobile Linux application developer participation, as well as global market growth of 3G mobile handsets.”
Not to be left out from showing off, Osamu Waki, Managing Director of Panasonic Mobile Communications, plugged like mad, “Linux sits at the core of Panasonic Group’s software strategy, and to date we have shipped nearly 8 million Linux based handsets in the highly competitive Japanese market.”
15 June, 2006
Nokia N80: Screen and Browser Set To Stun
The dream of effortless – and easy to see – mobile Web surfing has taken a step forward with the release of Nokia’s N80 smartphone. The new device is rapidly garnering praise for its stunning screen which takes the stress out of Web browsing and picture viewing.
With a resolution of 352 x 416 pixels and the capacity to display 262,144 colours, the N80 leaves behind some of its N-series brothers and outdoes most QVGA (that’s Quarter VGA or 240×320 resolution, to you) devices.
The holy grail of mobile screens is full VGA – a massive 480 x 640 pixel resolution. The first full VGA device, Sharp’s 904SH, has already been launched in Japan and though there’s no release date as yet for the technology over here, it’s just a matter of time. Until then the N80 is causing industry commentators like 3G.co.uk to proclaim it the best display they’ve seen on this class of phone.
The increased density of the display makes the interface more crisp and easier to read and Nokia have taken advantage of this by utilizing vector graphics to sharpen up icons and fonts, reducing the blockiness associated with lower resolution devices.
The browsing experience is enhanced by Nokia’s new Mini Map feature. Mini Map allows full HTML Web pages to be navigated by clever use of multiple, semi-transparent windows, offering different views of the page. The phone also utilizes the impressive S60 browser recently covered which now sports a visual history feature and RSS support.
The N80 is pretty sharp on taking pictures too. With a 3.2 megapixel camera built-in, the N80 can deliver stills at 2048 x 1536 pixels, substantial enough to challenge regular digi cameras. Video recording is good at 352 x 288, the same resolution as the N70 and N90, and a VGA camera is mounted on the front for video calls.
The N80 is bursting at the seams with impressive features including connectivity in just about every standard going (UPnP, Bluetooth 2.0, 3G,Wi-Fi), playback of music files (WMA,MP3, AAC, AAC+) and integrated video-sharing and blogging tools. With all that and the eye popping display, the N80 might be the phone of the moment.
9 June, 2006
Mobile Consumers Are Lapping Up Convergence
Sad but (supposedly) true: a new study by Nokia has found that over one in five mobile owners said they’d find losing their phone more upsetting than their wallet, credit cards and – unbelievably – even their wedding ring.
Tempted though we are to find those people and give them a reality-introducing slap around the face with a wet fish, the survey does reflect the growing importance of mobiles in everyday life.
Clicking ticking mobiles
Nearly half (44 per cent) of mobile owners now use them as their primary camera – 68 per cent in India – with over two thirds predicting that music-enabled mobiles will soon rule the world, replacing MP3 players like iPods.
It doesn’t look like a good time to invest in Timex stocks, with the study finding that seventy two percent of mobile users no longer own a separate alarm clock – and nearly three quarters use their phones as their main watch or clock.
Nokia commissioned the research in 11 countries around the globe to discover people’s attitudes towards current and future mobiles, and generally found that people *heart* the things the planet over.
Such is the love for mobiles that users want to see them integrated even closer with their lives, with 42 per cent wanting their phones to be able to chat to their home networks, printer, PC, stereo, TV and mobile devices.
Curiously, 72 per cent of Saudi Arabians also wanted their fridges to be included in this network.
Surfing on the move
Mobile surfing continues to rise in popularity, with over a third (36%) of respondents browsing on their mobiles at least once a month, with Japan going for it big time, with 37% going online daily.
“The results strongly demonstrate that people are buying into the idea of convergence – they really do want one device that does it all, from taking quality images, to storing their music collections and operating a digitally connected home,” commented Tapio Hedman, senior vice-president of marketing, multimedia at Nokia.
Nokia
7 June, 2006
N-Gage Online Game Purchase Launched
Nokia took a step into the world of online content delivery today with the launch of a new Website specialising in downloadable games for its N-Gage device. Gamers can download time-limited demos of games such as One and Pathway to Glory before purchasing at between 19.99 and 29.99 euros.
The shop, is a significant step for the company allowing them to deliver games directly to customers, an achievement not always matched in stores. It could also pave the way for online games downloading services, perhaps the gaming equivalent of Apple’s iTunes?
The process? All that is needed is to identify the game that you’re interested in, pay for it, download it to your computer, then load it on to a spare memory card to your N-Gage.
The N-Gage has not had an easy time. The first version was launched to widespread derision due to its ‘unique’ side-talking feature, which forced users to speak into the side of the device, instantaneously transforming them into raging doofuses. A succession of model changes followed, culminating in the more sensibly configured, 7710, or N-Gage QD as it’s more often known as..
While the concept of side-talking may fuel nerd in-jokes for some time to come (see sidetalkin) Nokia are determined to develop the N-Gage platform to create a multi-player, mobile gaming community which can connect via a variety of devices. The N-Gage platform for multiple devices was announced at the E3 trade show in Washington last month and will roll-out in early 2007.
“As we move forward with our next generation of mobile gaming, we continue to offer N-Gage owners easy ways to get games,” said Jukka Hosio, Director, Global Sales, Multimedia, Nokia. “The N-Gage platform is recognized worldwide for its high-quality mobile gaming content. By making these games available for download over the internet, we’re making it easier for N-Gage owners to find and purchase new games.”
Gameshop
6 June, 2006
Nokia Mobile S60 Browser Code Goes Open Source
At the W3C conference in Edinburgh today, in a move to get the mobile industry (and possibly more) to standardise on a single Web browser, Nokia has released the source code for the mobile Web browser it developed last year.
Using the same open-source frameworks used by Apple’s Safari browser, originally created by the KDE team, Nokia designed a browser for its S60 phone range, adding various enhancements designed to improve mobile browsing.
Under the open source deal, any individual software developer, third party mobile phone makers or operators can get their grubby mitts on the software engine that powers the Nokia-developed browser and customise it for their own needs.
Nokia’s S60 Web Browser for S60 is a fully fledged affair, offering full mobile browsing of complete Web pages straight off the Internet, complete with support for AJAX technologies, dynamic HTML and scripting languages.
Nokia intend to offer “active participation” with the open source community, sharing enhancements, widgets and improvements to the core browser engine in real time.
“We want to reduce the fragmentation currently in place in mobile browsing,” said Lee Epting, VP of Forum Nokia, Nokia’s software development support program.
Although sceptics may suggest the last thing rivals would want to do is to start using a Nokia browser, she insisted that the terms of the ‘liberal license’ would let anyone use the code to develop their own commercial offerings.
The source code will be made available to open source developers through the WebKit Open Source Project.
Further resources can also be found at Nokia Opensourcesite and Nokia S60 browser.
24 May, 2006