Nokia

Having ruled the market for over a decade, the world’s largest handset manufacturer, Nokia, is shifting gear to reposition itself from being a device maker to a services and solutions provider in the wake of mounting competition from players like Apple and Research-in-Motion.

“Services is next big thing…we see people living their life 24×7 through applications on their mobile phones. Whether it is Twitter or Facebook, people live their life online,” Nokia India Managing Director D Shivakumar said when asked about the company’s future plans.
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The Nokia E63 is the ultimate networking tool, so you’ll never miss a message again. Surf the internet, catch up with friends, share your photos or send an email - no matter where you happen to be.

With all this, plus its wide landscape display, full keyboard and 2 megapixel camera, the E63 is smart in more ways than one. Buy this today and get Top up on our new simple Addict Pay As You Go tariff with:
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Having over 25 years cell phone making experience, Nokia is now determined to develop its high tech muscles in netbook producing. Ever-evolving net books are also under the spotlight. But things look much better with the new Booklet 3G netbook reveled by Nokia. This functional looker offers a battery operating time of up to 12 hours coming with included WiFi connection, GPS and 3G HSPA.

Weighing only 1, 25 kg, this nice looking mini notebook features an aluminum chassis and has 2 cm in thickness. The Nokia Booklet 3G netbook includes 3 USB 2, 0 connectors, a front facing web camera, SD card slot including Bluetooth connectivity. The netbook operates based on yet unnamed Intel Atom processor features HD video playback, HDMI output as well as 10, 1 inches glass HD video screen.

This Windows 7 based marvel also comes with a SIM slot which is hot-swappable. The Nokia Booklet 3G seems to be a full-functional laptop with the Nokia’s Ovi services it is integrated that has Maps used for Ovi and apply music downloads, the GPS and A-GPS and VPN. The Nokia Booklet 3G Booklet allows video calling with the web camera and is readily accessible to SD card reader.

While main features available are already known, the full technical specifications list as well as its availability is expected to be announced next week. Hopefully, it would be affordable for laptops fans. The Nokia Booklet 3G Booklet offers a genuine mobility with you being in a constant touch with the whole world.
Source:[gadgets-reviews.com]

Its product-launch offensive includes a new Nokia netbook, handset, and tablet PC that seem squarely aimed at Nokia’s top rival

Nokia has seemed determined recently to remind the world that it, not a certain Cupertino rival, is the world’s dominant handset maker. In the space of four days, the Finnish company, which accounts for 37% of global mobile-phone sales, announced plans for a netbook computer, unveiled a new bargain-priced touchscreen handset, and a high-end “Internet Tablet.” Nokia also rejiggered its top management, elevating an executive in charge of user friendliness to the executive board. Finally, the company announced an ambitious effort to offer money-transfer services to the billions of handset owners in emerging markets who don’t have bank accounts.

All but the last announcement seemed aimed squarely at Apple, whose phenomenally successful iPhone has thrown Nokia off-balance. Although the Apple accounts for less than 2% of the overall handset market, its iPhone has stolen share from Nokia in smartphones, the market’s sweet spot. Sales of high-end gadgets with computer-like capabilities grew 27% in the second quarter, according to market watcher Gartner. That comes as the overall market for mobile handsets fell 6% over the same period. Gartner says Apple’s share of the smartphone market soared to 13% from 3% in the second quarter of 2009 from a year earlier, while Nokia’s slipped to 45% from 47%. (Nokia counters that it recently has regained share.) Apple declined to comment for this article.

Nokia Chief Executive Officer Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo denies Apple is driving the company’s strategy. Rather, he says, Nokia is aiming at totally new markets as the mobile-handset business shifts from hardware to a greater focus on such services as games, music, and navigation. “It’s not simply fighting against your competitors like Apple, it’s claiming new ground. It’s claiming no-man’s land,” Kallasvuo told BusinessWeek on Aug. 27.

Still, the unprecedented flurry of announcements signaled that Nokia is going on the offensive after a long period when Apple seemed to dominate industry buzz. More major announcements are expected on Sept. 2-3, Nokia execs say, during the annual Nokia World extravaganza for analysts, press, and business partners in Stuttgart. “We are on the attack,” says Nokia Executive Vice-President Anssi Vanjoki, who oversees global sales. “We had a more peaceful moment, and now we are really aggressive.”
Source:[businessweek.com]

Nokia 6600 was a good status phone of its time but while keeping this in mind Nokia has planned for its new version Nokia 6600i with the latest features and applications.

This Nokia 6600i slide is a 3G cellphone which is packed to provide the best performance to the users.

Nokia 6600i slide phone measures 93.0 x 45.0 x 14.2 mm and Weight about 110 g in size along with a 2.2 inch screen offering a resolution of 320 x 240 pixels (QVGA).

Nokia 6600i is equipped with the features like Fm radio, support all media formats, stereo headset, 5 MP camera along with auto focusing, 8X Zoom and dual LED flash, Up to 16.7 million colors, Bluetooth 2.0, micro SD card till 16GB memory, Nokia Maps application, supported mark-up languages: HTML, XHTML, WML, Supported email protocols: IMAP4, POP3, SMTP, store: up to 60 messages on phone memory, Undo function for SMS deletion, Conference calling with in 3 users, video calling, 20MB internal memory.

This handset would be available in Black and silver.

The Nokia N97 packs some impressive specs, but the Symbian OS feels out-of-date when faced with the competition.

On paper, the Nokia N97 ($700; unlocked as of 6/16/09) looks as if it could rival the other big phones of this summer, the Palm Pre, the Apple iPhone 3G S, and T-Mobile’s follow-up to the Android-based G1. It has more memory than the other three, supports a wide range of multimedia files, and has a large touchscreen and a full QWERTY keyboard. But the N97 falls short of its potential, largely because the operating system it uses–the Symbian S60 5th Edition–lacks the refinement of other OSs. Still, the N97 impresses in certain areas, particularly audio and video.

The Nokia N97 hasn’t completed battery testing at this writing, so we can’t yet assign a PCW Rating. We’ll update this review with that information as soon as we can.

The Nokia N97 feels good in hand with a matte backing and sturdy body. It is a bit hefty at 5.3 ounces (heavier than both the Pre and iPhone 3G S). It is also fairly pocketable for a phone with a slide-out keyboard–it measures 4.6 by 2.2 by 0.6 inches. Button placement is standard, with glowing Home and Call Send/End buttons below the display. A power button sits on top next to the 3.5-mm headphone jack (a must-have for multimedia phones). On the right spine is the volume rocker and the camera shutter button. The left spine has the screen lock switch and the mini-USB port.

The keyboard slides out easily, and the display pops out at a slight angle. While the tilt was nice for watching videos and helped reduce glare outside, I found it annoying when trying to type on the keyboard. The edge of the display is too close to the top row of keys, and you can’t adjust the display’s angle or make it lie flat. I also found it hard to press the keyboard’s keys; they’re simply not raised enough for comfortable typing. The keyboard’s layout was also a bit counterintuitive, with the spacebar placed in the lower-left corner.

A navigational touch pad (right, left, down, up, and a center button to select) on the right side of the keyboard is supposed to help with navigation, but I didn’t use it very often. It was so difficult to press that I accidentally selected apps when I was trying to scroll through them.

The Nokia N97’s call quality over AT&T’s 3G network was very good. Voices sounded loud, clear, and crisp–better than any phone I’ve reviewed recently. I heard no static or background hiss, either. Parties on the other end gave similar reports. Even while standing on a busy city street corner, my contacts said my voice sounded loud and clear.

The phone has a large 3.5-inch resistive touchscreen with a 360-by-640-pixel resolution. While colors looked good and the display appeared bright and crisp, I was disappointed by the touchscreen’s responsiveness. Resistive touch just doesn’t compare to the slickness of capacitive touch technology. Scrolling wasn’t very smooth, and the two-touch action required to start an app got annoying after a while. However, I really liked the N97’s haptic feedback (a slight vibration when you touch an app), which helped with the navigation.

I blame the Symbian S60 5th Edition OS for why I was unimpressed with the the Nokia N97’s display. The S60 operating system simply lacks the fresh and refined look of WebOS, iPhone, and even Android 1.5. The typography and icons are too small, and they fade away into the background of the display.

While the interface might not be the best-looking, the new live-feed widgets are quite useful. The widgets update your personal Internet feeds in real time on your home screen so you don’t have to open up another app to access them. My favorite, the Accuweather widget, takes advantage of the N97’s built-in Assisted GPS. When I traveled from San Francisco to the slightly different microclimate of the East Bay, for example, the outdoor temperature on my home screen updated accordingly.

Other widgets include Facebook, MySpace, your personal e-mail, the music player, favorite contacts, and the date and time. The music player is average and unsophisticated; it’s much like what we’ve seen on previous Symbian devices. It has no visual effects or album art scrolling (as on the iPhone and the Pre). Nevertheless, it is quite easy to use with the display’s large touch controls. It has a few equalizer effects, so you can tweak the sound to your liking. Overall, music playback was very good, though volume level was a bit low piped through the external speakers. The music player supports a respectable number of formats: MP3, WMA, WAV, eAAC+, MP4, and M4V.

The video app is equally simple, though it worked fine. The player can only support MPEG-4 and WMV files–no DivX or H.264 codecs, unfortunately. The N97 is loaded with Flash Lite 3.0, which means it can play videos directly from the YouTube Web page. Flash video playback looked excellent–even better than on the Pre or the iPhone 3G.

The Nokia N97 comes with a generous 32GB of on-board memory, and this can be expanded further with a 16GB microSD card. You can load up your media via microUSB or use stereo Bluetooth. The N97 also has an FM transmitter, as well, for piping your tunes to your car stereo.

The 5-megapixel camera has a Carl Zeiss lens (and a cover), a dual LED flash, and a handful of advanced features. It also comes preloaded with photo/video editing software. Picture quality disappointed me, though; indoor shots came out grainy and dark despite the flash. Outdoor photos fared better with bright colors and crisp details. You can record VGA video at 30 frames per second; our test video looked as good as any recorded by a smartphone camera that I’ve seen.

The N97 reminds me of the Sony Ericsson Xperia X1: It’s a really cool phone that can do a lot, but the features just don’t come together as seamlessly as in other smartphones on the market. The Symbian OS doesn’t simply need an update; it needs an overhaul to compete with iPhone OS and Palm’s WebOS. Plus, with no carrier or subsidized price, the N97 is expensive in the United States, especially when you consider the Pre, the iPhone 3G S, and new Android and BlackBerry devices to come–all are expected to be available for less with contract subsidies.

By : Ginny Mies

Nokia S60 users can finally bypass the browser and start Google searches from the same application that most other smartphone users have been using for months. The free Google Mobile App has arrived on Nokia S60 phones.

As with CNET Editors’ Choice winner Google Mobile App on BlackBerry, this Symbian build places a search bar at its heart. The search bar supports search suggestions, history, and edits to the history, all of which saves you typing on subsequent searches for similar topics. Submitted searches return results in the default browser.

The search bar is flanked on the top by icons for Gmail, Google Maps for Mobile, YouTube, and Picasa Web albums. Clicking either of the first three will launch each separate native app if you’ve got it installed, or will install it for the first time if you don’t have it. A ‘more” button fast tracks you to online versions of Goog 411, Google Reader, Google SMS, and Orkut.

The final feature in this approachable and endlessly useful app is the My Location feature that uses the phone’s GPS or cell tower triangulation to guess your general neighborhood. With it activated, Google can automatically localize your searches, which takes typing your city or zip code off your hands.

You can launch Google Mobile App from Nokia’s Today screen by pressing the phone’s “back” key. Users can opt out by disabling the quick launch hot key in the app’s Setting menu.

Get Google Mobile App for Nokia S60 by visiting m.google.com from your mobile browser, or mobile.google.com from a desktop. It is available for handsets used in Canada, China, Denmark, France, Germany, India, Italy, Netherlands, Poland, Russian Federation, Spain, Turkey, United Kingdom, United States, Finland, Hong Kong, Macao, Norway, Portugal, Taiwan, and Sweden.

Source:[cnet.com]

Mirror, mirror on the wall which is more powerful of them all. Which is more powerful: Nokia N97 or iPhone 3GS.

Both are great phones and both boast of great and unbeatable features.

With Nokia N97 it was established that finally Nokia had a weapon to kill Apple iPhone. And that effortlessly too. But now Apple has also upgraded iPhone immensely with the recent launch of iPhone 3G S.

Here is a comparative study of the two great phones. Here we present the comparision courtesy gadgetophilia.com.

Touchscreen and Display

The displays are similar 3.5 inch in size but Nokia N97’s display looks clearer as it has higher resolution of 640 X 360 than iPhone’s 320 X 480 pixels display. The touchscreen technology used by the two devices are vastly different. The iPhone’s capacitive touchscreen has very good sensitivity than Nokia N97’s pressure sensitive resistive touchscreen which needs a little more pressure to ensure the touch action.

Storage Capacity

The Nokia N97 has the largest storage capacity for any mobile phone. It has internal storage of 32 GB and which is expandable by 16 GB more with additional micro SDHC card making a total of 48 GB. The iPhone 3GS is available in two varieties of 16GB and 32 GB internal memory.

Processor, RAM

The GPU used in both the devices are the same PowerVR SGX graphics supporting OPENGL ES 2.0. However N97 uses ARM 11 CPU which clocks at 434 MHz and 128 MB RAM compared to iPhone 3G S has ARM Cortex A8 processor clocking at 600 MHz and 256 MB RAM. This clearly states that iPhone 3G S packs more speed than N97.

Operating System

Nokia N97 runs the Symbian v9.4 Series 60 rel 5 OS whereas iPhone OS 3.0 is available for iPhone 3GS. The iPhone OS apart from being a stable multitasking platform with ease of software development, is more internet ready than the N97 which hasn’t even got a decent browser. Every aspect of the iPhone OS is designed keeping in mind that today people live on internet. Configuring a new e-mail account, e-mailing pictures and general web surfing is a breeze on iPhone. The N97 is also claimed to be internet ready but doing things is not that pleasurable experience as the iPhone. To defend for Nokia I would only say that N97 supports Java but the Apple iPhone 3G S does not. Also iPhone 3G S still lacks the support of Flash.

The Nokia N97, the Finnish company’s much-hyped crown jewel, has finally made its way into Indian stores.

Since the timing of Nokia N97’s launch in India has coincided with the launch of Apple iPhone 3GS and the fact that there’s a software upgrade available for the older iPhone 3G (and iPod Touch), it is inevitable that we end up comparing both (we don’t have the iPhone 3GS in India yet). The Nokia N97 is also the first device to ship with the Ovi Store, best described as an online appstore for applications such as games, videos, podcasts, productivity tools, web and location-based services. Similar to Apple’s AppStore, Ovi Store, too, has paid for free content from content providers and developers that offer applications for Facebook, Hi5, Twitter, city maps and documents.

Hardware
The Nokia N97 is powered by a 434 MHz processor and 128MB RAM compared to the rumoured 600 MHz processor and 256MB RAM on the iPhone 3GS. If this configuration of the iPhone 3GS stands confirmed, then it clearly sets the N97 a step back. Add to that, the Symbian, the new S60 (5th edition) operating system on N97, looks achingly old-fashioned and sluggish when compared with the older iPhone 3G.Too bad that Nokia decided to go with the resistive touch screen instead of the capacitive one on the iPhone that makes its touch operation unmatched. Though the N97 has some touch gestures and the accelerometer, we have to admit that touch features on the iPhone remain iconic despite all efforts by Nokia and Windows Mobile.

Noticeably, the huge 1,500 mAh Li-Ion battery gives the N97 an advantage over iPhone 3G. Also the built-in 32GB internal memory and the microSD card slot are big positives when compared with iPhone 3G, which has 16GB internal memory.

Design
A slide-out 3.5 inch touch display along with a Qwerty keyboard and a fully customisable home screen makes the Nokia N97 look really elegant. The slide-out keyboard on the phone begins to feel very useful after you have written some emails and text messages on it. It’s not perfect, but it gets your work done faster.

But for average users, Nokia N97 is better positioned as a touch screen N-series device that happens to have a D-pad for gaming and a miniature Qwerty keyboard for ad hoc use .

Multimedia & Other Features
We liked the active home screen on the Nokia N97 as well as the phone’s ability to organise the widgets on it. Not to forget, Nokia widgets are really amazing, making the home screen the most usable page.

The N97 obviously takes a lead with its 5 megapixel camera whereas iPhone 3G sports only a 2 megapixel lens. The two stereo speakers, located along the left edge of N97, are the best set of speakers we have heard on a phone. They clearly put iPhone speakers to shame. Bundled features such as handwriting recognition, Bluetooth file transfers, FM radio and video recording on the N97 clearly put the message out loud and clear — it’s a great multimedia device.

Though scrolling through webpages isn’t as smooth and fluid on the N97 as on the iPhone (which has the Safari browser), yet the pages render quickly.

And…
The Nokia N97 is expected to retail for around Rs 36,119 in India (official prices not yet announced) while the iPhone 3G is sold for about Rs 29,000 (the 8GB model)

PROs

Battery life of up to 7 hours

Hi-end camera and video features

Fantastic home screen widgets and variety of apps from Ovi Store

CONs

QWERTY keypad; navigational buttons need time to get used to

The multi-touch feature seems sluggish

Relatively lower RAM causes slowing down while running with multiple applications