While
DigiTimes tends to nail rumors focused on Taiwanese companies like
Acer and ASUS, its component supplying sources can be hit or
miss across other geographies. So take it with the usual lump of NaCl when talkative sources say that Nokia is increasing orders in March as it prepares to "launch several 3G and 3.5G products with multi-touch and multimedia functions in 2009" -- Texas Instruments, Qualcomm, and Synaptics being the chief beneficiaries. Of course,
Nokia has been perfectly clear that its
5800 was the just the initial salvo in
an onslaught of touchscreen devices to come and led by its flagship
N97. Nevertheless, with profits down and the economy mired in the suck, it's nice to have confirmation (as tenuous as it is) that things are on track in Espoo.
posted Feb 3rd 2009 4:20AM
That picture hurts my eyes.
I just hope they put a cap on the camera resolutions.
My N95 was a brilliant piece of work, and a touchscreen would have made it the perfect phone. Perhaps it needed to be a shade thinner, but other than that, I'm very sorry I had to give it up.
Agreed. My N95 is slightly sluggish, and I can't say i'm in love with Symbian, but other than that it's pretty good all round.
I'm not too impressed by the prediction that Nokia will "launch several 3G and 3.5G productions with multi-touch and multimedia functions in 2009". Surely this kind of vague statement can be applied to any serious phone manufacturer.
Your avatar pic is so apt here.
I'm still waiting for the N97 though...
I'm a bit worried that Nokia smartphones are going to get left behind without some big changes to their current OS - writing Symbian apps can be a seriously complicated process compared to developing for Android or iPhone, and this imbalance isn't going to get any better when the Pre comes out with its web-style stuff.
If you have a cool mobile app idea, it'll be much easier (and more profitable) to implement it on either something you can already code (Java for Android or JavaScript/etc on the Pre) or something with ridiculous marketshare (Apple's flagship) than learning the ins and outs of SymbianOS.
In an arena where phones are getting more and more similar (big touchscreen, reasonable camera, 8GB memory, GPS) it's really the available apps that are going to differentiate one handset from another - and I'm just not seeing a big enough developer buzz around Nokia.
Umm guess what - Symbian's market share is a lot more than Apple's. So much so for the "ridiculous" market share.
Nokia owns Qt and symbian so I wouldn't worry about lack of aplications (port of kde for instance)
Also, Nokia phones already have a Pre-like "web-style stuff" runtime - the Widget Runtime. Porting Palm "apps" to S60 is going to be dead-easy.
Writing Symbian C++ is a PITA but a clever developer will always use the right tool for the job. Symbian phones also support Java, Python, POSIX C (hence the Quake 3 port), Flash, etc, etc, etc.
You guys are missing the point.. Symbian may have a huge marketshare, but I'd bet you hardly any of the average users actually buy applications for the platform.
Development wise, it doesn't matter if you can use other languages besides C++ if it still requires learning the whole platform and GUI setup..
Instead of this rush to make a dozen variation with half-baked features just because, how about focusing on battery life so people can use a smartphone that actually last longer than a couple hours. I used to like Nokia, but now I would only buy their E series phones since that is the only series left that have decent battery life.
The battery on my 5800 is outstanding, watching a one hour tv episode over wi-fi with the speakers and the battery didn't even drop one bar, further 2 hours of music playback and various web browsing over wifi as well as lots of txts and a couple of llong calls and the bars only dropped by 3 by the end of the day.
Yeah, I have to agree w/ the 1st responder. My 5800's been really good. N95 was terrible, N82 was okay.
But this one's great (or at least quite acceptable)- especially for it's multimedia stuff- movies, music, etc, which is usually their downfall.
I've been using high-end Nokia smartphones for years, they were all very well designed devices, amazingly robust, yet they all somehow missed the horsepower to make the UI experience perfectly smooth.
It will be very interesting to see how Nokia will do on the iphone-like market, given that the iphone itself is making UI experience it's major selling point.
In the available videos i've found the differences between the n97 concept and what's presented as the production models to be a bit deceiving. Seems that some good ideas didn't make it to the production models, mostly due to processing power apparently.
I hope the available videos only show preproduction models and the UI can stil evolve until.
However, my next phone could be a N97 (hmmm, keyboard!) or a next-gen iphone, if any. No hurry...
(Next-gen N97? ^_^ )
Damn my eyes, was that picture taken with an iPhone?
Nokia on track? What are you smoking, boy?
Nokia haven't been on track since 2006, look at all these N95 rehashes including the N97. If Nokia were on track they would have produced a high-end flagship device that's drastically different from the N95 by now.
The thing is that Nokia defined what smartphones are with the N95 and now 3 years later there still are no phones on the market that really top its features. I'm sure Nokia is sitting on a 12MP camera phone, but why release it since N95 is till pretty much the best there is..
What are you talking about? The Samsung i8510 tops the N95 EASILY. What about the Touch HD? If it wasn't for WinMo, the touch HD could eat the N95.
I don't understand why people seem to think the N95 hasn't been surpassed by other manufacturers. Sure, it took them over a year to beat the N95 but they have definitely done it. 8MP camera that produces the best daytime pics, optical joystick, solid Samsung build, superb sound quality, 16GB inbuilt aswell as expandable storage... Meet the INNOV8.
Nokia did indeed define the multimedia oriented smartphone with the release of the N95. And, they've been pretty much rehashing, tweaking and refreshing it ever since. However, the XM5800 did define a new type of phone for them.
While I, personally, wasn't impressed enough with the XM5800 to actually buy one, I was impressed with it none the less. And, as the article just stated, it's only the first step. The N97 will be the next step. However, I doubt it was stop there. Nokia has a lot of talented, smart people working for them, and a lot of money to back R&D.
Well that's just like, your opinion, man.
I fail to see how the N97 is a rehash of the N95. The N96 yes, but the N97 is an entirely different beast.
Well I don't see why not, look at the smartphones announced last year, don't see why they won't be announcing more touchscreens this year.
About whole Multi Touch thing. I've been wondering since first I heard the term. How are you supposed to hold phone and point it with to fingers using one hand?
If you must use both hands how it's more practical than keypad or qwerty keyboard.
Use the first two fingers on one hand? Or cradle it in both hands and use your thumbs, like for texting on a normal phone keypad.
the second only works for some implementations, but the first is really no different from using one finger.
Which Finnish city is more famous among geeks of the world: the lovely garden city of Espoo or it's semi-cosmopolitan neighbor Helsinki?
There's at least one thing wrong in that news. It claims that Qualcomm will benefit from the Nokia ramp up of orders, but in the past Nokia has hardly used any Qualcomm parts, and I don't think they are going to change it.
And if you look at Nokias usual way of introducing products about 6 months before they are shipped, we have seen all the Nokias that will be in production in march.
It seems that Nokias expecting to sell tons of 5800s and N97s.
don't wanna know what -those- phones just got finished doing...
YES
Maybe some unlocked tmo and ATT 3G
When my contract expires I want to get me one of those fancy 3g phones.