I'd been bending the ears of Nokia's Eseries team for ages about signing up with WOM World to handle buzz about their products and to manage triallist programs. And now it's happened, although my nagging was probably only a small part of the process(!) Here's the new, generic WOM/Nokia home page for you to keep track of via RSS. There will probably be an official statement along soon, too, hopefully with the announcement and trial-availability of at least one new Eseries smartphone.
Without wishing to harp on about the Nokia N93 too much(!), it was interesting to see the N93 get equal 'billing' with the N81 and N95 8GB in the title screen of Nokia's Mobile Games Innovation Challenge. Graphic proof below the break. I wonder if this actually means something? After all, we know that N-Gage support for the N93 is on the way...
Samsung has shown off a new S60 3rd Edition smartphone at the Tele-Vision fair in Nieuwegein. The L870 is a quad-band
slider with GPRS and UMTS support, FM radio, 3 megapixel camera and USB 2.0. The L870 is, notably, only 13.5mm thick, thin for a slider smartphone. Picture below.
...Although not by me (sob). I've got my own thoughts and opinions, which will have to wait until the black N82 arrives at AAS towers. Until then, kudos to Daniel from Sweden, who has unboxed (seemingly) the very first black N82 out in real world shops. Some photos below, plus a link.
That's User Data Preservation to you and I. This nugget is from a normally reliable industry insider, mik3, over at My-Symbian. We already know that new firmware v20 is coming for the Nokia N95 8GB, bringing screen auto-rotation, but mik3 makes a point of mentioning UDP. I'm guessing that v20 will bring the UDP code, ready so that UDP happens properly for the next firmware update after that. If you see what I mean...
Users of non-network branded Nokia E90s should check NSU right now. There's a new firmware update, v200.34.72, with Flash Lite 3, a new Quickoffice, and more. More details below. No idea why they should jump from v7.4 right up to v200, though! Read on.... [Updated: the update seems to have been pulled]
It's black, it's a candy-bar with pencil-thin keys, it's got Wi-Fi, a GPS and everything else but the kitchen sink. And yet it's not the (black) Nokia N82, we're talking Samsung and their new SGH-i550 reviewed right here. Does it match up to Nokia's N or Eseries? And, with generic S60 on board rather than an extended-for-their-own-use Nokia variant, does the i550 suffer?
This Samsung SGH-i550 image gallery is a teaser ahead of our full review (now published above). The i550 is Samsung's top of the range S60 phone. It has a candy bar form factor and features a large 2.6 inch screen, a 3.0 megapixel AF camera, WiFi and HSDPA connectivity and an integrated GPS.
After much expectation in the user community, the Nokia N95 just got its Flash Lite 3/Web runtime firmware update. Although not as big an update as v20 was (which introduced demand paging and transformed the speed of the device, remember), v21.0.016 is still a major firmware and well worth installing. More details and screens below...
In Insight #18 (AAS Podcast 67) Rafe, Ewan and Steve talk about this week's news (N-Gage First Access closing and Comes with Music). Rafe and Steve discuss their first impressions of the Samsung SGH-i450 and Samsung SGH-i550 (S60 phones) and afterwards Ewan talks about how he recorded and broadcast video on his trip to the USA.
Dubbed the 'poor man's N95', how does the budget Samsung i450 stack up? Pretty well for the price, actually. Rafe'll have an in-depth textual review here soon, but in the meantime I've done a video review in Smartphones Show 55, out today. There's also iPhone AppStore/Download! chat from AAS regular Matt Radford and a video version of my push GMail walkthrough.
Never mind the debates about which is best: clamshells, candybars, sliders, and so on. There's a wider debate going on - how large should a smart mobile device be? I argue that once you get beyond a certain size, you lose the 'take it everywhere' usefulness, you sacrifice robustness and you fail to achieve mass market sales.
A large screened S60 slider, 5 megapixel camera, Wi-Fi, GPS, 3.5G data - it's got to be the Nokia N95, right? But actually no, I just came across this recent video (see below) of the Samsung G810, which also adds a stainless steel case and genuine 3x optical zoom into the mix. Looks very good from here, we'll get one for review when it appears in the real world, never fear.
