The N79 seems to be now making its way to shops across Europe, as Nokia's official site in Italy lists it as available now, and Expansys UK also has it in stock. You can find out more about the N79 from All About Symbian's extensive hands-on preview article.
Announced first for Russia and then the rest of the world, Samsung have launched the I7110, with an OLED screen, similar to that in the Nokia N85, but is in a candy bar form factor and with familiar 5mp/GPS/Wi-Fi specs. More details below.
It's always interesting seeing long term tests of phones, i.e. from people who have lived with a device intensively for a while. In this case, Symbian Smashpop has lived with the Nokia N96 for a month (and no, I still haven't even seen one - go figure) and here presents a list of loves and hates. In other news, Vaibhav has been trying out the DVB-H TV in the N96 and comes away very impressed.
It's all very well standing there smugly with your new Nokia N or Eseries phone, knowing that it's functionally superior to your friend's Apple iPhone. But when you both turn on your devices, it's the iPhone that people gather round, partly because of the larger screen, but also partly to watch its party tricks. Watching these tricks, you might well ask: 'Why can't my S60 phone do that?' Chances are, it can, with a few software caveats...
The much-awaited Nokia N85 is now available in Finland, and it also seems to have now gone on sale in France too. It's already been available in Italy for a short while now, and presumably should get a continent-wide rollout as the month goes on. The package deal of the SIM-free model varies from country to country, but most people seem to get a voucher for some free Nokia Music Store tracks, a free Nokia Maps subscription and a free N-Gage game.
I can't resist linking over to AAS regular Matt Radford's latest post over on All About iPhone, talking about why the release of the S60 5th Edition-powered Nokia 5800 XpressMusic is going to be good for the Apple iPhone. At the latter's launch, the talk was on how it would be good for the mainstream phone industry - both views were absolutely right, as is Matt's observation that there will never be a 'winner' or a 'finish line' in this industry, just continuing advancement and improvement.
In part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, and part 5 of this series, Steve Litchfield looked at specifics of camera performance in the phone world. Now AAS guest writer Dirk Snoyt takes up the theme of camera phone flash research and gets all technical on the theme of colours. If you'd like to suggest a topic for us to cover next in the series, please comment!
Somewhat annoyingly (for those of us outside the country), Italy seems to be the very earliest recipients of production Nokia N85s - here, p@sco brings us a traditional unboxing and test photos. See also Rafe's N85 hands-on for more on what makes this device special.
Hot off the press, the Nokia E90 has had another big firmware update, to v300.34.84. There's now Maps 2.0 in the firmware, plus many other improvements. Changelog below. [Update:although it was first thought that Blackberry support was no longer possible, this has now changed: see here]
The EEE PC portable computer range has received a lot of coverage over the past year partly due to its low price but also partly due to its small size. How does Asus' minilaptop compare to Nokia's microlaptop, the E90 Communicator? All About Symbian's Tzer2 is about to find out, in an article with somewhat predictable outcome but plenty of interesting insights along the way, including Download! being held up as a relatively good example of how to do things - for a change.
Nick Anstee reports that there's a new firmware, v11.101, available through Nokia Software Update, for the N96. (Product code 0568238, at least). He's encountered problems though. Nick will comment below on changes and status of his device!
In which I explain perhaps the all round best way to keep your data safe and your disruption to a minimum when it comes to repair, replacement or firmware upgrade time. I also propose it as a possible way to restore operation to a 'broken' phone. Comments welcome if you've lived or died by a variety of backup and restore procedures. Can you add to this feature?
The UK's Gadget Show remains a respected review source, even if they don't go into quite the tech detail that AAS does... in the latest Web TV episode, Jon Bentley goes into reasonable detail on the Nokia N96, covering the improvements over the N95 while also being disappointed by the slow speed overall, by the poor Wi-Fi reception and by the lack-lustre BBC iPlayer.
Possibly my most link-packed news post ever, but.... The Phones Show 66 is now live, with a video preview of the OLED-equipped Nokia N85 and video of the 5800 XpressMusic in action (Hi-res version RSS feed). It sparked comments on YouTube too, with Paul commenting that in Japan they have phones like the SoftBank 920sc, with OLED screen, 3x optical zoom AND Xenon flash. I'm impressed. And viewer Micky turns out to be making videos of his own, prototyping a wearable N95 body-cam. And I haven't even had breakfast yet...
The upcoming Nokia N79 has now got a support site available at Nokia.com, including the full manuals and user guides in many different languages. As always this may or may not indicate an imminent release, but Nokia devices are usually released within a few weeks of their support sites appearing.
