Review While many mobile makers in the smartphone game have been concentrating their designer firepower on touchscreen devices, the Nokia N86 8MP rolls in as a successor to Nokia’s previous generation of Symbian S60 3E-packing heavyweights rather than as another touchphone contender.
Nokia’s N86 8MP: the N-series ancestry is immediately apparent
Making its mark as Nokia’s first 8Mp cameraphone – and its first with a mechanical shutter – the N86 8MP combines design and functionality elements from both the N85 and N96, two of Nokia’s most fully featured S60 devices. Imaging may be its focal point, but the N86 8MP also offers Wi-Fi to complement its HSDPA 3G data connectivity, A-GPS satellite navigation, 8GB of on-board storage, an FM transmitter plus a full spread of multimedia features and support for Nokia’s suite of online Ovi services.
There’s no mistaking that N-series family connection in the bodywork and front panel layout. The N86 8MP’s two-way slider design, which incorporates a numberpad and a media player control set as first seen on the N95, is chunky, measuring 103.4 x 51.4 x 16.5-18.5mm. It weighs a pocket-sagging 149g and feels very substantial in the hand.
Scratch-resistant hardened glass covers the front panel and the display, a 2.6in, 16.7m-colour 320 x 240 OLED screen that’s strikingly bright and clear. Read the rest of this entry »
Review The Nokia E55 is actually one of a pair of very similar handsets simultaneously released by Nokia. Its brother is the E52, which is pretty much the same, except that it has a standard numeric keypad rather than the E55′s SureType-style Qwerty keypad with two letters assigned to each key. That aside, both phones come with Wi-Fi, HSDPA 3G, a 3.2Mp Camera, aGPS, FM radio and an outsize battery.
Slim pickings: Nokia’s E55 Symbian smartphone
Nokia is claiming that the E55 is the world’s thinnest smart phone, which, much like world-class sprinting, is a contest that is increasingly based on very small margins. For the record, Nokia is quoting it as 9.9mm thin, which cuts a mighty 0.1mm off the 10mm E71. No, we couldn’t tell the difference when we held them next to each other, but do let us know if you think it’s significant.
It’s a neat looking device, with chrome-look trim around its plastic frontage and a metallic backplate. Incidentally, this feels a little flimsy, and even came off in our pocket once. The 2.4in screen offers 320×240 resolution and 16 million colours. It’s bright and sharp, as you might expect, and not bad in sunlight either. Read the rest of this entry »
Review Nokia’s touchscreen user interface has not had many outings. We’ve seen it before in the original Nokia 5800 XpressMusic and in the much more highbrow, Qwerty keyboard toting N97. Now we have a third appearance in the shape of another XpressMusic handset, the 5530, currently an exclusive offering from Carphone Warehouse from £130. To reach that price some compromises have had to be made. So, while Wi-Fi is here, as well as the ubiquitous Bluetooth, the handset does not support 3G and there is no GPS.
Nokia’s 5530 XpressMusic: touchscreens shouldn’t go any smaller than this
The 5530 XpressMusic isn’t all that different to look at to the 5800 XpressMusic. It takes a candybar shape, is mostly screen on the front, and has an array of three buttons beneath the screen: call, end and menu. Like the 5800, it is narrower than the standard touchscreen fare.
The 640 x 360 resolution screen delivers clear, sharp viewable information indoors, but outside it was a bit of a pig to see in bright sunshine. The resolution is the same as the 5800, but the screen size is reduced from 3.2in to 2.9in. That reduction might sound slight, but it makes a big difference in terms of usability, and we think it is about as small as a touch screen can go. Overall the phone measures 104 x 49 x 13mm and it weighs 107g. Read the rest of this entry »
First Look Announced last week, the N900 finally gives Nokia something competitive in the high-end market, and offers a great deal for developers to get excited about. I had a hands on today and came away with fairly positive impressions, for an iPhone user. But more importantly, Nokia has a roadmap that takes it into the next decade.
Qt will become the API across Nokia devices, which means developers might actually start writing applications for them. Qt is much easier for quick and dirty applications, and proven for heavyweights such as Google Earth, Opera and Skype, where high performance is a necessity.
Nokia’s Maemo 5-based N900
The Linux stack Maemo looks set to blossom into a range of high-end products, Nokia VP Anssi Vanjoki made very clear today. Symbian will fill the mass-market stubbornly occupied by S40 at present.
The N900 is the first tablet to fit a shirt pocket. It’s heavy, and still a bit nerdy, but it looks more of a ‘flagship’ than anything Nokia has thrown at the market in the past couple of years. As Vanjoki all but admitted, the N97 was badly in need of a patch-up – he stressed how quickly Nokia was working to address criticism.
But tweaks and patches won’t update the two-year-old technology in the device, nor give it a forward-looking UI, which is what Maemo 5 finally offers. So the N900 has some of the glitz and slickness of Android, the iPhone and the Pré. After five minutes, most users should find their way around. Read the rest of this entry »
Review Nokia’s flagship phone for 2009, the N97 has set sail – backed by marketing expenditure the size of an African nation’s health budget. But it’s barely got out of port before hitting stormy waters. Some of the disappointment expressed on the web – from phone fan sites and bloggers – is fair; some of it is baffling, but much of it is self-inflicted. Nokia has hyped the N97 intensely, even pitching it head-to-head against Apple‘s iPhone 3G S, with identical UK launch times.
Nokia’s N97
After putting the N97 through a range of practical, real-world situations, the controversy looks a little paradoxical. The N97 is, indeed, flawed in parts, with a UI chosen through necessity that, painfully, lacks the sheen and lustre of today’s top-of-the-range smartphones. Yet, like the Mondeo, it nevertheless does a commendable job at what’s asked of it. You can do a lot worse in the £30-£40 monthly contract price range than the N97.
Nevertheless, it’s expensive and currently, quite buggy – waiting for firmware updates is recommended. So why the fuss? The N97 is the first Nokia touchscreen device with a full Qwerty keyboard to reach the market. Six years ago Nokia abandoned what would have been its first touchscreen Qwerty Communicator, based on the Hildon UI, just before launch. This appeared as the short-lived ‘Series 90’ UI, which shipped in just one phone, but is now better known as the user interface for the Nokia Internet Tablet series. Read the rest of this entry »
