38 posts tagged “nokia”

To day I checked the Download! application in my N97. To my merry amazement there was only 1 application left in Download!: The OVI store application. I do have to say that the download application does seem a bit overkill on the N97 with both the ovi-store working quite well and the presence of the OTA Software Update application working excellent.

The default v12 N97 firmware has ovi-store version 1.00.  The download application has v1.05 in offer. Upgrading went like blast. Strange though that the OVI-store update is not shown through the OTA Software Update application. Who would ever check Download! out of anything other than curiosity. So please every one check the Download! application on your N97. Most likely the last time you ever need to check it.

I guess it will be gone with firmware 2.0.

Cheers

This is article 1 of a short series about mobile illusions.

For many of us a mobile phone has become a very personal device with modern phones having extended communication and media features. They take pictures, video's, send and receive e-mail, sms. There is support for IM, geo-tagging and grand access to your social internet network via Twitter, Facebook, Hyves, YouTube etc. Image loosing such a phone either by theft or forgetfulness. Image it falling into the wrong hands.

A private phone

Your phone contains a full register of all your friends addresses and phone numbers and your intimate SMS's, e-mails, IM logs twits and personal notes. Not to mention buddytracking on google maps and similar? The satnav in YOUR phone can guide any thief quickly and easily to their houses while they are not there. Not to mention stalking, pestering and or simply 'fungames' from social misfits. It often has location-tagged photo's, saying where and when they were taken. Showing exactly where there there are expensive things to nick. None of this information is protected or encrypted on nearly any phones.

A secure PC

There exists a responsibility to keep personal information of your friends and family safe. Which is a reason my laptop and PC run full-disc encryption at home. You can steal my hardware, but that damage is insured. Sure, high-tech hackers may break through my firewall(s) and hack into my PC's. But it takes skill and more effort (read: cash and time) than it is worth to them. Besides my financial administration is runs from a junk free dedicated OS installed on a secure usb-stick. My PC is powered-off and boots directly from the usb-stick. Fat chance that it is hacked during those few minutes a week it is online for bank transactions and I install no unsigned software from unknown sources.

A secure Phone?

But what about my mobile phone? Hardly any of the big phone manufactures makes any noise about security as a feature. Silently, Nokia's latest market E-series introductions (E71, E75, E55 i.e.) now offer standard out-of-the-box support for device locking, remote device locking (also via SMS) and device and memory card encryption. This might even become more important with the introductions of financial transactions technology like NFC. More and more possibilities are introduced to make payments via your mobile phone. Already virusses have been found that send SMS or calls to make some cash of your phone. Luckily little success has been booked so far with these schemes and for now it seems safe. Still Symbian security has already been broken. So it seems only a matter of time until the s^$%t hits the fan. Your smartphone is a MIMD (mobile internet & media device) and as such is often fed all kinds of nasty web pages, scripts and media and software from an unknown origin. Should you really install software from an unknown source (even if signed) on a device meant to store private data and that can do financial transactions?

With mobiles getting pocket computer aspirations, so should mobile security get beefed up. Think about secure and reliable encryption of private data. The ability to run insecure and unsigned software and games in a sandbox, separated en shielded from the part that does the private and financial things. 

Security options

With the increasing technological options to make payments and money transactions via a mobile phone this becomes more and more essential. Some of these issues have been addressed by some features of some mobile phone manufacturers and some mobile OS manufacturers. Software signing and security certificates already exist, though memory encryption as a default option exists only for a few phones. 3rd party developper options exist but hardly useful or accessible for an average Joe intending personal use. Only Java seems to have a some security model for selecting access to different phone data and functions(phonebook, internet, sms, calling etc.).

Phone and future

Most mobile phone related manufacturers simply consider security an issue of "If we don't mention it, it does not exist". In other words, play dumb. This sadly never works. Security is a big issue, and it should be resolved now by the large manufacturers and Mobile OS designers (Symbian.org, Windows Mobile, Android). They should be scoring points from us now instead of loosing them later on. Apple streamlined the graphic user interface putting touch on the consumers map.Time to streamline security features I should say.

Nokia is already taking a step in the right direction but sadly not far enough and only for some devices. Why design a N97 to be the ultimate social connector and then forget about privacy? How important is touchscreen,  and 5 instead of 3.2 MPixels photos compared to reliability and security. How much value do you put on the knowledge that after your phone is lost or stolen the house will not be ransacked while you have an appointment with the dentist or find your kids pictures back on some crazies website.

Think about it the next time you shop for a new phone!

It seems the full crop of new mobiles phones at the MWC '09 is in. While The Symbian-Guru Guru was pretty excited and had big expectations of the MWC `09, I on the other hand did not expect anything really wowable. Merely more megapixels and more/bigger touchscreens. And sadly I was mostly right.

Touchscreen developments

Yep, almost every company came with more touchscreens. Only Nokia introduced no new touchscreen devices, showing contentment with their 5800 ExpressMedia and the yet to be released N97. Note that I am not counting the new Nokia navigator with a touchable area for zooming. An interesting development is that Microsoft Windows Mobile 6.5 has become more finger oriented, finally. And very promising Samsung used Symbian S60 5th edition for their latest and greatest touchscreen: The Omnia HD.

Samsung Omnia HD

The Omnia is a very promising media phone. OLED screen, 8 MPixel photo's. Video upto 1280x720p@24 fps, even GPS and a compass. Specificationswise it completely blows the competition out of the water and with S60 5th edition being among the more pleasant touch interfaces. it should do well. Sadly there is no Xenon flash, only a single led. However neither the Nokia 5800 nor the N97 can match its hardware specifications. And with all of them running S60 5th edition It seems Nokia's only advantage over this Samsung will lie mostly in OVI's additional internet services additional software and regular firmware updates/improvements. Which BTW are not to be dismissed lightly. All in all the Omnia HD looks very impressive.

Nokia N86

Though SonyEricson presented a 'concept' of 12 MPixels, Nokia's N86 is currently perhaps the most promising cameraphone announced. The multi-aperture and a mechanical shutter will improve the image quality. Expect enhanced image depth and sharper images. Compared to a N82 the N86 lens setup has a similar amount of light per pixel while at the same having 60% more pixels. In comparison The E71's lens collects 30% less light per pixel and 36% less pixels.

The N86's lack of a Xenon flash will no doubt annoy staunch photographers. However if the LED's are of high quality they could still approach the colorspectrum Xenon well enough, that flashed photo's don't look off-color. Though the significant longer flash duration of LED's will cause more motion blurring in your photo's. The latter is less important, particular if as compensation the double LED's can be used as a torch and for filming in the dark.

No phones for social bloggers

No real combinations of a quality media phone (photo and video) with a decent mini-qwerty were expected by me. The announced E75 has a qwerty but only 3.2 MPixels, with a single LED and no mention of a Zeiss Tessar lens. No doubt it will fall in the same quality category as the E71: Only nice for sunny holiday pics. However the E75's video is specified at 640x480@30 fps compared to the E71's 22fps despit the phone's smaller size. On the other hand the E75 design does not even come close to the stylish curves of E71. The E75 looks flat and squared. A shade of polished ugliness, particular in the colors red and yellow.

Acer came with the M900. It main features are a 5 Mpixel camera, GPS, fingerprint scanner  and QWERTY! Making it the sole competitor for the Nokia N97. With Windows Mobile 6.5 as the OS choosen for the Acer M900, it will no doubt do well in buisiness circles. Though wether WM6.5 will be really that more userfriendly than WM6.0, I doubt it. I do hope the Acers'  photo's and video options will compare favorable to what we are used from Nokia's N-series devices as the N97 is in need of decent competition in that aspect. No doubt a qwerty version of Samsung's Omnia HD would give the N97 stiff competition. Indeed I hope they do. For now the N97 seems the only phone suited for a social blogger's appetite.

Conclusion

Samsung's Omnia HD was the most exciting annoucement, I guess. Though without qwerty I doubt I'll go for it. As such my N82 has little fear of being replaced. The N86 would be a nice upgrade to the N82, but the difference is simply not big enough. Which in my eyes sums up the MWC '09. The N97 is still looking to be the best choice in the near future. Though I'd prefere a slightly smaller device. And yes, the E71 is still my most wannahave-because-it-looks-so-very-cool-phone. Still the new E75 is a better choice with the 3,5 mm audio connector and the larger keyboard for big-thumbed geeks like me. I guess I have to be a little more patient for my next dream phone.None seem as much a step forward as the N95 did.

The Mobile World Conference is coming up in 6 more days and I am not feeling any worthwhile amount of anticipation. Why? As a consumer I feel misunderstood. There is no real phone that does it right for me, while could have been in the market for a year. We have touch phones, we have mini-qwerty phones, we have cam phones. But that thing in my pocket that still fits my needs best is already over two years old. In other words, I am saying all the new stuff is wannabe crap. Awake now?

There is quality and there is functionality. But where are the smart combinations? Quality calling, SMS, e-mail, webbrowsing, photos and satellite navigation. These are today's essential phone functions.

- Calling, I want calling with a decent sound quality.
- I want SMS and e-mail with a decent (qwerty) keyboard. So my screen space is used for composing and reviewing my message. No more frustration on a numeric keypad entering mixed language and struggeling with odd lexicographical tokens. No annoyance by tiny touch buttons or having your screen space completely absorbed for touch-qwerty data input.
- webbrowsing. Yeah I want to access the essentials either on a mobile site or the original. We are talking news-websites, RSS-feeds and stuff like youtube and other interesting internet video-feeds.
- I want quality photo's at low light and a decent flash. Image quality please! Not useless high numbers of insensitive MegaPixels.
- Satellite navigation. This means A-GPS support for speed and accuracy and some decent navigation software. Traffic information and more!

There are currently no decent phones on the market that take good pictures, have gps and a qwerty input. Touch or without touch. Even Nokia has been missing the point for more than a year. There is the N-series with 5 MPixels cameras and all the goodies one wishes except a qwerty keyboard. And there is the E-series with the E71 and the upcoming E75 that have decent qwerty but no 5 Mpixel camera. Nokia could have built an S60 3rd edition j71 (between E and N) over a year ago to fill that painfully empty spot in the market. And none of its competitors seemed to be bright enough to do it either. Not that I would go windows mobile.

The N97 seems the only upcoming phone with a sensible mix of quality and functions, though its size and weight tell me it is a bit of a brick and it's touch interface is yet still unproven. At the moment I would still prefer a phone with a decent compact  form factor and a qwerty on my next phone running a reliable S60 3rd edition FP2. Though I would not mind some nifty N97-ish widgets available for on the stand-by screen. But I expect that none of this will pop-up on the MWC '09. No it will be all 8 MPixels and more sub-standard touch-interfaces and lack of qwerty.

And the current phone in my pocket? A N82, in other words, a revamped  version of the two year old N95-model in stylish black. Still the best for now and likely for months to come.

Nokia did well with the announcements of Nokia World. Biggest news in mobile town being the N97. It has all a n-series phone needs: Wopping battery life, 5MPixel photo, 30 fps 640x480 Video and all the trimmings of the N95-class phones. I have only three complaints.

1. No Xenon flash, let's be honest. Dual led for video simply sucks, and it pales completely in comparison with xenon flash for photo's. At least the current dual led models do. And it will be a while until they get that right it seems. 
2. 12 cm's long? Okay to be precise 11,7 cm. Still it's a bit to clumsy. A smartphone that is not pocketable is not a smartphone, its a netbook/laptop/fancy piece of heavy luggage.
3. 150 grams? Another pocketable size complaint. 120 grams please at the most 130 grams.
   

With the new Symbian v5 touchscreen software, Maps, Ngage and the social contact integration on the standby screen it looks like a winner. Early adopters of the N95 like me will pine about this machine until it's available. Still I think it's current size and weight will make people hesitate to buy it. Time will tell wether the N97 will position itself for as a E90 replacement for buisinessmen or as a anytime, anyplace phone for a larger group of smartphone addicts.

Having said all this I would love to test this phone and see if it can cope with one of my 14x16 hours trips of  satnav, e-mail, phototagging and videorecording. It killed the last two N95 I owned, despite being never dropped. All in all it is pretty close to my personal wish list for Christmas, though it seems Santa will be half a year late ;-)

Nokia

The N97 will likely be the most expected phone for the first half of 2009. Supplemented with the new maps and e-mail integration into OVI. Nokia seems more back on track than ever. The new social contact integration on the homescreen of the N97 could very well indicate further developments in the new Symbian OS. Gearing it more towards the social demands an internetconnected junk has. Like multiple internet identities and syncing per identity as well simple things like as being allowed to cloudtag your e-mail. Who has ever properly used the subject line in an e-mail?

• N97 movie 1
• N97 movie 2

I hear rumors about the coming touchscreen phones of Nokia. Not only there is talk of release dates in october. There is talk about perhaps more than one phone. Well, it's annoying, exciting and my curiousity having its day. Blast...

How big will they be? Will there be a qwerty? Xenon? How many, how terrific and wonderful are they? OLED screens or TFT?  did I buy my N82 to soon? Ahhh, the suspense.

(updated next paragraph)

My company allows external exchange 2003 access through webmail and OWA. Fiddling with this a colleague managed to get Nokia Exchange support working and I have been running it now for a couple of weeks. Here are some quick impressions. Mail for exchange offers push type sync of agenda, contacts, tasks and e-mail. Sadly no notes, and some symbian contactdata does not match with exchange (carphone number i.e.) :

stability: Terrific, it has been working perfect since day 1.
syncing:There are different sync schemes for work and playtime. For worktime you can set working days and working hours, playtime (offwork hours) is the rest. Sync times are: always on, every  15, 30, 60 minutes or 4 or 12 hours.
battery usage: Terrific. I see no battery level drop over a whole day. I sync 8 hours and during free time once every 4 hours. Of course when transferring huge amounts of data this will impact the battery. But keeping it in 'always on' sync mode itself has not any noticible battery impact.
options: It syncs, agenda, notes, todo, contacts and e-mail. All works nicely. Some things and options I do miss. Contact images do not get synced! No html support. Limited support for company adressbook lookup (only name, e-mail and telephone, no office location and group member info, no pictures).

Currently my N82 no longer needs to sync at a pc. It now syncs it while I am on the move. Occasionally I sync the mobile bookmarks to my web browser at home and of course there is the live blogger/Nokia photo's sync. But that's it.

Quicklook score: 90%

It is a very reliable stable piece of software that takes good care of the essentials in a production environment. It is not however completely up to modern smartphone standards. It could use some extra features. The ability to set temporary sync profiles for a day or a couple of days: travelling, roaming, day off, working in the weekend is missing. Also the option for network profiles is missing, sync profiles that sync when the company network is detected. My N82 can scan for known wifi networks every 10 minutes without worrying for batterylife and hook me up to SIP and e-mail when in range. So yes it can be done. It's nice to have beta labs, but where can we request reasonable features for already finished software? Where can we contribute suggestions for improvements on software done?

Grouping of contacts, todo's and notes would be great. So would HTML support. Then again neither is supported by the default webmail client and S60. Syncing of contacts photos is not available in OWA I suspect (the exchange webclient itself does not show them either/yet).  So I can't really fail Nokia for these missing features. I also doubt if S/MIME is supported for e-mail. I see it more and more use of S/MIME for important messages and would love support for it.

download here or use the download application on your Nokia.

LifeVine is destined to be that for which people were misusing sportstracker. That is, not for tracking their sportsactivities, but for their walks, hikes and holiday trips. Posting video's and pictures with a GPS log.  LifeVine is meant exactly for these things. It will log and publish your track, captured media and music you played during the trip. Already the current sportstracker is capturing the music info and displaying it in its mini-map on my phone. You can find a more detailed blurb about LifeVine on Nokia conversations, go here.

Early adopters might want to subscribe to the opening e-mail on the LifeVine website. I hope to find some refinements and extensions over the sportstracker website to be found in LifeVine.

Updated spelling: LiveVine ->LifeVine.

In the past Nokia has won the Eisa Award of Media Phone since the category was created in 2005. This year, 2008, the category was changed into Smart Phone. After Nokia's winning streak with the N90, the N93 and last year with the N95 the award now goes to the Windows 6.1 Pro running HTC Touch Diamond. Quoting Eisa's statement on the new winner:

Here’s a device that is certain to attract undivided attention from gadget connoisseurs everywhere. The Touch Diamond’s glossy, shiny case contains an operating system based on Windows Mobile v6.1 Pro, enhanced with a new 3D TouchFlo interface. Images on the 2.8-inch VGA touch-screen are very sharp and clear, making the Touch Diamond a refreshing and rewarding device to use. No user will want for anything in terms of functions, since HTC has included a 3.2 Megapixel camera, 4GB of internal memory, an FM radio and GPS navigation. Connectivity options include HSDPA, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi and USB. By achieving such slick looks and performance, the Touch Diamond is a clear winner.

Though the touchscreen makes for a larger display, I'd rather choose myself the E71 (not in the least because of Symbian) or the HTC Touch Pro, both with a mini-qwerty keyboard. According to the dutch Tweakers site the 3G iPhone did not enter as a contestant since it was not available for testen. Though it is doubtful it would have won anyway.

Also the Samsung G810 running S60 wins the European Photo Phone of the Year award:

Is it a phone, or is it a camera? Only a few years ago the SGH-810’s features would have been unimaginable on anything but a high-spec camera. It offers 5 Megapixel resolution from its CMOS sensor, and protects its optical 3x zoom lens with a sliding cover. Image quality is surprisingly good in bright light, while in low-light conditions the xenon flash is a real bonus. Numerous camera-style photo functions include auto focus with face detection, panoramic mode, macro capabilities, multi-shot mode, digital image stabilization and red-eye reduction. Plus the SGH-810 device also includes Wi-Fi connectivity, GPS Geo-tagging, USB, an earphone socket and a slot for microSD memory cards. Best of all, it manages to look at once both elegant and robust.

Sony Ericsson scores with the W980i as the Music Phone of the Year:

Who could resist this piano-black Walkman-series phone? It’s a quad-band handset loaded with 8 GB of internal memory, a 3.2 Megapixel camera, an FM tuner, Bluetooth stereo, and a music player that operates even with the phone flip-lid closed. Opened out, the handset reveals its 2.2-inch QVGA display with 262k colors and stunning picture quality. One incredibly valuable innovation is the built-in FM radio transmitter. This broadcasts phone-based music playback to a standard car radio, even transferring artist and track details via RDS. The music player handles a wide variety of audio file formats, and automatically sorts tracks according to a range of criteria. Finally, two excellent features are the SenseMe and Shake control. These group tracks by mood, enabling track changes and entire playlist shuffling with just a simple flick of the hand.

The full list of awards can be found here.