28 posts tagged “nokia”

Hi Folks,

The internet has a few more rumors going more and more solid:

Nokia 5800 Tube
- Quad-Band GSM (850 / 900 / 1800 / 1900 Mhz), EDGE/UMTS/HSDPA connectivity
- 3.2″ 640×360 px (16:9 ratio) 16M color touchscreen display
- 3.2 Megapixel camera with autofocus
- Wi-Fi, GPS and Bluetooth 2.0
- 140 MB of internal memory
- 3.5 mm headphone jack
- TV-Out
- Dimensions: 111×52x14.5mm
- Weight: 104g

The specs look great. The tv-out is a great addition. Particular with the lovely new screen resolution ;-) With the 3.2 Mpixel camera I doubt if there will be video recording too. It looks like the upper segment of midranged phones. Now where is that 5 MegaPixel version with a mini-qwerty keyboard?

Let's keep our eyes open for a real review of the device. And there seem to be some pictures in this post.

A post in AAS called my attention to a nice, simpel and free java golf game. It's really a nice game you can play by your self or with others. A such it is a great pub game for the mobile phone to play with very good friends when having a beer, perhaps not in the league as 'Worms World Party' but differences in skill are more easily levelled in a game of golf. Here are some screenshots:

The game has one annoying habit, the startup melody is loud and annoying, however it falls silent after it has run its course. The sound level can not be adjusted. However you can use the silent phone profile to prevent drawing the attention of an annoyed crowd.

Cheers and enjoy,

   Snoyt

Altough TomTom Navigator works on the N95 and other S60 3rd edition phones. It does not support the internal N95 GPS. For over a year now the N95-owners were forced to buy an external bluetooth GPS if they wanted TomTom to work on their phone. In comparison CoPilot, Route 66, Smart2Go/NokiaMaps, Navigon, Nav4All all worked with the internal GPS. However www.tweakers.net, a dutch tweakers-website, reports that a group of hackers called 'Binpda' have released a workaround for Tomtom Navigator 6.02. It works through adding an extra bluetooth profile and running a small virtual bluetooth-gps program that accesses the internal GPS. Allowing TomTom to connect with the internal GPS thinking it is an external bluetooth GPS.

Why TomTom themselves has not added support for a phone that has already sold over 10 million pieces is unclear to me. As such, Nokia Maps was the best option for me last year. This despite at that point there were some stability issues and missing AGPS support. I should say it worked well despite some lesser choices in routing. The price per year (for a 3-year license) was 1/6-th of that of a TomTom license per year. For those not needing it for daily driving during office hours and not requiring real time traffic info, it was a particular good choice. And cheap, very cheap since TomTom forced you to buy an additional bluetooth GPS mouse for another 60+ euros. For those looking for ultracheap satnav there is still Nav4All for the N95. Taking only a minimal of mobile internet usage to guide you. The cheapest yet unless roaming!

To date Nokia Maps 2.0 beta is nearly out of beta. It has been improved on nearly all fronts. It has the ability to use internet if available for POI searches and routing. It gained a much better display layout, much better routing and has become very stable. There is a AAS review of Maps 2.0 beta 1. Also real time traffic info data is now a extra option. And no, Nokia did not asked money for these free upgrades. Excellent and fair. In Nokia Maps 2.0 beta 2 only few bugs and issues remain. As such Nokia Maps 2.0 is becoming a serious competitor in price and quality compared with TomTom. And Nokia is already making in-roads into the car business. Renault is selling special edition cars with Nokia phone's with GPS navigation and factory built-in carkits (Renault Sandero Nokia with the N95, Renault Twingo Nokia edition with the Nokia Navigator 6110).

It looks that that gold digging in the satnav sector with PNA's is past its prime. And companies such TomTom will no longer be able to support themselves by selling PNA's. Looking back, putting TomTom on the stockmarket by their founders last year was a great way to cash-in timely. Convergence will connect all the different little sales markets of consumer navigation into one big battlefield. The fight for dominance and survival will become fierce. Giving consumers the top dollar for their euros.

Quietly and without fanfare the N95 has now been around for about a year in most countries. Time to think back and remember last year and ask yourself:

And be completely honest with yourself. Feel free to answer anything as silly as: I wanted the geekiest smartphone on the market. Or I just bought the most expensive one. Or it was monday. Be honest to yourself. Because now you can answer the following question in earnest:

Did it promise every thing I wanted and did it do everything it promised? Never mind those grumpy other people, where you content? With your phone? In the last year we have seen, slider problems, at least 4 firmware updates for the N95 to fix some minor and some glaring bugs. Compared my old mobile phones never needed firmware updates. They worked. Simple.

However the last year we not only got bug fixes, we got added features with the firmware, complimentary software from Nokia. Upgrades. Things like:

• correcting purplish pictures
• fixed hidden network problems (finally)
  
• added demand paging to solve the limited memory
  
• increased phone speed and battery usage
• A-GPS support
• an improved Nokia Maps 2.0 beta
  
• added geo-tagging
• Share Online for blogging
  
• Internet radio
  
• flash-in--web page support.
  
• N-Gage

and so on... A rather new approach for a company, particular Nokia. Nokia's N-series phones seem to get firmware upgrades and software enhancements as much as a Linux OS gets in a year. Better yet, Nokia Beta labs seems to want to track and field test the latest developments for mobile phones. Now a year later I wonder:
.

Is it? Al major bugs solved, all promises fulfilled albeit a bit late? Or is there one missing?

And NO, requests for touchscreen are NOT allowed ;-)

Here are my answers:

• I wanted: 3G, wifi, e-mail, web browsing, GPS with satnav, quality 3+ MPixel photo camera and occasional decent 640x480 video recording. The specs promised all, but did they deliver?
  
• I got last year: Every I wanted and more like SIP, A2DP, uPnP support and reading office documents attached to e-mail. But I also got purplish images, slow GPS-locking and a rather unstable and simple satnav and slider problems. And of course system crashes due to limited memory. Connecting to hidden wifi networks gave serious troubles.
  
• I got now: All I wanted then with an much improved Nokia Maps beta, and things like SIP, A2DP, uPnP support and reading office documents attached to e-mail. Speed, stability and battery usage are now acceptable. In fact I currently use almost all the applications of the phone. And yes, hidden wifi networks work fine now.
  
• My one wish: Decent S/MIME support for e-mails. I want it even more than Skype.

And yes, my next phone should be Symbian Touch, have a magnetic compass for pedestrian navigation, 3x optical zoom, better jpeg-quality, Xenon-flash, be twice as fast, twice as more power effcient and be exactly the same size! Support virtual dolby surround and a builtin bluetooth headset! And oh yes, it should be able to be used in the pouring rain! Although I draw the line at these Burlandish antics.

Is it still worth the bucks? Feel free to answer my questions in the comments below ;-)

www.tweakers.net reported it yesterday evening. It's really there including audio streaming of 30 second song samples. Nice. Still a music shop selling drm is not my beef. Actually I prefere the real CD's. They are like a free backup copy, rip'em and play'em where ever I am. Plus I have a free backup to store on the attic.

For now drm-free music is the next best thing to a real CD.

Nokia's OVI site suggests playing Fifa `08. Nokia's nseries now carries 'N-Gage is Live'. We could say it is now officially online. The game of the week changed this monday from System Rush to Hooked On and they added Fifa `08 to the list of available games.

Just logged into n-gage preview and they told me to goto the www.n-gage.com page and download+install the n-gage application there!  Currently there is support for the following phones:

• Nokia N81
• Nokia N81 8GB
• Nokia N82
• Nokia N95
• Nokia N95 8GB
  

The N73, the N93 and the N93i are said to be expected to be added soon. Currently the download is running and installation will be soon ;-)

Update: Installation went smooth. No problems. Registering went allright allthough it would not take my e-mail adres. I'll have to try that later again.

Current games available are

• System Rush Evolution
• Asphalt 3: Street Rules
• Brain Challenge
• World Series Poker
• Hooked On

Update 2: Several game prices seem to have been upgraded to 9 euros.

In our discussion on the NAM95 post of Al Pavangkanan PseudoFinn made a remark about demand paging which made me realize many of us are still unclear about what it actually does. So here is a short blot on my conception of it. Note that I don't work for Nokia, I am unfamiliar with their exact implementation. However the term 'demand paging' is a well known technique in the field of Computer Science and Engineering and the general outline here should suffice to validate what I write here. Any Nokia experts are welcome to comment and improve on this.

PseudoFinn more or less stated that not only improves demand paging the available amount of RAM for applications (TRUE), it increases the speed too (FALSE, but with some remarks).

Demand paging

Demand paging has been around since the early Unix days when memory per megabyte was  far more expensive than hard-disk memory  per MB. It is nothing more than having a virtual amount of memory larger than your RAM allows. Only the part of virtual memory currently accessed is loaded into the RAM (128MB in your case, 64MB in my case). Unused memory is swapped to disk clearing real RAM for running more or larger applications. It allows to use the expensive but fast RAM more efficient while storing currently unused memory on a slow but cheaply and much larger sized disk.

RAM has very high access speeds, disk are in general very slow. For example:

-  N95 RAM: 32-bit*333MHz =  1.3GB/s
- Access to the firmware ROM is in general slower than RAM access.
- Disk speed on the N95 is timed around 2 MB/s.

All memory access has to be checked wether it is resident or stored on disk and handled as such. Demand paging does is not an improvement of you RAM handling. There is no speed increase. In fact it actually slows down memory access. The disk swapping creates noticable delays and slows the general performance. Start Nokia search on you N95 and see the huge delay caused by swapping. Delays that were not there before demand paging.

Demand paging allows however to 'run' a nearly unlimited size of inactive OS-modules and inactive programs. These inactive programs need thus not be closed and switching between them means loading the virtual memory part at low diskspeed to run them. This is often faster and certainly more practical than restarting them. The number of simultaneous active programs is however still limited by your real RAM size. As such you can not have Nokia Maps simultaneously active while taking a picture. Both programs can however both be 'open' at the same time and one of them running. As such you still need to close sometimes programs on the N95-1 because there are two many active programs running. Not all programs support the demand paging properly and lack a proper sleep/inactive mode.

The good part about demand paging is that the bigger free RAM for applications does wonders on the N95-1 that was pretty cramped for running even 1 major application. Memory fragmentation and unreleased memory chunks can 'eat' free RAM and make the N95 unstable causing an auto boot or requiring a manual reset. Demand paging improves hugely on both these problems. Making the phone more stable and reliable. Wootness indeed.

N95-3

The complaints about the slowness of the N95-3 can not be caused by the lack of demand paging. Even without demand paging the free RAM (not virtual memory) for running active application exceeds that of the free RAM of the N95-1 with demand paging. Nokia did not consider demand paging very essential for any other phone than the half brained N95-1 that has only 64MB! The difference between V20 and V12 firware for the N95-1 was not only demand paging. More free RAM can make a computer run smoother, though in the N95 NAM case this is most unlikely the case. Demand paging increased the free RAM in a freshly booted N95-1 to about 27 MB while pre-"demand paging" firmwares had 18-20 MB free RAM. With the N95 NAM having 128MB RAM, It has significant more free RAM than a halfbrained N95-1. 

No, there were also certain power and speed improvements implemented in the firmware. On average the N95-1 V20 firmware is 25% more power efficient. And note that demand pages (disk writes and reads) are actually an additional power drain besides the earlier indicated speed reduction! It think the V20 power and speed optimisations are the things required for the N95NAM to improve it's speed.

Summary

Demand paging does de facto not increase the speed of a computer. In fact it slows it down. It does however allow the free RAM to be used more efficiently when running large amounts of inactive tasks. Demand paging allows for faster switching between them. Running out of RAM for active tasks and forcing a computer system to continuous swap between disk stored virtual memory pages to run an application can actually make a computer dead slow and locked up. The slowness of the N95NAM is unexplained but I would hazard to guess that it has to do with the USA 3G changes or it is the missing speed and power improvements that were implemented in the V20 firmware for the N95-1. No doubt they will occure at the next firmware update, since the slowness is definitely a valid point for discontent.

Nokia has currently several new projects on track to be integrated in new firmware, location tagging working with Maps, wonderful Maps 2.0 itself, Nokia search, flash support in the webbrowser and of course the coming n-gage. All of these are to be implemented in firmware at some time. However remember how long it took Nokia to coff up demand paging for the N95-1. At least 6 months. Expect at least 3-4 months for the N95 NAM. Development and proper testing takes time.

It's looks like first access is nearly over and Nokia is planning to open N-gage 2.0 for all us N-series fans. Why, how, where did I get this info? From my trusty N95 of course. Where else.

I had the N-gage first access installed on my N95, my curiosity is indomitable and I just needed to have that peek at what's coming. Initially it worked for a while until Nokia started checking on device types and the showroom with the First Access Games became empty and void on my N95 classic. Still I managed to buy System Rush Evolution before they closed it ;-). It runs without problems and multiplayer worked too even after the close down! Compared to the SRE demo on the N95 the hardware graphics are missing. But this could be because the N81 lacks the hardware 3D graphics that the N95 has.

And today the showroom is packed again with all the First Access Games the N81 users have access to. Clearly N-Gage 2.0 is preparing for allowing access by the other N-series types. It won't be long until there is a formal announcement is made and the N-Gage application becomes available for all the N-Gage compatible phones.

N-Gage 2.0 looks great, well designed and user friendly, with all the functions needed for social gaming and multi-player ranking  but one. Which one thing you ask? Ahhh, there is nothing better than to hear your friends scream their frustration when you push their digital Ferrari off the road into a ravine. Thus where is my voice-link in the multi-player games? Really text messaging is nice, but not during gaming ;-) It is really hazardous to your health points.

Have a look what is coming your way 'real soon now'. AAS has a review here.