nokiageek.com

I’m back, and so massively tired you wouldn’t believe. I know there’s a few posts up now, but I’m going to try to condense some of it, and I’ll elaborate on other parts as and when necessary. I may skip and jump between parts here, so if it’s hard to keep track, I do apologise.

The first thing to take from this event was that the handsets weren’t the most important thing announced. Yes, we got 4 handsets announced (N95 8gb, N81, 5310 and the 5610) but Nokia were pretty strong in the fact that they wanted to push the servies that they are launching. One of the opening statements was ‘This is about Nokia renewing itself’. That’s a pretty bold thing to say for such a sucessful company. The big key phrase is ‘The 4th Screen’. We were told that Nokia moves in different directions all the time (they used to make tyres?!?) and now, they are changing into an internet driven experience as so much of our lives is spent online.

We were shown a couple of videos next, and they showed off a new multimedia menu. For anyone who uses a PSP or PS3, it’s instantly recognisable as the Media Bar. It’s pretty much lifted. Personally I thought it was a bit dull and grey, but it does incorprate so many extra parts. There’s a specific maps tab for example, which has all your bookmarks in it. All your music is listed in their too. This is going to come as standard on all Nseries devices.

A quick video was shown showing a device that was held in a horizontal position. They were talking about the interfaces on phones, and it showed a guy touching the screen and moving whatever was on there, just like the iPhone. It created a few groans/laughs from the audience and at the time I thought ‘I can’t believe they’ve so obviously nicked this.’ Turns out this devie has actually been doing the rounds at Nokia for about 2 years now. If I remember right, Stefan told me it was code-names ‘Tube’.

There was chat about how Nokia wanted to free the internet. This all makes sense later on when the new servies are announced.

We’re told that single use devices are being marginalised. For example, MP3 player sales are now levelling off, while phones with MP3 players built in are rising in sales.

We start to talk about music phones. What makes a good music phone? Battery life, transfer, storage. Basically, there should be no compromise made. It must look good, have a good interface so it’s usable.

We move onto the new handsets themselves. A couple of Series 40 handsets come first. I’ll list them one by one below.

Nokia 5310

A candybar style handset. 9.9 mm thick with a nice metallic feel to it. Triband, 70g in weight. 2.0″ screen with a 17.7 million colour display. It can take up to a 4gb microSD card (we’re not told how much memory is built in). Dedicated audio chip and a 3.5mm jack. There’s dedicated music keys on the left hand side of the screen. 2 megapixel camera. Not 3G.

Nokia 5610

Slider design. Black gloss finish, aluminium side panels coloured. Quad band handset. 2.2″ screen, 16.7 million colours. Again, can take a 4gb card (and again, no mention of what’s built in) . Has the dedicated audio chip. 3.2 megapixel camera, 8x digital zoom, auto focus and a dual LED flash. 30 fps video recording on the main camera. The front camera records at 15fps. Horizonal slider key build in under the screen to flick through menus. For a S450 device, I’ve gotta say this was a pretty neat phone.

And now the ones we want!

Nokia N95 8gb

Cut a long story short, it’s so much better it hurts. The slider is amazing, when you click onto the multimedia control keys there’s a resounding thunk. It feels solid all over as well, no creaking at all. The screen is bigger, it’s now 2.8″. Oddly, it seemed like some of the fonts have been stretched. Hopefully that’ll be fixed on the full release. The keys below the screen have been shrunk, but they don’t feel too small at all. They’re also raised more. There is no cover on the camera but it actually makes the back look so much better. The front cover is extremely shiny (maybe a bit too shiny) while the back is a matt black and plasticised, rather than the rubberised one we have now. The new battery is in there. The new multimedia menu is built in, and there’s a fantastic search funtion. Load it up off the front screen, and you can search for anything. Music, files, apps, you name it, you can pull it up from right there. Navigating through the phone is much faster. To confirm, there is over 80 meg free RAM. See screen shot, courtesy of Ricky from Symbian-Guru who managed to sneak Taskman onto the phone!

Bear in mind too, the version I used was a pre-prototype model, so the processor wasn’t the proper one, it was in fact a slowed down version. This handset will FLY through stuff.
So you can compare the sizes between the two versions, here’s a photo from Rafe at allaboutsymbian.

Nokia N81

Put it plain and simple, this is one sexy piece of kit. Slider again and it’s a really well made one. Feels solid. Lovely reflective black finish. There’s going to be two versions, one with 8gb built in, one that takes MicroSD cards. You basic functionality is the same as the new N95 (new multimedia menu etc) but there’s some key differences. I’ll start off with the one (only one) bad point; 2 megapixel camera. I mean c’mon, squeeze a 3.2 in there, lets not be going down to a 2. I know it’s not aimed at that market, but by the time this is launched, people are going to want a certain standard and maybe that will be too low? Good points make up for this though. First of all, the Navi key is great. Before anyone says it, yes it’s just like using the iPod wheel, but that’s why they’ve done it! So the user is familiar with how it’s going to work. You can’t tell on the pics, but where the earpiece is it’s actually two buttons as well. These only come into play when there’s actually a use for them, for example when playing a game, zooming on photos etc. The keys light up with a white backlight, which on the black phone looks fantastic.
The N81 is due out Q4, and I can see it being high up on many peoples Christmas lists. I’ll get some videos up tomorrow, for now, here’s a picture of it in my hand.

OK, here’s a the low down on the services.

The big word to come out of this is Ovi. There was Ovi branding everywhere. Meaning ‘the door’ in Finnish what Nokia are aiming to do is to open the door to all their existing communities, social networks and content as well as promoting Nokia content. it will be used to create and share digital content. Basically ovi is an umbella term, and everything is contained within it; games (Ngage, more on which later), Music, video, Contacts, Maps, Photos and the Internet.

The first version on Ovi.com is looking to go live by the end of 2007 in English. The press release says that other markets will launch in the first half of 2008.

I’ll now break down the things that make up Ovi.

Nokia Music Store

The Nokia Music Store will lauch with over 2 million tracks and support from major labels, indies and local artists.

There will be an app built into the new handsets (and I believe a download for older handsets). Purchased songs will be easily transferable to your handset using Windows Media Player, or altrnatively with the stand-alone PC client whcih is turning up this year. the PC client has a couple of cool little tricks, such as ripping from a CD straight from the phone. Niiiiice.

The Phone app is basically a fully featured version of the PC client. You can check out songs by listening to a 30 second streamed clip. There is also a recommendation service built in to both the PC and phone clients. On the screens we saw, tracks were listed at 80p per track and albums were about £8 but don’t hold me to that.

My conclusion : I’m going to jump down the same route as Ricky at Symbian-Guru and Rafe at allaboutsymbian here. When were shown it, Rafe turned to Ricky and said ‘If this goes right, Apple is finished.’ Now that may seem like a pretty bold thing to say, but consider some facts here. There’s something like 40 million Nseries handsets around right now. We will all have access, on our phones, to this. If every single person just downlaoded one songs, that’s 40 million sold. That’s not including all the great handsets coming up soon. It uses the Windows DRM, so for example Creative Zens will have no problems using the Itunes store. Nokia are opening themselves up one massive market. And you know what, it works better than iTunes.

Here was the thing I loved. Say you buy something off the store on the PC, but you don’t have your phone on you for whatever reason. Your entire libary, including tracks not on your mobile, is listed when you load up your phone client. You can then download any tracks you haven’t synced straight to your mobile. Visa versa, anything you do on your phone is reflected the next time you load up the PC version. Now that’s sweet.

The PC app… well it’s based on iTunes, but the guys are made it are all iTunes users and we were told that they nall agreed on what the limitations of what they were using and fixed them in the Nokia version.

Seriously guys, I don’t care if you are a ‘free music’ type of person, I telly ou know the second you get this on your phone, you’ll downlaod a track. And then it’ll owrk so well, you’ll probably get another. And then you’ll see the ease of syncing between the PC and phone, and you’ll keep buying them. It’s really that good. And this is from a guy who *cough* doesn’t often pay for his music *cough*.

I’m not gonna give you a full lowdown on Maps. It’s being brought under the Ovi umbella, but we’ve all used it already. There will be constant revisions of the Maps app to get us to a level where it replaces any navigation devices we currently have. Whether that happens only time will tell because we are all aware of the limitations of the current app, but they are still strongly focussed on it.

Nokia N-Gage

Mobile gamers, prepare to get a bit turned on now. N-Gage is going to totally revolutionise mobile gaming, and maybe gaming on the whole.

We’re talking here about a dedicated mobile gaming platform. The best way for me to describe it is Xbox Live on your phone. when you load up the app, your greeted with a great tabbed interface, and the front is instantly welcoming to anyone who uses the Xbox Service. You’ve got a box with your gamertag to which you can upload a picture to. There’s N-gage points which I presumed are your acheivement points from the games. There’s a rep section, so don’t go about slagging people off or it’ll be relected on the service. You can pull up a list of you friends from the next line. Clicking on that will show you what your mates are playing and from there you can send messages to others.

Like the okia Music, there’s a PC client as well as the phone one, so you can download the games to your PC and install them to your phone if you need to keep down data charges. I mention charges, because we were told that Creatures of the Deep is currently a 25 meg download. that’s HUGE for a mobile game.

There’s proper massive developers behind this. EA, Gameloft, Capcom, Vivendi and THQ, amongst a load of others are all developing for it, and also Nokia are pushing titles out themselves including a new version of Snake whcih looks amazing. It’s no longer just on one plain as there is rises and drops on every level and music now plays a massive part. If your doing good, the music flows but when you start to mess up, it all starts to drop off. I spent 5 minutes on it and it was really good.

Muliplayer is going to be possible on some games. The developer has full control over whether this is implemented or not. I had a kick about on Fifa 07 on an N81 (absolutely amazing) and chatted with the guy at the stall. EA have not inplemented a multiplayer option over your data connection for the simple reason that network latency would ruin it. However they are still talking about multiplayer over WLAN or locally with Bluetooth.

Games can be trialled, rented or bought. To buy it’s gonna cost about 6-10 euros. No prices were given on rental.

Best thing is, it’s gonna be a standard on N-Series. The current list reads N73, N81, N93 and N95 but other handsets will be added all the time. Obviously some games may not run on specific handsets (for example if their is an N80 versin, some games may not work) and if you attempt to download one of these, you’ll be warned against it.

N-gage is pencilled in for a lauch in major European makets in November. Believe me, I’ll be the first in the line for it.

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