Mobile Phone News

Filed under: Nokia, Symbian

For Nokia, WiFi and VoIP have seemingly gone hand-in-hand for as long as 802.11 radios have been offered in S60 handsets. It makes sense, of course — the internet is a great way to yap at little or no expense compared to plain old cellular voice minutes when a traditional WiFi hotspot is available, and Nokia was really ahead of the curve with jumping on the bandwagon and making sure that the capability has been available out of the box. Unfortunately, it seems like constant carrier pressure may have finally gotten the better of Espoo, with GigaOM confirming that 3rd Edition Feature Pack 2 doesn’t contain a SIP stack built-in the same way that FP1 historically has. That doesn’t mean VoIP products are totally locked out, but it does mean that apps that Rel. on the native stack are out of luck until they’ve implemented a new stack of their own. Products like the N78 and N96 are affected by the buffoonery, while the E71, which uses FP1, is not — a good thing, considering the corporate affinity for VoIP and the Eseries’ business leanings.

[Via jkOnTheRun, thanks BFish]

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Filed under: Handsets, Nokia

Well, they’re in this place. Nokia’s latest and greatest N-series devices just hit the market like a trio of well-aimed bricks — or at least that’s what Nokia’s hoping. We got to spend a little bit of hands-on time with prototypes of the new devices, and while we came away slightly impressed, we were nowhere near E-series impressed. in this place’s our biggest problem with the lineup: the only one worth talking about is the N85. Other than minor screen size disparities, the 16GB built-in memory of the N96 and the fresh candybar form of the N79, these three phones are pretty much precisely identical on specs, and yet the N96 manages to be inexcusably bulky, while the N79 sports an inexcusably terrible screen — we’re hoping that was just the prototype being funky, but we saw two versions with the same problem. The N85 isn’t precisely the pinnacle of thinphoneness, but its amazing OLED screen and more refined design make the N96 look like more of a rough draft than a sibling. On the interface side, the phones are much more responsive to S60’s new motion and transitions, but Nokia has oddly chosen to disable the Navi Wheel scrolling in all three phones — a weird move, but we can’t say we blame them, we haven’t had a single good experience with Navi Wheel since Nokia introduced it. In all, we’re not precisely thrilled about Nokia’s prospects for winning over the masses with this new series of devices. Sure, Nokia will protest that it’s going after the high-end users, but 5 megapixel cameras, GPS and WiFi are no longer the differentiators they once were, and users have begun to expect thinner, sexier devices at prices far below the N96’s gargantuan $895 pricetag.

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Filed under: Handsets, Apple

Given that just about every high-end handset on the market has a diamond-encrusted cousin out there somewhere, it was only a matter of time before Apple’s latest got its own stupidly expensive sibling. Knalihs Anthem is offering up 50 iPhone 3Gs with over 475 diamonds weighing 3.75 carats in total. Each mobile will be bundled with all the appropriate paperwork certifying the gems, and while the first ten units will go for a cool $10,000 apiece, the other 40 will be priced in due time. So, any guesses as to whether pricing shoots up or down?

[Via Luxury Launches, thanks Yogesh]

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