Mobile Phone News

Filed under: Handsets, Nokia, ATT, Symbian, GSM, EDGE, HSDPA, UMTS

S60 lovers on AT&T, rejoice — your on-contract, branded phone has arrived. The Nokia 6650 has started flowing into stores today, bringing an N75 successor that ups the beauty factor by a country mile and adds 3rd Edition Feature Pack 2 for good measure. It’s apparently running $70 with a two-year deal after rebate, so if Symbian flips are your cup o’ tea, get on it.

Nokia 6650 showing up in AT&T stores originally appeared on Engadget Mobile on Tue, 11 Nov 2008 09:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments

Filed under: Handsets, Nokia, ATT, GSM, EDGE, HSDPA, UMTS

Remember how AT&T ended up picking up the original E61 as the E62 — but somewhere along the way, the tweaked version lost two of the E61’s most important features, 3G and WiFi? Yeah, that sucked. The good news, though, is that since the E62’s release, AT&T’s really warmed up to WiFi and manufacturers have started to smile upon HSDPA 850 / 1900 en masse. Word on the street is that AT&T will be taking another shot at the whole S60 QWERTY thing, launching its own flavor of the E71 as the E72. Of course, you can get North American 3G in the plain ol’ E71 this time around, so what would a customized E72 have to offer? Feature Pack 2, allegedly, a line item sadly missing from the original’s spec sheet despite its release coming well after FP2 hit the streets. We’ve been hearing for ages that AT&T was eyeing this thing, so we take this as a great sign that the plans haven’t been abandoned — only question is, when’s it plan to go down?

Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments

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]

Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments