Fansite of Nokia professional training

Nokia loves churning out new 8800 series models by the truckload. Last time, it was the 8800 Sapphire Arte. That one sported a genuine sapphire gem and retailed for about $1600 bucks. And now, in an attempt to match the success of the Sapphire, we turn to the Nokia 8800 Carbon Arte.

First, the price: 1100 Euro, $1623 USD. And I thought that Nokia would try to break the bank on this one with a price over the 2G mark. Either way, the Carbon Arte is made up of carbon fiber, stainless steel, titanium, and polished glass for that futuristic spaceship look.

Like the previous Sapphire Arte, the Carbon arte comes with what Nokia calls “tap-for-time” - touching the steel surface below the display twice brings up the clock on the screen. Cool? Sure. Useful? Hell no. And then there’s the “turn-to-mute” feature, which allows the user to flip the phone over to silence incoming calls.

A 3.2 megapixel camera, OLED display, 3G rounds out the list of technical specs on this handset. Nokia reports that internal memory is now 4 whole gigabytes of storage, and it doesn’t seem like expandable memory will be on the horizon anytime soon.

Your $1600 will be well spent, however - if you include the “free stuff” that comes shipped with the phone. This of course means exclusive wallpapers and soundtracks, a touch-sensitive Bluetooth headset, a desk stand, and a leather carrying case. Nokia sure knows how to take care of its phone owners.

Not that it’s a surprise to anyone, but the Nokia 8800 Carbon Arte is expected to ship in the third quarter of 2008. Which….should be about now.

Openatownrisk.com, Nokia’s odd teaser site, is back and stranger than ever. If you’re bored, you can give the new 4-part puzzle a try, but most likely you’ll just want to see the outcome: the so-called “weirdest clip ever made.” Gizmodo has the video clip here.

Well, it’s certainly weird all right. The video makes absolutely zero sense, and I can’t for the life of me figure out just what Nokia is trying to promote here. Maybe Nokia should just resort to their standard flash countdown pages.

It’s been pretty quiet on the Nokia front, unless you count the unofficial N85 rumors. The latest news is the release of the Nokia 3610 Fold, a pretty simple low-end flip for the budget set. It’s like a cross between the Nokia 3555 and 6555 phones.

For starters, the 3610 Fold is a quad-band handset with a “sexy-back” fold design - meaning there’s a seamless transition from the front part of the flip to the back when the phone is fully open. The main display is a sort of roomy 2″ screen that supports up to 262k colors. There’s also an external squarish display that according to Nokia’s press release can show an analog clock, among other things.

The camera’s 1.3 megapixels, and has no flash. It does, however, have 6x digital zoom. Yippie.

Expect the Nokia 3610 Flip sometime in..wait for it…the third quarter of 2008. It’ll retail for 125 Euros ($186 USD) and it would not surprise me in the least to see this phone on Tmobile.

Nope, it’s not out yet, but the Nokia N96 MegaPhone has undergone a very pretty teardown at the FCC. Check the link for more of the gory details.

The N96 is still slated for a Q3 2008 release.

The FCC

After three days of no posts (come on guys, I’m lazy, but not THAT lazy), I present to you the newly redesigned Nokia Phone Blog. Unfortunately, it’s so new that the paint hasn’t quite dried yet, so expect glitches, bugs, and other anomalies crawling around the place.

If you came in from an outside link, you’ll notice that (most) older pages are still around.  Turns out Movable Type and Wordpress don’t exactly integrate too well together, so for the time being I’m running two different blog platforms at once. With some luck my redirects will be up and running sooner rather than later.

This isn’t the final look of the Nokia Phone Blog, but it’s pretty darn close. More updates to come later on this week!

Not much is known about the elusive N85, other than the fact that it looks like a scaled-down N81. Or is that scaled down N96?

Either way, Engadget was able to shed a little more light on the subject thanks to some new FCC documents. There’ll be two versions of the N85, one without 3G and the other with 900, 1900, and 2100 mhz bands. Except the 1900 band is one part of AT&T’s 3G network, so who knows where it’ll fit in.

The FCC page doesn’t reveal anything else of value, other than the SAR values: around 1.01-1.03 W/kg when used near the head and 0.65-0.79 W/kg when worn on the body.

So I put the Nokia 5310 XpressMusic through its paces for the past couple of weeks to really get a feel for this razor-thin, low-end T-mobile exclusive phone. Inside, everything you wanted to know and probably a lot more than you care to hear.

(I’m going to try something new with review pictures this time around: they’re uploaded onto Ovi, so you can view the slideshow or click on the slideshow to see the rest of the full resolution shots. Let’s see how this works out)

As usual, I must express my sincere thanks to the folks at WOMWorld for providing the trial device. And without further ado:

Up until this year, Nokia’s XpressMusic series was pretty lackluster. The original XpressMusic phones were low/mid-range handsets meant to be score with the younger crowd, but failed miserably because, let’s be honest - no one wants to be seen rockin’ out to something akin to a Fisher Price toy.

Nokia’s designers took the original look and threw it in the garbage, and eventually ended up with the 5310: a budget-priced handset that happens to be one of the slimmest phones around. Oh yeah, and it’s a pretty decent music player, too.

The Outside

The first thing you’ll notice about the 5310 XpressMusic is that it’s small. Really small. It’s official measurements are 4.09 by 1.76 by 0.39 inches (103.8 x 44.7 x 9.9 mm), and to give you some kind of perspective, here’s the dimensions of a couple popular Nokia phones:

Nokia N95: 3.9 x 2.09 x 0.83 inches (99 x 53 x 21 mm)
Nokia N81: 4.05 x 1.97 x 0.70 inches (102 x 50 x 17.9 mm)
Nokia 6010: 4.64 x 1.95 x 0.87 inches (119 x 50 x 23 mm)

If you’ve ever encountered an N81, the 5310 is about half as thick. And probably a quarter of the weight. It’s so light that you won’t even notice that you’re carrying it around.

The front houses the display, keypad buttons, and the dedicated music keys. Nothing too out of hte ordinary here - buttons are about average size (very similar to the N95), and are slightly raised. There’s a firm tactile response when pressing keys, and for the most part they should be fine - although there might be issues with absurdly large fingered people and the 5-way directional key.

I like the unobtrusive look of the dedicated music keys. They’re only very slightly raised and they blend in nicely with the red.

Other features of note on the outside: top-mounted 3.5mm audio jack, power button, and USB port (complete with flimsy port cover), left side charger port, right side volume controls, and rear 2 megapixel camera.

Build quality is what I’d call average. There’s no creaking going on and it isn’t hollow, but the feel is still rather…plasticky. Given its price point ($25-50 with contract), I can’t say I’m too surprised by this.

Not a whole lot to mention about the display. It’s a 2 inch 240×320 pixel TFT. It’s quite bad in direct sunlight. For all other purposes, it does its job.

Camera

The Nokia 5310 houses a no-frills 2 megapixel camera with basic functions. It’s not impressive. Colors are noticeably faded/washed out. See pictures below for more. And video, if you can believe it, is far, far worse. Youch!

I warned you!

Audio

Voice sound quality was typical Nokia, and that means very good in both directions. The loudspeaker, unfortunately, could be better - the maximum speaker volume is way too low, and using it in any kind of outside environment is pretty rough. Part of the reason for this is poor placement of the speaker - it’s situated on the back of the phone, so typically holding the phone in your hand will muffle the sound somewhat.

Even though it’s meant to be a music phone, the 5310 doesn’t come equipped with stereo speakers. That isn’t to say the onboard speaker isn’t good, because it’s actually rather decent. The addition of the 3.5mm audio jack is a nice touch, although the included headset is cumbersome and there’s just way too many wires to deal with.

The retail package also includes a 1 gigabyte microSD card, compliments of Nokia (and falling memory prices).

There’s also a lot of Panic! at the Disco-related paraphernalia preloaded on the phone. Okay, by a lot I mean one song (Nine in the Afternoon) and a couple videos. I cannot stress how bad the videos look on the phone. They are horrendous.

Battery Life

The 860 mAh lithium-ion is definitely one of the 5310’s stronger points. It’s rated for up to 5.5 hours of talk time, and I was able to get a good couple days usage out of it that included a mixture of phone calls, taking pictures, listening to music, and generally messing around with the phone.

User Interface

Finally, a word about the user interface. I like it. A lot. It’s faster and more responsive than previous UI’s, looks 100x better (now looks very similar to S60 counterparts) and the active standby is great. And going through menus while listening to music is actually a pleasant experience. Hurrah, S40 UI’s are no longer an embarassment!

Summary

The Good: small and thin, lightweight, cheap price, battery life, nice interface, overall good value for the money

The Bad: small and thin, horrible camera + video, no stereo anything

See All High Res Photos of the Nokia 5310 XpressMusic

Nokia N-Gage’s flagship puzzle game Reset Generation is now freely available for download or online play (requires Java Runtime Environment). Or, you can choose to drop a cool 10 euros on the mobile version.

As for the game itself, it’s, well…interesting. (see quote above) And extremely confusing at first. Think of it as a turn-based mixture of Tetris and Bomberman with a bunch of familiar, oldschool characters and some quirky rules.

All versions of the game come with an 18-level single player story mode and a 4-player online battle mode. The story mode also functions as the in-game tutorial and is more or less necessary to get you introduced to some finer points of the game.

Reset Generation Official Site

Nokia’s latest moneymaking addition to the Ovi service is Files on Ovi, a subscription-based service that charges a flat fee for hosting your pictures, videos, music, and pretty much everything else.

Here’s how it works: pay a monthly/yearly fee, and you’ll be given a certain amount of online storage space which you may fill to your heart’s content. You can optionally use your (Nokia) mobile phone to upload, download, and send files to other people.

No official word on pricing, but the 60-day,10 gigabyte storage trial period is currently in effect - meaning you can take the system out for a test drive.

Files on Ovi

After a series of losses in the past year or so, Motorola has been pretty much down for the count as of late. But surprises do happen, and this week’s surprise announcement was as follows:

Motorola actually made money. Okay, so $4 million dollars isn’t a whole lot of profit. But considering Wall Street analysts were expecting losses of over $30 mil, I’d say that’s quite the surprise. Unfortunately, the company’s still not out of the hole, and its cell phone business wasn’t exactly churning out hits in Q2 (actually, the division managed to lose $346 million).

Some of the highlights:

• 28.1 million cell phones shipped - well, more than last year (27 million shipped)
• Market share fell to 9.4%, putting it in third-place (LG is in fourth, wtih 9.1% share)
• Loss of $346 million for the quarter in handset division
• 50 new phone models to release by the end of the year - more smartphones with full keyboards coming
• Handset business will be spun off by Q3 2009