New Nokia N97 announced!

Earlier today, at Nokia World 2008 in Barcelona, a new addition to the Nseries family was announced. The Nokia N97, a 3.5 inch touch screen, full qwerty device, is the latest smartphone from the Finnish manufacturer and, after a long line of mediocricies, a good one. Sure it has only a 5 megapixel camera, but the other specs are pretty nice and together add up to form the best Nokia to date.

Press photos can be found here:

http://www.nokia.com/A4630648?category=n97#

The N86 - Nokia's first 8 megapixel phone

At the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Nokia announced its first 8 megapixel monster (more like a critter actually): the N86.



The only words that come to my mind after seeing the Samsung i8910 are "too little, too late". But let's not get too incisive. This is a step forward for Nokia. A small one, but at least it's in the right direction. The N86 comes with improvements in a few areas (very fast CPU, 8MP camera, Flash Lite 3.1, a good battery and a load of Java APIs) and one obvious downgrade: the 2.6" screen.

All in all it's very good that Nokia have finally decided to step into the 8MP arena. I'm sure we will see a true flagship device from them again, in time.

More photos of the N86 can be found here.

Should owners of E71 upgrade to E75

Nokia came out with a great phone with E71. It was a great improvement from its predecessors like E61. However, as is the case with good products the expectations of users were very high with the newer versions of the E series phones.

Nokia launched E75 recently and everyone thought it would be a great improvement but from the reviews it seems it is taking a hit. Techtree which is gadget review website in India has trashed the new E75. Read all about it here.

However, I’m a little surprised because what improvements could have been made to E71 apart from a few aesthetics. Maybe the camera could have been improved and a little bit of multimedia improvement but that would have cut into the functionality of the other applications because of the limitations of available memory (I mean RAM on the phone). A lot of times I have a tough time to get the phone moving specially when I’m using 3-6 applications at the same time.

I agree that Nokia could have delivered a better phone with E75 but I do not feel that they have completely failed. Also it seems from the reviews that there is no need to upgrade from a E71 to E75 but those who are thinking about buying a new E71 might want to take a look at E75 as an alternate phone – of course they would have to shell out some extra money!

Nokia E72 the Nokia E71 successor begins Shipping

According to the Mobile Guerilla the Nokia E72 has started shipping. To quote the website

The Nokia E72 business and personal messaging Smartphone is now available in retail stores. Nokia also gave out a research study revealing that more people use email when sending critical information than the traditional phone calls or text messaging.

The phone is going to be selling at about 350 Euros.

Some of the features of the phone are

• 600Mhz processor,
• 2.36-inch QVGA display,
• 5.0 megapixel camera with autofocus and flash,
• 3.5mm audio jack,
• 250MB of internal memory and
• 4GB microSD card included with support for up to 16GB.

Beware of Chinese imitations of Nokia E71 phones

I came across a Chinese Phone manufacturers website which was selling Nokia E71 phones amongst other popular phones.

The Nokia E71 phone being sold is very similar to the original Nokia E71. I must say that the imitation looks very good at least in the pictures. Since I have never seen a imitation live I do not know if it feels like a original Nokia E71. However if you look closely and read the description there are some features which the original Nokia e71 does not have which is ironic as far as owners of original Nokia E71.

My Nokia E71 died on me

My Nokia E71 died on me today.

I had this auto restart problem for some days with my Nokia E71. When I used to received a call and while the phone was ringing and before I could pickup the phone the phone would shutdown and restart again. This was not happening with all the calls but I would say it happened to 50% of the calls. It was annoying for me and for people who were trying to calling me.

I concluded that there must be a problem with one of the apps I had installed on the Nokia E71. Therefore I deleted some of the suspicious apps. But no luck the problem continued. Then I decided that I would reformat the Nokia E71 and also update the firmware.

This morning I went for a walk and usually I listen to podcasts while walking. I listened to the latest episode of “No Agenda” (I would recommend this podcast to everyone as a lot of conspiracy theories about all the news). I had charged the phone last night and I was able to listen to the whole podcast (about 90 minutes). In the morning I also made some calls and received calls on my Nokia E71.

I went to the office and realized that my phone had shut down. I thought the battery might have drained and plugged the Nokia E71 to the charger and lo behold the phone restarted! Then I got a call and I answered the phone while plugged into the charger (I know you should not do that but….). After the call the phone died. I plugged the charger again but the Nokia E71 refused to start.

I thought the charger had gone bad and bought a new Nokia charger and plugged the phone to the charger. Again nothing happened. When I press the start button at the top of the phone the backlights do come on but the Nokia E71 does not boot up.

My phone is about 18 months old. I wanted to know

• if any of you have had similar problems (phone restarts while receiving a call)
• when the battery had lived its recharge cycles do the backlights switch on?
• If you have had to replace the battery how long (or charging cycles) did the battery last?

I will keep you posted on the developments.

Once the phone starts working I will hopefully start to post more on the E71 blog.