Nokia N9/ Review

Nokia N9

Price: $650+ (no contract)

Love at first sight -- this is possibly the most beautiful phone ever made.  N9 is in a class of its own in terms of design. It manages to be elegant by virtue of its minimalism yet remains unmistakably Nokia. The impeccable proportions belie the handset's 12.1mm (0.48-inch) thickness thanks to tapered ends reminiscent of its more ornate predecessor, the N8.
It all starts with a colored-through polycarbonate monolith, which is machined (not cast) to form the N9's unibody. The finish looks matte and feels similar to anodized aluminum, but is significantly more durable. Our review unit came in black but cyan and magenta versions are also available. The back is slightly convex and features an oval chrome-finished (and scratch-prone) pod that's flush with the body and houses the slightly recessed eight megapixel autofocus camera. A dual-LED flash is offset to the left of the lens. The front is almost all screen with no buttons, and just a tiny slit for the earpiece on top. Curved Gorilla glass flows into the bezel like liquid spilling onto a flat surface. The 3.9-inch FWVGA (854x480) ClearBlack AMOLED display is phenomenal, rivaling Samsung's Super AMOLED -- text and graphics just appear to float on the panel, further refining the experience.

You'll find a silver Nokia logo along with proximity and ambient light sensors at the top edge of the screen, and a charge indicator LED and front-facing camera at opposite ends of the bottom portion of the glass. The sides of the handset are rounded, and the right edge incorporates both a chrome volume rocker and a power / lock key. A speaker and microphone are located along the bottom, and the top side hosts a silver-rimmed 3.5mm headphone jack plus a precisely machined door protecting the micro-USB connector and flanked by the micro SIM tray. The battery is sealed and there is no microSD card slot, but the N9 comes with either 16GB or 64GB of built-in flash storage. Fit and finish are top-notch, and the 135g (4.76oz) device feels solid and comfortable in hand, with almost the exact same footprint as the familiar iPhone 4.

Peek inside, and you'll be catapulted a year back to the glory days of TI's OMAP 3630 SoC (popularized by Motorola's once mighty Droid X), which combines a single-core 1GHz Cortex A8 CPU with a PowerVR SGX530 GPU. In the N9, this chipset is paired with 1GB of RAM, making it Nokia's highest specced phone to date, and promising to offer plenty of muscle without obliterating battery life, at least on paper (more on this later). Digging further, you'll find Nokia's signature pentaband UMTS / HSPA (14.4Mbps) 3G radio, a quadband GSM / EDGE 2G radio for legacy networks, NFC and the usual suspects -- WiFi a/b/g/n, Bluetooth 2.1 + EDR, GPS / AGPS. Strangely, there's no FM receiver or transmitter on the menu, unlike many of Espoo's past offerings. The N9 also features a full array of sensors, including ambient light, proximity, orientation (accelerometer) and compass (magnetometer).
The N9 takes wonderful pictures. Color balance and exposure are spot-on, and shots always contain a huge amount of detail, thanks in great part to the superior . Its powered by Eight megapixel sensor, Carl Zeiss F2.2 wide-angle autofocus lens, dual-LED flash and 720p HD video recording .
Wrap-up
The N9 delivers a double punch with gorgeous hardware and brilliant software. It's arguably the first competitive flagship phone to come out of Espoo since the launch of the original iPhone. This is the handset that puts any lingering doubts about Nokia's engineering chops to rest.  It's difficult to recommend a platform with no future, but the N9 is everything Nokia's long time fans have been waiting for, and you could have it today.

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Nokia Debuts Their First Windows Phones

It’s nice and early in London, and Nokia CEO Stephen Elop has finally put to rest months of speculation by unveiling Nokia’s first batch of Windows Phones at the Nokia World conference. It’s been a long time coming — news of a Nokia/Microsoft partnership first broke back in February — but Nokia has at long last debuted the Lumia 800 and the Lumia 710.
Lumia 800
It’s been hinted at for months now, but the handset formerly known as the Searay has finally been revealed as the Lumia 800. Stephen Elop has called it the “first real Windows Phone” — quite a lofty claim, but does the hardware live up to it?

The 800 sports a curved 3.7-inch WVGA ClearBlack AMOLED display, a single-core 1.4GHz processor, and 512MB of RAM. Mobile photographers will find much to like about the 8-megapixel camera with a f/2.2 Carl Zeiss lens, and the 16GB of onboard storage should hold quite a few cat pictures. The specs won’t exactly set anyone’s world on fire, but the design might: like the N9 before it, the Lumia 800 features a stunning unibody design that’s shaped out of a slab of durable polycarbonate material.

The style-conscious among you will also be glad to know that the Lumia 800 comes in three colors: black, cyan, and magenta. Surprisingly, the Lumia 800 is already on its way to France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain and the UK in time for a November launch. Customers in Hong Kong, India, Russia, Singapore and Taiwan will be able to nab one by the end of the year, but domestic Windows Phones fans will have to wait until early 2012.
Lumia 710
The 710 (formerly known as the Sabre) is the chunkier of the two, but that doesn’t mean it’s a slouch when it comes to hardware. It repackages the same 1.4GHz processor as seen in the Lumia 800, and pairs it with a 3.7-inch WVGA screen, and a 5-megapixel rear camera. It’s meant to be Nokia and Microsoft’s effort to capture a more budget-conscious audience, and it’s heartening to see Nokia give it the same performance potential as their more premium offering.

Though the 710 only sports 8GB of internal storage, it beats out its brother by including a microSD card slot that can accept up to 16GB of additional flash storage. It also bears the distinction of being one of the few Windows Phone with physical navigation keys, which is sure to please fans of tactile feedback.

Expect to see it hit shelves in both stealth black and crisp white, with multiple colored backplates to please the chromatically indecisive. It looks like the Lumia 710 will be headed first to Hong Kong, India, Russia, Singapore and Taiwan, alongside its more expensive brother.

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Nokia N900/Review

Price: $649 (preorder)
Official Site: Maemo.Nokia.com
Specs: 6.34 oz; 2.35” x 4.37” x 0.71”; Wi-Fi, HSPA; 800x480; 600MHz processor; 1GB RAM; 32GB-48GB internal memory
Company: Nokia

What do you get when you combine two of the hottest electronic trends like mini netbooks and touchscreen smartphones? The answer would be Nokia’s new N900 phone and its custom-made operating system, Maemo. Designed as a loose follow-up to Nokia’s N97, the Nokia N900 has a bit of an identity crisis between a smartphone with a desktop OS, or a portable computer with telephone capabilities. Either way, this search for identity has created an excellent entry in what could easily be a new cell phone subgenre. Although the price is still shrouded in mystery, this drool-worthy gadget will start to roll out on North American shelves for T-Mobile beginning this fall.
With its 3.5-inch touchscreen and slide-out QWERTY keyboard, the Nokia N900 appears to have a lot in common with several other of the latest smartphones to be released. However, as you start to unravel the bulk of the details and specifications for this gadget, more and more unique features move to the forefront.

As opposed to a typical 360 x 640 resolution cell phone screen, the Nokia N900 rocks a significantly higher 800 x 480, giving you a picture more akin to your laptop rather than your phone. In order to effectively run this advanced mobile device, Nokia has had to do away with the standard Navi-Key format, and replaced it with a new robust operating system called Maemo 5.
Features such as a live dashboard that allows open tasks and messages to be viewed simultaneously really give the Nokia N900 a huge leg up in functionality over other smartphones. The Maemo 5 system also supports the Firefox 3 web browser and instant-on software updates for your N900.

While the Nokia N900 undoubtedly has a weight problem for a smartphone, the added heft is a necessary evil in order to handle the impressive feature list. In addition to the WVGA touch-resistive screen and full QWERTY keyboard, there is also a built-in stand that can flip down from the back of the phone and is perfect for when you want to watch a video clip or movie in high resolution from your desk.
The digital camera on the Nokia N900 is also anything but an add-on, thanks to its highly technical Carl Zeiss optics, 5 megapixels and dual LED flash. It was also a great move on Nokia’s part to put a slide-out lens cover over such a rich camera, so the usual pants pocket dust, lint and fingerprints are not a worry on the Nokia N900.
One of the areas that Nokia is going to really have to work on is with downloadable applications. Thanks to the iPhone, app support is a huge key to phone success now, and the N900 does not ignore this. There will be at least a dozen applications ready at launch for the N900, ranging from games to Twitter programs, and the hope is that this software library will continue to grow exponentially in the near future.

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Special Gadgets/Nokia Booklet 3G

While Nokia might not be the first name you'd think of when shopping for a new netbook, the company is looking to change that with the Nokia Booklet 3G ($TBA). Running what looks like Windows 7, the Booklet offers solid specs, including an Intel Atom processor, a 10-inch HD display, integrated A-GPS, 3G/HSPA, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth, a built-in SD card reader, HDMI output, webcam, an impressive 12-hour battery, and stylish aluminum chassis.

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Luxury Gadgets/Nokia Oro – 18 Carat Gold Plated Smartphone

The most striking thing about the Nokia Oro is that it is plated in 18-carat gold, studded with a sapphire crystal home key, and lined with leather. Of course it’s a phone, smartphone. In fact it’s your good old C7 in the inside, but it has been beautified to make it the classy Oro.

The phone works on Symbian-based software and also has the most recent Symbian Anna update. The Oro enables users to enjoy HSDPA 3G and Wi-Fi support. The device comes with a 3.5-inch AMOLED display, pentaband radio connectivity and an 8-megapixel camera with 720p video recording to provide an excellent viewing experience.

This luxury smartphone is expected in the beginning of next quarter, but that is only in selected countries across Middle East, Europe and Russia. The Nokia Oro must be particularly eying Russia as the place is known as a successful market for such premium collections. The price is said to be upwards of €800 ($1,126), excluding taxes.

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