Nokia has 40% of the worldwide mobile phone market, although most of their success has been outside the USA. That's too bad, because while Apple has captured the attention of American consumers, Nokia has been selling a far larger quantity of feature-packed phones everywhere else. I've been using one of them, the N95-3 for the past two weeks. While it's not the ultimate phone (no QWERTY keypad or touch screen) it does have a lot of capabilities that the iPhone and others lack. Some notable features:
- HSDPA - AT&T's 3G data network - 10x faster than the EDGE technology on the iPhone
- High quality camera with auto-focus and Carl Zeiss optics.
- GPS - the real thing, not some cell-tower imitation
- Multitasking - so programs can run in the background
- Video capture, video streaming, and video calls
- Laptop tethering
- Open platform
All of this is packed into a phone-sized form factor with a 240x320 color screen. (The iPhone is 480x320).
The processor is an ARM 1136 which at 320 Mhz is half the speed of the iPhone's ARM 1176JZF, but the N95 also has a TI DSP and a graphics accelerator. This architecture allows you to hold a high quality phone call while letting other programs run in the background. For instance you can browse the Web or use Fring to receive your Twitter messages. (The iPhone pretends to do multi-tasking by suggesting applications save their state when they suspend operation, but they aren't really running when you aren't using them.)
The camera is as good as many pocket cameras and infinitely better than most cell phones. The following images illustrate the differences among the Palm Treo, the N95 and a Canon ELPH. (Click on each image for a full-rez version).
Treo | N95 |
Canon |
The Treo will serve as an emergency camera in case space aliens land in your back yard, but you wouldn't bring it with you on as your only camera if you anticipated taking pictures. The N95, on the other hand, will service in all but the most demanding situations, e.g. available light candids.
The GPS is a pleasant surprise. It offers quite detailed maps which it downloads on the fly as needed. It is very fast as it can use the closest cell tower to help the GPS decide which satellites to track.
Perhaps the most promising aspect of the N95 is the complete openness of the platform. Unlike the iPhone, which was completely closed until recently and now promises to allow applications "approved" by Apple, the N95 offers an completely open environment. As a result, there are some really interesting applications, such as Fring which offers "over the top" VoIP, Qik, which provides live video streaming from the phone to the Web, and Seesmic which is like Twitter with video. While the Seesmic application is still in Alpha, if illustrates the promise of an open platform, allowing subscribers to record, upload, and view short video clips.
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