Nokia

Mobile makers agree on standard micro-USB charger for Europe

By Michael Mulcahy

01:18 June 30, 2009 PDT

Are your cupboards full of old phone chargers? They seem to accumulate with every new mobile, and are rarely useful again. Hoping to change this wasteful scenario, the European Union have proposed – and ten leading manufacturers agreed to – a new standard that will see micro-USB charging devices used for all data-enabled mobile phones. The hope is that, within three to four years, mobiles and chargers will be sold separately in Europe, and they’ll all be compatible. Read More

Recently on The Mobiler - Nokia E71 review

By Tim Hanlon

23:20 June 15, 2009 PDT

If you haven't checked out The Mobiler recently you might've missed Samsung's TouchWiz 2.0-powered Jet, the IRS planning to tax employees for their business phones, Nokia working on the ability to charge phones using ambient electromagnetic radiation, Samsung's inexpensive Crest Solar E1107 for emerging markets, and our review of the Nokia E71. Read More

Recently on The Mobiler

By Tim Hanlon

20:06 June 9, 2009 PDT

Recently on The Mobiler we've looked at the iPhone 3G S vs the Palm Pre, the Nokia N97 going on sale in the U.S., the MoGo Talk Bluetooth headset for the iPhone, AT&T's plan to offer tethering for iPhone OS 3.0, Qik coming pre-installed on the Nokia N97, a Wi-Fi hotspot for the Volkswagen Routan, a roundup of Opera Mobile 9.7 reviews, Postino for the iPhone turning pictures into postcards, the Fujitsu F-09A touchscreen, a security breach at T-Mobile, and Verizon's "COLT" portable cell site. Read More

Today on The Mobiler - The CrunchPad nears completion

By Tim Hanlon

05:00 June 4, 2009 PDT

Things aren't slowing down over at our mobile blog The Mobiler, with news of Mike Arrington's CrunchPad tablet nearing completion, a (French) review of a pre-production Nokia N97, cell phone use being linked to cubital tunnel syndrome, RIM patching a BlackBerry PDF vulnerability, INQ planning a Twitter phone, BenQ's latest 12-inch Joybook, Qualcomm's Snapdragon chipset getting bumped to 1.3GHz and the Sony W995a getting a price and release date. Read More

Recently on The Mobiler

By Tim Hanlon

01:23 May 25, 2009 PDT

Over at The Mobiler, we've recently looked at Lenovo's NVIDIA ION-based IdeaPad S12 netbook, Microsoft clarifying its Windows Marketplace app sharing policy, the Android Cupcake OS 1.5 being released for US T-Mobile G1s, leaked details of Nokia's N900 Maemo tablet, Virgin Mobile offering Wi-Fi on every flight, and AT&T's subsidized netbook program going US-wide this summer. Read More

This week at The Mobiler

By Tim Hanlon

01:17 May 15, 2009 PDT

This week on The Mobiler we've looked at iUnika's solar-powered UMPC, Novatel's MiFi 2200 personal hotspot coming to Sprint, AT&T and Apple crippling SlingPlayer Mobile for the iPhone, Peggle for the iPhone, the £24,495 solid platinum iPhone 3G, AirTran partnering with Aircell to offer Gogo Wi-Fi on every flight, the Samsung Alias 2 using E-Ink keys to solve dual-hinge usability issues, and the Nokia E71 arriving on Telstra Next G. Read More

WildCharge expands wireless charging compatibility with new Universal Adapter

By Noel McKeegan

23:00 April 8, 2009 PDT

Boosted by the buzz surrounding wire-free charging at CES earlier this year, solutions for powering up portable devices without the hassle of messy cords and multiple chargers are making the transition from curious concept to viable consumer product. One of the obvious problems with the early examples of this kind of technology was that each solution is tailored to a particular device, but now early mover WildCharge has released a Universal Adapter for Cell Phones which works with multiple devices across multiple brands. Read More

Nokia unveils N86 8-megapixel cameraphone with Carl Zeiss optics

By Dave Weinstein

05:01 February 19, 2009 PST

It looks like Nokia has pulled out all the stops in delivering a potentially paradigm shifting N86 cameraphone with a camera that they claim has SLR-like optics and is good enough to replace your current compact digital one. With 8GB of internal storage, and a lens system from Carl Zeiss, this device can capture still images at 8 megapixels, as well as 640x480 video 30 frames per second. The camera has a F2.4 aperture (so it's able to handle low light conditions) and includes a high intensity dual LED flash. Nokia is also using the internal GPS in the device to geo-tag all the photos. Read More

Nokia releases new E series messaging phones: the E55 and E75

By Dave Weinstein

18:15 February 16, 2009 PST

Nokia has announced two new E series messaging devices; the E55 and E75. Both devices feature 320x240 displays and Series 60 Symbian OS and build upon the excellent E71 device Nokia released last year. The E55 device has a"two letter per key" keyboard similar to the Bleackberry Pearl that it's targeted to compete with while the E75 includes a slide out QWERTY keyboard as well as an exterior 12 key keypad and is aims to be the successor of Nokia's iconic Communicator devices. Read More

Blind and illiterate users can outsource reading and translation with Kurzweil's kReader

By Loz Blain

00:57 January 29, 2009 PST

Ray Kurzweil is one of the most amazing intellectuals and inventors of our time. From his teenage years he's been building a long list of extraordinary achievements, from his early work teaching computers to compose music, to his world-first font-independent optical character recognition system, to his pioneering electric synthesizers that are so accurate that even musicians can't discern them from a real piano in listening tests. In 1976, blind music legend Stevie Wonder bought the first production model of the Kurzweil Reading Machine, a tabletop-sized device that was able to scan text documents and read them out using a text-to-speech engine. Last year, Kurzweil teamed up with Nokia to integrate the reading machine and its synthetic voice into the N82 mobile phone, letting blind or illiterate users read documents, menus, bills, and anything else they could capture on the phone's inbuilt camera. Now, Kurzweil has announced that the kReader phone can translate text it captures that's in another language and read it out to you in your language. It also has new text-tracking abilities to make it even easier to capture all the text on a page. Read More

Nokia flags high-priority on e-mail

By Noel McKeegan

17:15 December 3, 2008 PST

Nokia has announced a plan to offer email and IM on all Nokia devices through the use of their Mail on Ovi Platform. Users have the option of creating a new e-mail account with 1GB of storage on the Ovi service, or can connect to their existing Mail and IM accounts hosted by Yahoo, Google, Microsoft, AOL and others. Read More

Nokia Maps plans mobile assault on Google Maps

By Mike Hanlon

00:07 December 3, 2008 PST

December 3, 2008 Dave Weinstein reports Nokia has announced a major update to its Nokia Maps application for S60 smart phones, which not only updates their mobile mapping, but adds desktop support for trip planning and coordination through their new Maps on Ovi service. Read More

Nokia's 5800 XpressMusic Mobile Device

By Darren Quick

21:47 October 8, 2008 PDT

What looks like an iPhone, functions like an iPhone, but isn’t an iPhone? Nokia’s new 5800 XpressMusic, that’s what. Nokia would most likely balk at suggestions their new mobile offering is in response to Apple’s ubiquituos device, but comparisons are inevitable with the 5800 sporting similar looks courtesy of a large touch screen, similar looking interface and focus on music. The 5800 XpressMusic will be among the first devices to support "Comes With Music", a Nokia service which offers one year of unlimited access to the entire Nokia Music Store catalogue. Read More

Cinemizer video glasses offer quality portable viewing for Nokia N96

By Kyle Sherer

02:20 October 1, 2008 PDT

The 115-gram Carl Zeiss cinemizer video glasses simulate a one-meter wide movie screen at two meters distance, and when connected to the new Nokia N96 mobile phone there's an added bonus - the TV signal from the integrated DVB-H receiver is displayed on the video eyewear without loss of quality. Read More

The Nokia 8800 Carbon Arte

By Mike Hanlon

19:50 August 21, 2008 PDT

August 22, 2008 Further proof that innovation and compelling feel in a mobile handset do not require an Apple logo arrived from Nokia this week when it introduced the 8800 Carbon Arte, a new premium variant of the Nokia 8800 Arte range with materials such as carbon fibre, titanium, polished glass and stainless steel. Apart from evoking an intensely functional F1-like feel with its carbon fibre woven pattern, extreme light weight, seamless surfaces, and an almost sensual slide mechanism, the Carbon Arte has some elegant and useful functionality too. Frinstance, consumers can tap the steel surface below the display twice and a clock appears on the screen. The turn-to-mute silencing mechanism allows individuals to silence incoming calls in a discrete manner by turning the phone over, screen-side down. Read More

How green are you? PEIR system measures personal environmental impact

By Emily Clark

22:17 June 19, 2008 PDT

A key starting point to helping the environment is determining what impact we personally have on the planet. To assist in this challenge researchers at UCLA have developed a way to generate online Personal Environmental Impact Reports (PEIR) using location data from cell phones. Read More

Nokia's sleek new handset offerings

By Noel McKeegan

19:51 May 7, 2008 PDT

May 8, 2008 Nokia has unveiled three new mobile handsets - one folding and two sliding units - ahead of a planned release in the third quarter of 2008. With an emphasis on compact, minimalist design, the Nokia 6600 fold, the Nokia 6600 slide and the Nokia 3600 slide also boast some clever (if not completely ground-breaking) functionality aimed at making the phones easier to use. Putting the 6600 to "sleep" to reject incoming phone calls, for example, is achieved by tapping the cover of the twice and the same convenient process is used to "wake" the handset up again. The more distinctive charcoal and wine colored 3600 slide is also the first Nokia product to feature background noise cancellation. Read More

Shoot-to-Translate: killer mobile phone app for travelers

By Mike Hanlon

22:34 April 6, 2008 PDT

April 7, 2008 Nokia unveiled a plethora of mobile phone functionality concepts last October at The Way We Live Next briefing in Finland and tucked away behind the high profile apps was a simple shoot-to-translate function. Inveterate traveler Dave Weinstein dropped in at CTIA last week and reports that he focussed straight away on the cameraphone translator that can supposedly translate Chinese to English from a photo taken on the phone. “You can imagine how useful it would be for me, but it was just a technology demo. They wouldn't let me load the app on my phone or tell me any real info about it”, says Dave, who spends most of his time in Beijing these days. Read More

The Nokia Morph Concept Phone

By Mike Hanlon

19:07 February 27, 2008 PST

Nanotechnology looks set yield some seemingly magical functionality in the near future, and a recent concept product from Nokia puts most of the technologies that will be viable for handhelds within the next decade into one fascinating instrument. The Morph does just that, being flexible so that it can change shape from candy bar phone to bracelet. It’s also transparent, has self-cleaning surfaces, can sense and observe and even harvest energy from the local environment. The result of a partnership between Nokia and the University of Cambridge, the Morph went on display this week alongside the remarkable "Design and the Elastic Mind" exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York. Read More

K-NFB Reading Technology offers cell phone solution for the blind

By Emily Clark

21:52 January 28, 2008 PST

January 29, 2008 Access to cell-phones in today’s increasingly technological world is important for all people, not just those with 20/20 vision. The latest news in this sector comes from Kurzweil Technologies, which in a joint venture with the National Federation of the Blind in the US, has announced the pairing of its K-NFB Reading Technology software with the Nokia N82 mobile phone. Read More

Nokia 8600 joins high-end Platinum Collection

By Noel McKeegan

17:44 January 27, 2008 PST

January 28, 2008 Goldstriker International has added limited edition Nokia 8600 and Nokia 8800 handsets to its luxuriously finished Power of Platinum Collection which launched earlier this month. Read More

Much more than just photographs: the future of mobile phone camera applications

By Noel McKeegan

21:15 December 30, 2007 PST

December 31, 2007 Nokia's vision for mobile phone camera applications of the future include one-step access to online information on your surroundings and the ability to translate written characters in any language simply by snapping a photograph. Read More

Nokia to add Creebi virtual pets to n-gauge

By Darren Quick

23:07 December 16, 2007 PST

December 17, 2007 It seems that virtual pets such as Tamagotchi and their electronic brethren are a fad that just won’t go away. Now Nokia has announced that the Creebies virtual pet-care game will be available through the N-Gage mobile games service, giving each player their own 3D Creebi to care for, entertain, feed and even breed. Read More

User-generated content: the entertainment news of the future?

By Emily Clark

18:50 December 3, 2007 PST

December 4, 2007 According to a prediction from

Nokia, up to 25% of the entertainment consumed by people in five years time will have been created, edited and shared within their peer circle rather than coming out of traditional media groups. This user-generated content phenomenon has been dubbed “Circular Entertainment” and could be the future of news information delivery. Read More

Mobile phone sales continue to soar

By Emily Clark

22:22 November 29, 2007 PST

November 30, 2007 According to new research from Gartner, sales of mobile phones in the third quarter of this year reached 289 million worldwide. Sales for the full year are expected to hit around 1.134 billion handsets sales to end users, a marked increase on last year. Read More