- Saturday, 21 November 2009
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When your work speaks for itself, don't interrupt - Garson Kanin
Nokia unveils a threesome at CES
WHAT IS CES without new phones from Nokia? If you were waiting for a big bang though, there wasn't one, just three new low- to mid-range phones, two worth mentioning, and an accessory.
The low-end phones were really low end, and the 7510 is the only one worth bothering with.
Nokia 7510 phone
It is a T-Mobile aligned flip phone with two nice little features. The first is a button on the side of the hinge that pops the spring loaded phone open. No need to fumble for a clasp, just click, sproing. If you are slightly inebriated, it is click, sproing, hey, whoops, damn, (drop) crack. Inbuilt obsolescence.
If you look closely at the red phone, you will see a black rectangle outline in the case. It is invisible in anything but bright light, so the case just looks like a solid colour. The black bit is an OLED screen, so you get ghostly text floating on the surface of your phone, it looks really slick. Since it comes with three skins standard, you can get ghostly text in many colours.
Nokia E63, the E71 lite
Moving quite a bit upscale we get to the E63, the little brother to the E71 that corporate warriors know and love. It is a bit thicker, a bit clunkier, and a little less everything than the E71, but still better than most smartphones. It also lacks GPS and only has a 2.0MP camera, but is otherwise an E71, and only costs $299 unsubsidized. For a Symbian phone with a keyboard, that is a great deal, we can see this doing very well.
BH-904 which, sadly, shoots nothing
Last up we have an accessory, the BH-904 bluetooth headset. Most headsets are rather stuck in a rut with two or three form factors that everyone seems to clone without any thought to why they are doing it. Nothing new until we ran into the BH-904.
The mini-howitzer barrel is the mic, and it retracts, something we haven't seen before in a headset. Based on my little time with it, the unit seemed very sturdy even if the boom looks a little fragile. Given the indestructibleness of my last two Nokia phones (N95 and 6820 FWIW), we wouldn't worry too much about this one breaking. No MSRP yet though. µ
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For those of you drooling over Nokia's sleek looking benign smart phones that precariously uses Symbian OS, I have a suggestion for you: go to your local hardware store and purchase a steel handle claw hammer since it is very likely to come in handy because it would be more gratifying to watch the device adhere to mechanical physics than to return it after being disappointed in realizing that it doesn’t keep the duration of each of your scrupulously billed phone calls. The icons and menus are collectively an abysmal maze of serendipity. I could fill a kilometer-long scroll with shortcomings if I had to. I own an E71 and the only pros about the phone are the battery life and its size; it’s the epitome of a dumb phone being dubbed as smart.
I'm not sure why Nokia, who makes excellent low end or mainstream phones, continues to release devices intended to be smart with such horrendous usability. I’ve written off all Nokia’s smartphones – am I the only one who was waiting impatiently for a new user interface to end this longing regret of a financial investment?
I don’t see these devices leading to any viable market share increase for Nokia. At least Palm, given their dire situation which tends to bring out creativity in earthlings, had an epiphany and awoke with an OS that looks promising although time will be the only wager. I think it’s the moment for someone or something to defibrillate Nokia.
Go and buy e.g. Motorola then if you think its any better. Oh, they are just cutting 4000 jobs. Perhaps people didn't like their phones after all...