Sparky: Tech you hold -

Us guys love gadgets -

BusinessWeek: Sounding like a corporate PR wonk -Jack Ewing: Nokia Puts Your Digital Life in Your Hand

“The handset maker introduces phones designed to do everything your video camera, computer, and iPod do. And they're always nearby.

Marko Ahtisaari, Nokia's director of design strategy, sometimes begins the day by diving into a Finnish lake still partly covered in ice. He calls that a disruptive experience, and it's a metaphor for what Nokia (NOK) is trying to do in the consumer electronics business. On Apr. 25, Nokia introduced new versions of its N series handsets, which mark the company's latest encroachment onto turf now occupied by outfits such as Sony (SNE), Canon (CAJ), and Apple (AAPL).

If you are old fashioned enough to call these devices "phones," Nokia people will politely correct you. They are multimedia computers, which offer features and picture quality to rival digital cameras or camcorders, and music quality to challenge an iPod. And because they can connect to the Internet you can check e-mail, download songs, or even update your blog while on the go. (Thought the world already had enough blogs? Think again.)

The high-end N93 will hit stores in July and retail for $660. (Wireless service providers may offer deals to get that price down.) An upgrade of the existing N90, it moves Nokia further into camcorder territory. The new version can record 90 minutes of video and adds features such as the ability to connect directly to a TV for full-screen viewing. ...

Should anyone miss the point, Nokia's press extravaganza in a spiffed-up Berlin warehouse ended with a video in which the camera slowly panned across a tableau of dusty, discarded electronic equipment -- including digital cameras and a cobweb-covered iPod. ... ”

EnGadget counters: "We don't know much about what's going on here, but from our broken translation we can glean that there's another Nokia N-series device out there somewhere — perhaps the successor to the N92? — that appears to have a rather chubby 3 megapixel autofocusing 3x zoom camera, DVB-H functionality, and may also feature HSDPA / UMTS / EDGE, 802.11g, and Bluetooth 1.2. Anyone else seen this thing floating around?"


How this is different from the near Newton-y goodness of a Sony PDA phone would cause thought. At last. After all the leaked photos, Sony Ericsson really had no choice but to officially announce the P990 "well ahead of availability." This 3G (UMTS) smartphone has the same dimensions as the P910 but adopts the Symbian OS 9.1 and UIQ 3 software platform while throwing down with WiFi (802.11b), Bluetooth, a 2 megapixel camera with "photo light," video calling, FM radio, MP3 and MPEG-4 player, and keyboard (QWERTY, QWERTZ, AZERTY, or Russian) underneath the flip-down keypad. Web browsing is accomplished in landscape mode on the 2.8-inch QVGA screen using the new Opera 8 browser and is "prepared for all major push e-mail clients." The unit ships with 80MB free memory and a 64MB Memory Stick Pro DUO card in the box. The P990 will drop in Europe and Asia in Q1 2006. It will with a 4GB Memory Stick Pro DUO card.

Your Sparky went old school and has the P910i, when all said and done - it isn't as cheap or as versatile as Warren Ellis' Digital Box if you already have a phone. If not - go with the box, I'm trying to get ahold of a Windows PC so I can get this to play movies in portrait or landscape mode on my phone.

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Quickly and easily done - eh? - Sparks