Hasta La Gadget!

We knew something was up with these Bluetooth heart rate straps from Polar, and sure enough, Nokia has announced a partnership to get serious fitness monitoring integrated with its products. The first to take advantage will be a special version of the N79, creatively dubbed the N79 Active, which will include 4GB of onboard memory the requisite strap right in the box and sell for about €375 ($494) when it ships “soon” in “select territories.” Of course, the new hardware isn’t any good without new software, and it just so happens that the N79 Active will include a new version of Nokia’s Sports Tracker app for keeping tabs on workouts. We’d heard that other Polar accessories like cadence sensors for biking fanatics were in the works, so this could end up developing into a whole franchise.

[Via All About Symbian]

Filed under: Cellphones, Handhelds

Nokia N79 Active to come with heart rate monitor, guilt originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 14 Jan 2009 13:23:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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You might remember (emphasis on “might”) that Nokia was rumored to have a 5700 XpressMusic upgrade in the works a few months back — 3.2 megapixel autofocus cam, larger microSD expansion limit, and that’s about it. Believable if not intensely boring, right? Well, a 5710 just showed up on Nokia’s US site that looks an awful lot like a black 5700, and let’s be real: 5710 sounds like the right model number for an ultra-mild 5700 upgrade. No official announcement yet, but yeah, we could totally see this showing up on T-Mobile at some point this year.

Filed under: Cellphones, Handhelds

Nokia 5710 XpressMusic leaked by none other than Nokia itself originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 08 Jan 2009 23:47:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Well, that certainly was a quick little experiment, wasn’t it? Just months after quietly becoming available, Nokia has just as quietly slapped an “end of life” label on the N810 WiMAX Edition, officially ending Nokia’s consumer-level support for the wireless standard — for the time being, anyhow. Though we’ve been able to confirm that the discontinuation is official, no word was given as to why it fell off the market so quickly — Nokia inststs that it was a “natural” end of life — but if we had to take a stab at it, we’d guess the Baltimore-only availability had something to do with it.

[Via MobileBurn]

Filed under: Cellphones

Nokia N810 WiMAX reaches ‘end of life’ originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 07 Jan 2009 17:46:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Here’s an odd one for you. Tobias Engel of the Chaos Communication Congress has discovered a rather nasty exploit that’ll cause any Nokia S60 devices running versions 2.6, 2.8, 3.0 or 3.1 to stop receiving SMS and MMS messages. The “Curse of Silence,” which has been independently verified by F-Secure, is triggered by sending an SMS that begins with an email address that’s at least 32 characters long. The attacker must also change the protocol identifier to internet electronic mail before sending. Devices with versions 2.8 and 3.1 lock up after 11 such messages and still have some limited receiving capabilities, while 2.6 and 3.0 devices will go completely mum after just one attack. In both cases a factory reset is required to fix it, and he says there is no other known workaround for the user. We don’t imagine this being a pervasive issue, but if you’ve got any tech-savvy enemies or malevolent pranksters in your life, you’ve been warned. Video demonstration is after the break, or hit up the read link to see if your device is among those listed at risk.

[Via Hack a Day]

Read – Vulnerability Advisory
Read – F-Secure Verification

Continue reading ‘Curse of Silence’ exploit squelches inbound SMS/MMS to Nokia S60 devices

Filed under: Cellphones

‘Curse of Silence’ exploit squelches inbound SMS/MMS to Nokia S60 devices originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 31 Dec 2008 09:39:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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The same wild and wacky Russians that demolished a Motorola ZN5 are showing the same courtesy to Nokia’s 5800 XpressMusic. The so-called Crash Test involves putting Nokia’s first Comes With Music-enabled handset through a litany of horrible scenes, including a stay in the local freezer, a fall from grace, a ride in the washing machine, a dip in a freshly brewed beer and, of course, a crushing blow from a vehicle. The preview video is hosted up in the read link, and the full results of how it fared are promised in the near future. Let’s just say we’re betting the farm it doesn’t handle unlimited downloads, calls nor texts very well (read: at all) after this hellish experience.

[Thanks, Adam]

Filed under: Cellphones

Nokia’s 5800 XpressMusic gets torture tested, succumbs to the pain originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 27 Dec 2008 10:25:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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