Palm’s webOS certainly faces strong competition as it vies for attention from manufacturers, carriers, developers and consumers. But Palm was able to knock out at least one ailing offering by making webOS the replacement for the old Palm OS. For others it may not be so easy. In fact, with the barriers to entry now so high and the commitment to existing operating systems so great, webOS may be the last major smartphone operating system launched for the foreseeable future.
With webOS taking the baton from Palm OS, the number of major smartphone operating systems has stayed fixed at six. Three of them — Symbian S60, Windows Mobile and Android — are intended to be used by handset makers from multiple manufacturers, whereas iPhone OS, BlackBerry OS and webOS are used only on the handsets offered by their developer. Of course, even these “purebred” operating systems owe much to older platform technologies, with Android and webOS being built atop a Linux kernel, iPhone OS having its distant roots in FreeBSD, and BlackBerry and Android building on Java. The race to attract software to these platforms has ignited an arms race of development funds to both prime the supply pump and the promotion of app stores to lead the horses to he touch-sensitive virtual koi ponds..
Developing and maintaining a smartphone operating system is a serious and expensive undertaking that can consume a company. Producing the original iPhone caused Apple to miss the self-imposed ship date of Leopard, and third-party app support did not come until much later. Whatever Microsoft is planning in a major overhaul for Windows Mobile 7 has taken long enough to warrant the release of the interim 6.5 release that still leaves the company far behind the state of the art. WebOS development clearly took up a significant portion of the $425 million investment from Elevation Partners in Palm. And finishing a 1.0 release is just the beginning.
We’ve known about Nokia’s so-called Surge for months now, but at long last, AT&T has done its duty by making things official and giving us a price and release date to consider. The Symbian S60-based smartphone is aimed squarely at social media freaks, boasting a full QWERTY keyboard, a browser with Flash support (imagine that, right?), a pre-installed JuiceCaster app for easily updating your Facebook / Twitter status and a price tag that’s sure to turn heads. For just $79.99 after rebate, you’ll also get a 2 megapixel camera, AT&T Navigator, AT&T Video Share and the pleasure of handing over at least $30 per month for a required data plan (if you want the $50 rebate, anyway). If you’re sold already, you can get yours on July 19th.
The N97 is Nokia’s attempt to stand tall in an unfamiliar, hostile world populated by the iPhone, Pre and Android the only way it knows how: by throwing the kitchen sink at them. If this is it, they’re doomed.
Okay, maybe you don’t think that’s true, the doomed part: Nokia is the number one cellphone maker in the world—they sold 468 million phones last year and still own 41.2 percent of the smartphone market. But in the context of Symbian’s sliding marketshare—Symbian was on 56.9 percent of smartphones at the beginning of 2008, now it’s on 49.3 percent, while the iPhone has doubled its marketshare to 10.8 percent and RIM’s grown to 19.9 percent—the N97 indeed spells a certain kind of doom for Nokia, if it’s the best the number one cellphone marker in the world can really do.
Hardware Let’s start with the most decent part, the hardware. The form factor is great, actually, for a QWERTY slider, because it still feels like a phone. It’s a little narrower than the iPhone 3GS and the exact same thickness as the G1—not svelte, and it still fits in skinny jeans just fine. The snappy “thwack” it makes when you slide the screen upward to the reveal the keyboard is the single most satisfying thing about this phone. It’s loud. But it’s reassuring. It feels powerful and sturdy and smooth, like it’ll last a hundred years.
The tilt angle the screen thrusts out at isn’t adjustable, which is unfortunate, since it’s slightly off from where I’d prefer. For instance, you have to hold the keyboard flat when you’re typing to look at the screen dead-on—if you tend to tilt your phone toward you as you type (like I do), the screen is going to face your crotch and you won’t be able to see anything.
The keyboard waiting underneath the screen is a mixed bag. The slightly rubbery texture of the keys is perfect, and while I found I had no problems with the layout, some people might loathe the fact the space key is shoved all the way to the right. The real problem is that the keys have an ultrashort travel distance, so there’s virtually no tactile feedback when you’re typing—less than the G1, which wasn’t exactly rocking faces with its keyboard, either. Put another way, it doesn’t pass the driving test—I couldn’t bang out a text message while driving to save my life. (Good thing I didn’t wreck.) Not only does the d-pad suffer from the same defect, the ring with the directional buttons is too narrow, so you’ll likely push the center button a whole lot when you don’t mean to. I wound up avoiding it altogether, since I’ve got a touchscreen after all.
What actually surprised me most about the 640×360 screen was how much it totally didn’t blow me away. Let’s get the fact that it was a resistive touchscreen out of the way. The N97’s touch responsiveness was about as good as resistive screens get, but even at best, that’s minor league stuff compared to a capactive touchscreen—the touch hardware that makes the Palm Pre, iPhone, BlackBerry Storm, G1 and myTouch 3G awesome to poke and flick. In terms of visual quality, I simply never had a “wow” moment, like the first time you peep the brilliant screen on the Palm Pre. It’s acceptable bordering on good, though—watching YouTube videos on its Flash Lite-enabled browser was a solid experience, for sure.
The most disappointing aspect of the hardware is the pokey 424MHz processor that attempts to run this thing—the one spec that’s notably not emblazoned on the back of the N97, because it’d be a badge of goddamn shame. It still baffles me that Nokia sent their all-singing, all-dancing, all-Qiking flagship phone out into the world with this anemic slice of silicon. Running just a couple of basic apps at once—say, Facebook or Gravity and Music—I had more hangups with this thing than a telemarketer on meth. HTC’s been using 528MHz processors for what feels like an eternity, so what the hell?
As for the camera, well to start, there are two cameras. A 5-megapixel shooter on the back protected by sliding cover, and front-facing camera for video conferencing. It also shoots 640×480 video at 30 frames per second. As you can see, the still images are good, not great—despite the size they’re still washed out enough that they have the definite feel of “cameraphone” all over them, even in broad daylight. The LED flash is surprisingly strong, though you’re not going to light up a whole room with it, obviously. The secondary camera is pretty laughable in terms of quality, but that’s okay. And then the video quality is passable for a phone, though far from startling clarity, both the clips stored locally and the ones I uploaded to Qik using the built-in app.
My favorite hardware feature is the built-in two-way FM transmitter, so you can pick up radio stations or beam your music library out to your car’s FM radio, no Belkin dongle required. Performance was just about as good as a separate FM transmitter dongle, too. (Passable, but it’s never going to be awesome.)
Hurray for hardware standards, though. It charges over the same microUSB port that plugs into your computer, not the little tiny peehole that’s been Nokia standard for a million years. A standard 3.5 mm headphone jack is dead center on top, and it’s got stereo Bluetooth. And let’s not forget that 32GB of internal storage, which can be expanded by microSDHC cards for up to 48GB of total storage.
Overall, as much there is wrong internally, there’s a lot to like in the hardware—it’d be total win with a faster processor and more brilliant screen, since the battery seems more than up to the task.
Software I don’t even know where to start the hate parade I want to unleash on S60 5th edition. Nokia’s managed to make RIM’s BlackBerry Storm OS retrofit look like a work of art. And when legacy (sorry, mature) software runs into a crappy half-assed UI, it’s a steaming pile of suck on a slab of garbage toast. All I could think about was how badly I wanted to shove Android onto it. Since I have nothing nice to say, let’s keep this part short.
Nokia’s instinct to widgetize the homescreen, giving you access to messaging, maps, the browser, Facebook or whatever else you want is a good one, and one of the few non-terrible things about the user interface. But even its visual feel is dated and worn, like someone dragged 2003 into the present tied to the back of a battered and rusted pickup truck. Yuck visual elements abound—in landscape mode, there’s a fairly persistent right-side dock of buttons, that steal screen real estate for no discernible reason at times. And inconsistency seems to be the rule. Some stuff you double tap to activate, other stuff you single tap. There’s a list in the manual detailing which is which—I forget. There’s no flick scrolling, except for when there is, like in the Ovi Store.
The phone’s built-in apps are solid, mostly, with the exception of the default email program (download Nokia Messaging 1.1 from Nokia to get an actually competent program).
The WebKit browser mostly kept pace with the iPhone’s over Wi-Fi. The interface isn’t as easy to use, like to zoom, but hey, it does Flash Lite, so suck on that everybody. The browser’s back button serves up thumbnails of previously visited websites you can zip through, a desperately needed touch of form and function on this phone.
Nokia Maps, if you want more than the basics—namely pedestrian or voice-guided navigation—you get a three-month trial before you have to pay up for a subscription. That said, it’s feature rich, with a compass, multiple map modes like 3D, traffic info and points of interest, though not as easy to use to pick and use as Google Maps on other platforms. (I handed it and an iPhone off to a friend in my car while navigating deep into the wastelands of Alabama, and Google Maps proved much easier for them to deal with, despite their intense dislike for all things Apple.)
It’s pre-crammed with a buttload of mostly excellent third party apps as well: Qik, RealPlayer, YouTube, JoikuSpot Premium, Accuweather, Facebook (a really impressive though appropriately S60 version) and Spore, to name just a handful. Qik in particular is fantastic—I set up an account and was livestreaming video within a minute of popping open the app.
That’s fortunate, because the Ovi Store manages to have the worst mobile app store interface I’ve seen yet. Just try to use that header/scrollbar thing on top to move between categories. And it’s “stuff,” not apps, since Nokia hawks a melange of goods at Ovi, from wallpapers to ringtones to apps, often jumbling them all on a single page. Speaking of Ovi, the desktop suite, also named Ovi, didn’t fall far from the Ovi tree—it’s a natural disaster that’s not a single app for managing your phone, but a handful of distinct apps that intersect in the actual “suite” launcher application. Imagine iTunes, then its remarkably confusing total opposite, ontologically speaking. (And I’m not even getting into the Ovi online services, which are distinct from Nokia’s other offerings, so I wound up creating two wholly different accounts in the process of getting my N97 totally setup.)
What a mixed bag.
Conclusion Nokia has to know where it stands. At least, assuming somebody actually used the N97 before it went out the door.
Symbian S60 5th Edition only makes sense if it’s a stopgap keeping Nokia in the game (barely) until they put out an actual next-generation OS, just like the underwhelming Windows Mobile 6.5 will do for Microsoft. I’m really hoping for a complete rebuild of Symbian. I am not expecting Nokia to turn to an entirely different OS from a certain Goo-ey company despite recent (and retarded) rumors. Nokia is married to Symbian for the long haul—after all, they paid nearly half a billion dollars for it.
That’s the only way I can fathom them releasing something this unusable into a world populated by the iPhone, Palm Pre, Android and BlackBerry. If this really is the best Nokia can do, the giant is doomed to die a slow death, propped up for a while by the cheap handsets that it sells by the tens of millions.
Built-in Qik app and setup rocks
Widgets on homescreen are solid
32GB of storage expandable to 48 freakin’ GB
Two-way FM transmitter for playing music over car radio is awesome
Keyboard feels nice, but weird layout might bug some people
High-res touchscreen, though it doesn’t make the most of it
Pokey processor
Ovi Store is worst mobile app store on the planet
Symbian S60 5th edition user experience is garbage
So much for Nokia and Intel keeping quiet on actual product announcements, huh? Just yesterday, the two mega-corps joined hands in what they called a technical collaboration, and while they wouldn’t go into detail about what products would sprout from the partnership, it seems that Commercial Times has done the honors. Reportedly, Nokia has already ordered up a few machines from Compal and Quanta, two OEMs that are largely responsible for most every netbook on the market today. Not surprisingly, we’re told that the Nokiabook will rely on one of Intel’s Atom processors, and considering that the new wave of Atom chips aren’t slated to land until 2010, you can pretty much put money on a N270 or N280 configuration. In related news, we’re told that Compal will engineer a Qualcomm Snapdragon-based Nokia smartbook, though there’s no word on what kind of OS (Symbian, perhaps?) will be included.
Just under two months. That’s how long it took Nokia’s N86 8MP to go from FCC to store shelves here in America, as the cats in Espoo have just announced to the world that the aforementioned cellphone is now shipping globally. In case you’ve forgotten, this 8 megapixel slider touts variable aperture, a mechanical shutter and automatic motion blur reduction, not to mention 8GB of internal memory and a microSD card slot. There’s no official mention of price, and as of right now, the phone’s not even listed on Nokia’s American e-store; still, based on early estimates, we’d say you best break out the bank just in case.
We’re not quite sure what levers they pulled, but our compadres over at Engadget Spanish have managed to wrangle a retail N97 out of Nokia’s tightly-clasped hands, and naturally, they’ve done us the honors of photographing it. We’re hoping to snag a unit of our own soon, but ’til then, tap the read link for lots more shots and even a video. Yes, a video. Welcome to the internet.
When Nokia unveiled its N86 back in February, we Yanks were given no hope whatsoever that a US release was in the cards. We’re doing our best to stifle our excitement, but it sure looks like a stateside launch is a lot closer now that said handset has made its way through the dark and murky halls of the FCC. Seen here in a lovely, washed-out shade of black, the 8 megapixel, OLED-equipped dual-slider seems no different than the one we toyed with in Barcelona, save for the whole US-friendly aspect, of course. C’mon Nokia, come clean with the price and ship date, won’tcha?
We’ve already seen Symbian ported to an Atom-based PC for kicks, but it looks like Symbian Foundation boss Tim Holbrow already has some considerably grander plans, and says that we could actually see some Symbian-running netbooks in stores before too long. As TechRadar reports, when asked if we’ll see Symbian netbooks on the market, Holbrow replied “I think so, yep,” before intriguingly adding that he thinks the real question is “will netbooks carry on being netbooks?” Apparently, Holbrow sees netbooks becoming nothing more than a “single processor” that people carry around and use to access data from various sources — letting folks use a wireless keyboard and display at home and have the UI adjust automatically, for instance, or what Holbrew calls “superconvergence.” Of course, Holbrow isn’t making any firm promises just yet, although he does say he can “see world in two or three years’ time where mobile devices start to eat into the world of laptops and netbooks.”
If flash animations and S60 5th edition are your idea of a good time then you’ll want to head on over to Nokia’s new interactive N97 landing page. From there you can get as close as you’ll ever get to Nokia’s flagship slider with 3.5-inch, 640 x 360 pixel resistive touch-screen display prior to its expected June launch. So go ahead, take ‘er for a spin and then hit the newly live pre-order button after you’re convinced that this is the smartphone for you. Sure, there’s lots of potential June competition out there but take heart: the Android-powered Samsung i7500 lacks a QWERTY, there’s no guarantee that a next-gen iPhone will launch in June, and the Palm Pre might be a big fat dud. There, feel better about your choice?
Update: Tipster Chris just let us know that the N97 shows a $699 phone-only price on the “find products” tab over at Nokia USA. That’s $6 cheaper than the N96, strangely enough. See screen-grab after the break.
It’s been an awful long time in coming, but AT&T’s customized remix of Nokia’s lovely E71 — the E71x — is now available for sale direct from the carrier’s site. As was revealed a little over a month ago, pricing comes in at just $99.99 on contract after rebate, which seems like a steal for a device with this level of capability and sex appeal. Of course, you’ll need to be okay with S60 3.2 — but if you can get past that, you’ve got a gorgeous all-metal shell, full QWERTY, HSDPA, 3.2 megapixel cam, and WiFi waiting for you. What now, Bold?
This is site is run by Sascha Endlicher, M.A., during ungodly late night hours. Wanna know more about him? Connect via Social Media by jumping to about.me/sascha.endlicher.
Built-in Qik app and setup rocks
Widgets on homescreen are solid
Keyboard feels nice, but weird layout might bug some people
Pokey processor
Ovi Store is worst mobile app store on the planet
