New Nokia Phone

John writes: "infoSync has posted the official information about the two new Nokia phones which is going to be unveiled today. Quote: 'The Nokia 7650 will be the world's first 2.5G Symbian OS mobile phone with advanced messaging and imaging capabilities ...' It looks like ICQ on the mobile phone is closer than ever!" Includes a built-in camera and various comments about this not coming to North America anytime soon.

Re:Oh, you said "Symbian"!

[kilgore_47]

It looks like ICQ on the mobile phone is closer than ever!

I don't know about ICQ, but AIM is already available on some sprint phones. It already works in North America, too!

Re:Very slick

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not sure. Maybe he means "there are no per minute charges mainly because the North American mobile infastructure sucks"?

Trust me, I work in the mobile telecoms sector, and the US infastructure sucks. South Africa has a better GSM network than any state in the US could hope to have.

ICQ on mobile

[jawtheshark]

Considering how *unreliable* ICQ has become, I frankly doubt that this would have any use. Honestly since some time it has become impossible to communicate with people running newer versions of ICQ (still using 99b-Rev A here, or LICQ).
Besides, I know it's possible to do ICQ on handhelds for a long time. I have a Psion and there is an ICQ client available. It is paying so I never bothered. (Use google to find it) I've used Opera on my Psion for the sake of it and that works great, if this is some kind of integrated Phone/Psion I could get interesed (including speadsheet, Contacts, Word, Jotter,...) I always have looked down on Palm owners, because the Psion in it's many incarnations is really superior IMHO. Too bad Psion stopped making hardware.
As for Nokia hardware, I alway found them "feeling" cheap, more like toys...Give me a good Siemens anyday.

Nokia and Symbian

[Anonymous Coward]

Nokia 7650 Home Page [nokia.com] (with specs, etc.)

Symbian Press Release [symbian.com]

Re:Very slick

[RedX]

For some darn reason they always do that, North American GSM seems to be low priority for GSM phone builders.

Perhaps because the marketshare for GSM in the US is so far very low? Because CDMA and TDMA carriers currently offer vastly larger coverage areas than their GSM rivals, and there are plenty of CDMA and TDMA handsets that also offer analog roaming, GSM service is limited to pretty much only people that will be staying in and traveling between large metro areas. This will hopefully start to change once AT&T gets further along with their national GSM roll-out [pdabuzz.com] this should start to change. Of course, we start to get into a chicken vs. egg argument when you consider that more people (definitely me) would jump on the GSM bandwagon if some of these sweet Nokia handsets were available in the US.

Re:Arghhhhh!

[voop]

How long before phones start getting hacked or spread MS LookOut worms? How long before phone spamming becomes the norm?

Actually, this is happening allready. In France, Bouyges Telecom (a large tele operator) were frequently spamming my mobile with adds from different companies (e.g. Pizza Hut). It turned out to be an "opt-out" thing that they do to all new customers. After calling their customer service (and waiting a periode of 3 weeks "for technical reasons" - yeah, right!) the spamming stopped.

What, in reality, was more annoying was that they also spammed my voice mail in the same way: the phone would indicate a message, I'd dial (and pay the per minute charge) to listen, only to find that it was yet another piece of spam ("This week at Pizza Hut, you can get...."). Again, it was possible to "opt out".

It's worth noticing, that this was not on some "you get it cheap if you accept spam" subscription, but rather on their "pro" subscription....

Re:ICQ on mobile

[Computer suck!]

I'm morning the demise of Psion hardware too. I think we should set up a support group...

The Nokia 91XX and 7650 are EPOC^W Symbian based devices[1], so is there nearst your going to get to a Psion for a while... :(

Also Ericsson have a device based on Symbain, the Ericsson R380e.

[1] I'm sure you know this, but I bet there are plent of people on this forum that don't, EPOC is the OS that powers the Psion based device. EPOC has now been renamed to Symbian, targeted at phones and no longer a part of Psion (thou. Psion are it's begest share holders, others inc. Nokia, Ericsson, Intel, Kenwood, Motorola, Panasonic, Sanyo, Sony and Siemens[2].

[2] I think, you can check it on there web site.

http://www.symbian.com
http://www.psion.com
http://www.sonyericssonmobile.com/

Even cooler fone from Nokia for SMS

[rainTown]

Nokia came out with an even cooler phone for SMS a few weeks ago, the 5510. It has a full char set keyboard... and an MP3 player... no dig cam though... info here: http://www.nokia.com/phones/5510/index.html

The point is...

[barnaclebarnes]

That over 1 billion text messages were sent in the UK alone last month. txt'ing is _the_ way to communicate for todays youth culture. Even us oldies in their late 20's send text messages on a regular basis. Looking through my phone I sent 12 messages this weekend. Organising places to meet people, drunken banter from the pub, etc. It is great, no need to talk to the person and it is normally cheaper than calling during peak times.

Also Bt Cellnet here in the UK has just signed a deal with msn (and soon yahoo!) where there will be seemless IM between phones and msn/yahoo, including full presence detection. (With the current ICQ setup you have to send the message to the phone, not just the persons icq account).

PS: When will the US just actually understand the importance of text messaging in todays youth culture?????

Re:Drat, no 1900MHz support

[rasjani]

I havent yet read any specs yet so i cannot really speculate about this topic BUT. If the main market for this phone is Europe, 1900MHz aint what people want. Hell, i havent even heard of that kind of frequency.

Afaik, only 900MHz and 1800MHz are used in europe. 900MHz which works pretty much everywhere and dualband 1800MHz in bigger cities & suburbians (and with w/ lesser money ofcourse)

And to the other reply in this thread, no, phones arent tied to certain operators (atleast, not in Finland). I do know thought that this is widely used marketing scheme in other countries (and imho, it sucks big time. There's no real deal why certain phone should be tied to certain operator)

Re:Drat, no 1900MHz support

[gid-foo]

1900 mhz is the US PCS range. You guys are 900 and 1800, we're 800 and 1900. What the original guy was saying is that he would like to get one of these phones in the U.S. but can't because the freqs. are all wrong. Damn those global conspiracies.

Now we can use ICQ?

[TheRealDamion]

Over 4 years ago Nokia released the 9000 phone with a telnet client. At 9600 baud (which is pretty good) you could sit on a shell account using whatever UNIX clients you wanted to. IRC or a free ICQ client. You could also get VNC for it. so you had 640x200 res 8grayscale connection to any graphical unix client. Since then the 9110 provided 14,400 connectivity, 16greyscale and MUCH smaller size (roughly normal phone size and weight). Then earlier this year Nokia released the 9210 which has a 12bit colour 640x200 display (note that VGA is only 640x480 and that's pretty good). Battery life like 6 hours talk time and 80hours standby. EPOC6 (god knows what the reviewer of the linked article is on about boasting about first use of EPOC?) and 8meg SDRAM.
Yes Nokia arsed up by making it have Word Compatibility instead of a telnet client, but in the last few months a company has written a good ssh client making this (at last) almost as good as the 9110 and basically THE device for admins to use in a pub in a country village. In the UK we have almost 100% coverage all over the place, be it in the middle of fields and lakes or right in the middle of a City. ICQ? That's **cked up too. It's just a combination of about 5 other 20year old standards, like mixing talk, finger, ping, email, wall/write together.. all things that already existed. Why do I feel like nothing is progressing?

ummm... Japanese Cell Phones.

[ainsoph]

I was away in Asia for a year and during that time I got to see lots and lots of people using cell phones, all the time. In Thailand everyone had these cool slick phones, very small, text messaging, the works. Everyone uses them, and most people 150% more quiet than the American users of cell phones.

My point is though, once we got to Japan on our trip, I became blown away by the phones there. I have never really wanted to get one, but after seeing those I thought, crap can't wait to go back to the states to get a cell phone!

Once back, there were no cellphones that would even compare to what I saw there.

Here is a few things:

65k color screens in ultra thin phone.

Downloadable Javabased Nintendo games. Download and play, whenever you want.

People stand around in train stations doing email on their phones or surfing the web instead of telling everyone in the train about their sexual expliots of the last weekend.

We were in Shinjuku on a side street and there was a film crew filming some celebs. People grabbed their cell phones and took digital pics of the goings on and emailed their friends right from the side street.

Point is: Japanese cell phones are cool. I wish we had the services that they had.

some links:

http://www.eetimes.com/story/OEG20011116S0107

http://www.cnn.com/TECH/computing/9909/20/bandai.c ell.phone.idg/

http://foma.nttdocomo.co.jp/english/terminals/inde x.html

Re:Very slick

[10Ghz]

"the US infrastucture does suck, but I'd like to see you drive 1000 miles in any direction from whereever you are outside the US and still have service. And that's on your "rest of the world" compatible network."

Europe. I could travel from Helsinki to Madrid and my cell-phone would still work. Distance: about 3000 kilometers.