Nokia’s Jumping in The Ring, Apple’s Taking off The Gloves

In the never ending war between cellphone manufacturers, a lot has transpired over the last 24 hours. It looks like Nokia is going to be announcing their own iPhone Killer (I cannot tell you how much I hate that term, but it definitely says something about how revolutionary the iPhone really is). As I recall, the Tube (the name of the new Nokia, which leads me to my regular question: who comes up with these names?) was introduced (unofficially of course) before the release of the iPhone, so as opposed to the Omnia and others like it, it was not a response to the iPhone.

The Tube looks like a pretty nice phone, nothing we have never seen before, but as I have said many times, when it is being released by the market leader, Nokia, it does not matter what we have seen in the past from “small” players like Samsung or HTC.

In any case, Apple has no intention on sitting back and letting Nokia take over its touch screen market dominance. They have just begun to sell the first ever version of the unlocked iPhone in Hong Kong for $695. Worried, Apple? Maybe next time you should allow your users to replace their batteries or send an MMS!

What is left to be seen is, will the S60 full Touch UI compete with the iPhone’s interface? Because we all know that the user experience is what is going to be the deal maker or breaker for Nokia. Check out the first demo of the Tube’s UI in the video below.

-Hillel


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Nokia Outdoes Itself with the E72 & E75

There is a new video that was just leaked of the not-yet-announced Nokia E72 and E75 handsets. I have two things to say about that.

  1. That would never happen with Apple’s products. I am not sure if this is a good thing on Nokia’s part or a bad thing, but Apple somehow manages to keep the leaked information about their new products to a minimum, until they are officially announced. Judging by the amount of hype surrounding Apple releases, Apple is doing something right.
  2. These phones both look pretty amazing, but nothing we have never seen before outside of Nokia. Then again, Nokia is a big enough player that when they release a new concept phone, it does not matter who has done it before, theirs is bound to be all that much better.

 You can watch the video here (watch it fast, Nokia has taken it off of Youtube 5 times, after it was posted by 5 different users. They are really not interested in people seeing this video.)

-Hillel

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Missed the Boat

As the industry leader (is that even true anymore?), Nokia seems to have missed the boat with their flagship handset being released in Q4 of 2008. The N96 is not a bad phone, there’s no question that it packs in a hell of a lot of features, and you gotta love that dual slide action, but in the world with the IPhone 3G dominating the market, is it really that impressive? Granted, it comes with 16 GB of built in memory, and an additional expansion slot, which is not so common. Besides that, it offers the pretty much standard (a slight exaggeration) 5 megapixel camera, the same old assisted GPS,  and HSDPA. I am pretty sure if the N96 would have been released during the pre-IPhone 3G era, it might have been a big hit, but with phones like the HTC Diamond Pro, and the Sony Ericsson XPERIA, I personally am not very excited about the N96 release. Besides, Nokia has got to learn how to slim down their phones a little. It is true that Nokia was ONCE so good that looks really did not matter, but with Apple around and Sony and HTC designing phones, Nokia has to get with the times. Having said that, you can be sure that Nokia will sell more than a few N96s.

-Hillel

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