Mobile Release

Despite the smart phone sector remaining remarkably buoyant, not everyone has money to burn on the latest high-end phones.

This is a fact that Nokia realises and is a major contributing factor to why they are still number one – by releasing plenty of great entry level devices that are attainable to those struggling to make ends meet.

These four new mobiles from the Finnish manufacturer announced today (five, if you include the £17 Nokia 1280) show that fun and functional phones needn’t cost the earth.

The Nokia 1616 is a torch-waving dual band handset with a 3.5 mm headphone jack, FM radio, colour screen and the usual suite of basic Nokia functionality.

With a choice of colours and a price of only €24 (£21), the 1616 could shine on prepay after its Q1 2010 release.

The Nokia 1800 differs in form but remains familiar in function to the 1616, another compact dual band device with a colour display, 3.5mm audio jack and FM radio.

It can also outlast even the chattiest of folks, with a 8.5 hour talk-time and a fantastic 22 days of standby, and at a price of €24 (£21) we’re sure that it won’t stay on shelves for long next year.

Amazing what the absence of wi-fi, Bluetooth, GPS tagging or toastie maker can do to a phone’s battery lifespan, isn’t it?

The Nokia 2220 Slide is far more flamboyant, a two-tone slider available in a range of colours including hot pink, which immediately got us interested!

In all honesty the 2220 is a step up from the above two phones, incorporating MMS, Bluetooth, GPRS support, a VGA camera and Ovi e-mail support.

The Nokia 2690 is a candybar version of the 2220 slide that looks pretty nice and contains the majority of features, with the addition of EDGE and MicroSD support for cards up to 8GB.

At a price of €45 (£40) and €54 (£48) accordingly, it is amazing to see how far mobile phones have actually come, and what savvy folks can get for their money.

It’s out! The big announcement from Nokia is out of the bag ahead of their annual conference, and the name on everyone’s lips (and Twitter streams) at the moment is N900.

Read on to take a closer look at the official images, videos and Nokia N900 features, the most exciting internet tablet/mobile phone/sexy piece of gadgetry we have seen in a long time!

The features list reads familiarly to anyone well versed in the internal workings of the Nokia N97 (cool dudes that they are), but with changes large and small to make the Nokia N900 so much more than an incremental upgrade.

The New:

- Maemo 5 operating system.

Based on Linux, this is the biggest change of all. Nokia’s first ever mobile to run on Maemo, the user experience and multi-tasking functionality places the N900 firmly in the upper echelon of mobiles.

- CPU.

The ARM Cortex-A8 CPU is the iron fist to Maemo’s velvet glove user interface, a processing beast which allows for accelerated graphical capabilities, programs running concurrently and performance that one would come to expect from a computer rather than a mobile. Is this the end of juddery transitions and freezing that plagued certain Symbian-powered smartphones? Let’s hope so.

- 3.5″ touchscreen display.

It is huge, and is the biggest indicator of the N900’s internet tablet DNA. Primed for a landscape experience, this WVGA resistive touchscreen offers clarity and crispness at 800 x 480 pixels, as well as an on-screen virtual keyboard to supplement the three row full QWERTY affair nestled away.

Some may find a resistive touchscreen off putting, but try telling that to the millions that find it essential for depicting Asian characters and handwriting recognition.

- Mozilla Web Browser

The ’secret’ weapon in the N900’s armoury. For the many people unfamiliar with the sub-category of internet tablets, the slickest mobile browsing experience they would have had is likely to be Safari on the iPhone. We certainly can’t knock it as the kinetic scrolling, the functionality and rendering speed are all top notch.

This, however, is on another level. The size of the screen and speed of connectivity thanks to both Wi-Fi and HSDPA 3G means the Nokia N900 deals with this capably, but the full Flash 9.4 support and smooth scrolling on that native landscape display quickly reminds that you have never seen desktop-quality internet on a mobile, until now.

- Phone functionality.

The other secret weapon, the N900 is Nokia’s first tablet device to also be a mobile phone! Whilst we have had the Maemo experience in earlier Nseries devices, marrying it to calling functionality is a first. With quad-band GSM and 3G HSDPA support, the N900 is ready to go global and stay connected.

The Established:

- 5 megapixel Carl Zeiss optics camera, with dual-LED flash.

Much the same great camera found in the Nokia N97. There may be better on dedicated devices, but this is still one of the best to be found on a smartphone.

- 32GB of internal memory, microSD card support.

Hefty memory on board means plenty of space for multimedia, and if that wasn’t enough then an extra 16GB of memory can be added, courtesy of a microSD card.Hey, it even has a kickstand to turn it into your own mobile multiplex.

- A-GPS with Ovi Maps.

Getting lost gets a lot more difficult, as Ovi Maps provides turn-by-turn, walking directions as well as orientation by landmarks. Scouts must have it so easy these days…

- 3.5mm headphone jack, FM transmitter, TV-Out, DivX support, Bluetooth v2.1…

All becoming standard on Nokia Nseries handsets. All still brilliant features that round out a strong handset.

The other big surprise is that we could all buy Nokia N900 as soon as this October, for €500 (£440)!

That N97-bothering price point could see this summer’s hottest phone eclipsed pretty quickly, and with the such array of pioneering tech behind it, the N900 should have little problem selling itself across the globe. Maybe, just maybe, Nokia are back in this one.