Mobile Choice Blog

Phones to record HD video in "a few years" says Nokia

According to Nokia, mobile phones will be able to record HD-quality video soon, meaning that your camphone vids will be a good enough resolution to look great on a large plasma or LCD screen.

At least, that's what the company's chief technology officer Tero Ojanpera says, and since he's got the inside skinny on Nokia's future handset developments, you can assume he's not making it up, even if he does admit that it's technically "a couple of years away".

However, there are some barriers to HD mobile video. Storage is one: you'll need lots more memory on your phone (or a huge memory card) to store HD-quality video in a decent quantity. It may also sap battery life. Still, that's not stopping Nokia - or chip manufacturers Broadcom and Texas Instruments, for that matter, who've both shown off HD video tech for phones.

(via Yahoo News)

Nokia updates firmware for N95

Nokia has released new firmware for its flagship N95 handset, which includes a host of improvements. For example, the way it runs applications has been tweaked, to provide more than 30MB of free RAM after booting (translation for untecchy types: it'll run faster).

The camera has been updated so it's faster to use too, with less of a gap between shots. The search function has been built into the standby screen to help you find stuff on the phone more quickly, and excitingly, it gets some N-Gage game previews and the Nokia Music Store application.

A lot of mobile users don't know what a firmware update is, let alone how to get one. But the list of features here shows why it's worth learning. Nokia's Phone Software Updater site will get you started.

(via All About Symbian)

Jamster launching music download service for Nokia XpressMusic phones

You might know Jamster as the home of the Crazy Frog, but there's more to the company musically than amphibians spouting gibberish over a dance beat. Thank goodness, is all we can say.

Jamster has just announced that its Jamster Music full-track download service will be made available on Nokia's 5310 and 5610 XpressMusic handsets, via the Download icon on their main menus. It's a subscription-based model, in which you pay £4.50 a week for six music downloads a week, choosing from 1.4 million available tracks.

It's slightly confusing though, what with Nokia having its own Music Store whose downloads work on both those handsets, as well as operators' own music stores. Still, if you're an XpressMusic handset owner who fancies downloading, at least you're spoilt for choice when it comes to stores.

(via Mobile Entertainment)

Nokia and Vodafone put differences aside for Ovi deal

Recently, Nokia announced its launch of 'Ovi', a suite of mobile services that would include music (the Nokia Music Store), games (the new N-Gage) and mapping/navigation. It was presented as a big change of strategy for the company, moving away from its hardware-focused roots.

However, some operators reacted with suspicion, worrying that Nokia was moving too much onto their turf in trying to provide services.

However, it seems Nokia is winning them round. At least, it's signed a deal with Vodafone to launch its Ovi-capable handsets in 2008, with much talk of how Ovi will be integrated with Vodafone's own games and music services on the Vodafone Live portal.

Nokia teams up with Reuters for mobile journalism

We've heard a lot about 'citizen journalism' in the last year, which generally involves members of the public shooting photos and/or video on their cameraphones, then sending them into newspapers or TV broadcasters. It's even been claimed the phenomenon could put proper journalists out of a job. Nokia and Reuters have other ideas, though.

They've launched a new project called 'Reuters Mobile Journalism' (although we prefer the way the website address shortens that to Reuters MoJo). It's basically an application preloaded on Nokia N95 handsets, allowing Reuters hacks to file stories from events without the need for a laptop. They've already been testing it out at events like New York Fashion Week and the Edinburgh Film Festival.

It's easy to see why putting cameraphones into the hands of journalists will result in some interesting stuff - more photo and video-related than textual. But this isn't new - savvier websites have been getting their journalists to moblog for a while now, using existing technologies and services. Still, it'll be interesting to see how the relationship between Nokia and Reuters develops - we wonder how many journalists would put up with filing content from a device with the N95's famously low battery life...

Reuters Mobile Journalism website

Nokia 6301 wants to give your home phone the boot

What do we think of UMA? Well, she was good in Pulp Fiction and the Kill Bill movies, but she's gone off the boil a bit since. Oh, hang on... No, UMA is nothing to do with Ms Thurman - instead, it's the acronym for Unlicensed Mobile Access technology, which is about combining mobile with Wi-Fi based landlines.

Nokia has just announced its latest UMA phone, the 6301. When you're out and about, it's a normal mobile phone, but when you get back home, it connects to your home Wi-Fi network to act as your landline too. Nokia is working with operators to sell the handset, with Orange already signed up - although we're not sure if that means Orange UK yet.

There's been a lot of talk about mobile phones killing off landlines in the past, but if UMA catches on, that supposed battle will become a moot point. We think one nice touch is that you'll automatically put the phone into a charging dock when getting home, so running out of battery life when out and about should become a thing of the past.

Orange gives no Christmas cheer to Nokia and Motorola

They might together account for over half of all mobile sales, but it seems Nokia and Motorola have fallen off Orange's Christmas (SIM) card list. The Register has noticed that in Orange's Christmas handset line-up, there aren't any new phones from either manufacturer, despite them being respectively first and third in the phone makers chart.

There's already speculation that Nokia's absence is due to its decision to launch the Nokia Music Store in competition with the operators' own services, but that argument wouldn't apply to Motorola, which has stuck to its guns in making its handsets work with the operator offerings.

It's not great news for either manufacturer, although it's not exactly tip-top for Orange users hoping to upgrade to the latest shiny phone from Nokia or Motorola. It's more evidence of the upcoming battle between operators and manufacturers as the latter try to launch their own mobile services though.

(via The Register)

Five reasons why the Nokia Music Store might struggle

Yesterday, we outlined the five reasons why Nokia's just-announced Music Store has a realistic hope of challenging Apple's iTunes Store for digital market dominance. In the interests of fairness, now it's time to take the glass-half-empty approach, and look at the key challenges faced by Nokia's new download service.

1. Apple is a mighty foe. When you're talking legal music downloads, Apple pretty much built the market with iTunes, and while its dominance isn't set in stone, it's a huge challenge for any other company to try and unseat it. Just as we're rightfully sceptical about any claims that the iPhone will make huge inroads into Nokia's market share in mobile, so we should be careful about wild claims that Nokia can do the same to Apple in digital music.

Nokia's new N-Gage shuns comparisons with PSP and DS

Amid all the hullabaloo around the new Nokia Music Store (something we're taking full part in), it might have gone unnoticed that the company also announced new details about its new N-Gage service last week. Instead of a dedicated games phone like the original N-Gage and N-Gage QD, it's now a platform running on various Nokia Nseries handsets, offering advanced 3D games.

The temptation is to portray the all-new N-Gage as a competitor to fully-fledged gaming devices like Sony's PSP and Nintendo's DS. However, that's not something Nokia is keen to encourage, as its N-Gage chief Jaakko Kaidesoja explained in an interview with Pocket Gamer.

"We don't want to compare it with DS and PSP," he said. "They're doing a great job on their turf, and our turf is the mobile gaming market."

Five reasons why the Nokia Music Store CAN take on iTunes

Last week, Nokia finally announced its long-rumoured music downloads store, called logically enough the Nokia Music Store. You can read all the details over on the Mobile Choice website. Nokia was keen to portray the store as a competitor to Apple's iTunes Store. However, that's an ambitious claim, given Apple's dominance in the music downloads market.

We've put together five reasons why Nokia's ambitions aren't just bluster. Even if iTunes' position as top dog isn't under threat yet, Apple should be looking over its shoulder a bit nervously at its new mobile-focused competitor. Starting with...

1. The rise of mobile music. Nokia already claims that it's the world's biggest manufacturer of MP3 players, thanks to the tens of millions of music-capable handsets it shipped last year. Although it's a bit early to write iPods off as dead dodos, there's a definite shift towards people listening to music on their phones, which the Nokia Music Store aims to capitalise on.