Nokia N97 Phone
Over two years ago we thought we knew what Nokia had in mind for their secret N97 phone. And we thought we had pictures too. Boy, were we wrong but then again nobody else had any facts about the future N-series handset. How were we to know that Nokia will launch its N97 only on December 2nd 2008? Here's what we wrote back then:
Well now, what do we have here? This device is rumored to be N97 and only time will tell if its Nokia's latest offering or a result of someone's Photoshop skills! According to the rumor mill, the handset is equipped with a 3 inch display and will in all probability have a 5 Megapixel camera with 20x digital zoom! The N97 promises both fun and functionality and will also include a miniSD card and 20GB of internal memory! We shall keep you updated on this one!
In the mean time Nokia surprised everyone with the touchscreen slider N97. It’s like an iPhone or a Storm. But dare I say, better? Nokia saw what people want nowadays and adapted. After trying out their first touchscreen on the Nokia 5800 XpressMusic, the Nokia brainiacs where ready for the next big thing. The Nokia N97 will certainly be the flagship smartphone of Nokia for quite a while. Here are some of its features, which will make you choose it:
a 3.5 inch widescreen 16:9 touchscreen
haptic feedback
full QWERTY slideout keyboard
5 megapixel camera with Carl Zeiss Tessar lens and dual LED flash
up to 32 GB of storage
up to 16GB additional memory via microSD
Symbian S60 5th Edition
up to 37 hours of music / up to 4.5 hours of video
A-GPS and GPS
HSDPA, Wi-Fi, USB 2.0, stereo Bluetooth connectivity
a 3.5mm headphone jack.
The Phone will cost 550 Euros before taxes and subsidies and it will be launched in the first half of 2009. What do you think? Like what you’ve seen so far? Don’t forget to check the video below too!

I like Nokia so much cos they represent quality! the only cons i have with them is their OS, why cant they explore other OSes rather than sticking with that Symbian stuff?

Sony Erricsson, Samsung, HTC and the rest are developing on other platforms like Windows Mobile and HTC even on Google's Android. it opens up the phone and a lot other people can develop apps and tweak the OS to do much more.

For instance, I had a Treo last year based on WindowsMobile and wrote an app that converts the infrared into a universal programmable remote control, downloaded another app that turned my screen into a sketch pad for the pc, a lot cos you have direct access to the hardware at a base level through the OS.

I've used so many Oses and have come to like WindowsMobile so much cos of the context menu (like right click) on the screen to get more menus, it helps with navigation, copy/paste, undo/redo etc. Palm lacks a lot of these and so does iPhone but am not sure of symbian since this is the first touchscreen symbian 5th edition. anyway, am sticking wif ma Touch Cruise in the mean time.

Flexcubed:

why can't they explore other OSes rather than sticking with that Symbian stuff?

simple. they own majority of the shares of symbian os. and surprisingly, they arethe best sellers of symbian os. so why promote other os when they are the best promoter of theirs

thegame:

simple. they own majority of the shares of symbian os. and surprisingly, they arethe best sellers of symbian os. so why promote other os when they are the best promoter of theirs

Nokia has confirmed its going with a version of Linux (probably Maemo) in future top-class phones. Symbian has gone as far as it can, and the demands of current-gen and next-gen portable devices need more functions* and versatility than Symbian can offer, given its roots are almost twenty years old.

Sony-Ericsson is ditching Symbian for Android, so is Samsung (which made only like one Symbian device ever). indeed all the major players are heading for the Open Handset Alliance and leaving Symbian and WinMo in the wake of their frenzied rush to Linux.

isnt this enough to let you know there is something inherently limiting in Symbian as far as future powerful highend phones are concerned?



*function in the OS at the low-to mid-level; not functions such as clipboards or MMS.

@Ex. samsung made more than 5 symbian phones.

@Ex

do you have a link to an official statement by Nokia? a press release or something? cos i feel you are exaggerating this stuff.

naijafan:

@Ex

do you have a link to an official statement by Nokia? a press release or something? because i feel you are exaggerating this stuff.

here you go.


Nokia eyes wider use of Linux software in phones

BARCELONA (Reuters) - The world's biggest mobile phone maker, Nokia, could start to use open-source Linux software on its more expensive phone models, a senior company official said on Tuesday.

"In the longer perspective, Linux will become a serious alternative for our high-end phones," Ukko Lappalainen, vice president at Nokia's markets unit, told Reuters in an interview on the sidelines of the "Nokia World" industry conference.

Linux's role in the handset industry is growing as Google has introduced its Linux-based Android platform, but Lappalainen said Nokia was likely to stick to its own Linux development.

Nokia uses Linux maemo software in its niche offering of Internet tablets, while it uses Symbian software for its phones.

"I don't see anything in Android which would make it better than Linux maemo," Lappalainen said. (Reporting by Tarmo Virki)

http://www.reuters.com/article/internetNews/idUSTRE4B16IO20081202

now, you might want to ask Reuters for further comfirnation to satisfy your skeptical mind. you have been arguin for Symbian all the while so the thought of Nokia ditching it for Linux in high end phones gives you nightmares.

even Nokia recognizes the limitations of symbian except Nokia's fanboys. why should it shock and awe you? everyone is gunning for better OS in these days of faster CPUs, powerful GPUs and cheaper RAM. samsung, motorola, HTC (G1), sony ericsson etc. why shouldnt Nokia? lawd knoiws they've been stagnant all these years, holding the smartphone industry rooted in one spot.

Motorola became the first company to use Linux on a mobile phone when it released the Motorola A760 to the Chinese market on February 16, 2003. Motorola chose to use MontaVista Linux in the Motorola A760 and future Linux-based phones, despite the fact that Motorola was a founding member of the competing Symbian OS[18]. Since then, Motorola has increased focus on its Linux platform and publicly stated that the future platform for all its mid- and high-tier mobile phones will be Linux with Java[19], and other phone manufacturers NEC and Panasonic have developed a common platform based on MontaVista Linux.[20][21]


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MontaVista

interesting info i found trolling the Net. So we owe it all 2 Motorola. I just found even the RAZR ran on the same embedded MontaVista Linux.

Ex Inferis:

now, you might want to ask Reuters for further comfirnation to satisfy your skeptical mind. you have been arguin for Symbian all the while so the thought of Nokia ditching it for Linux in high end phones gives you nightmares.

even Nokia recognizes the limitations of symbian except Nokia's fanboys. why should it shock and awe you? everyone is gunning for better OS in these days of faster CPUs, powerful GPUs and cheaper RAM. samsung, motorola, HTC (G1), sony ericsson etc. why shouldnt Nokia? lawd knoiws they've been stagnant all these years, holding the smartphone industry rooted in one spot.

LOL @ asking reuters for confirmation . Just sounds funny to me. The idea sounds like MS ditching the windows kernel to build on a linux/unix kernel instead. the idea i have about software development includes the ability to improve your offering and make it whatever you want it to be.

for instance. . . microsoft in an effort to make their mobile offering more appealing, would be revamping the entire mobile OS to release WinMo7. or RIM with the blackberry OS on the Storm. why cant the Symbian developers do the same with theirs as well. Considering that it enhances competition at the same time.

truth is, microsoft did something similar when they had to go bring back a unix guru (can't remember his name) from retirement to develop the kernel for windows nt.

naijafan:

LOL @ asking reuters for confirmation . Just sounds funny to me. The idea sounds like MS ditching the windows kernel to build on a linux/unix kernel instead. the idea i have about software development includes the ability to improve your offering and make it whatever you want it to be.

for instance. . . microsoft in an effort to make their mobile offering more appealing, would be revamping the entire mobile OS to release WinMo7. or RIM with the blackberry OS on the Storm. why can't the Symbian developers do the same with theirs as well. Considering that it enhances competition at the same time.

you can say the same thing for Palm, which is ditching Palm OS to craft a new one, the Nova. there is only so much you can do with an aging OS, especially one designed for less powerful CPUs and using archaic languages. elsewhere ive outlined the major problems of Symbian from a developer perspective (which is all that matters): these include unwieldy SDKs, arcane coding language, binary incompatibility, poor memory management etc.

sure, microsoft can't ditch WinMo in a hurry; but thats because of the Windows trademark which defines microsoft: ie Windows is Microsoft and Microsoft is Windows, can't have one without the other. but like i said elsewhere, even MS doesnt use its WinMo; preferring instead Win CE for mobile devices. meanwhile Nokia inst really Symbian since it didnt create the OS, it licensed it and then outright bought the company. and it still churns out low-end Series 40 devices (which fetch more profit margin).

so, if Palm is creating an entirely new OS from scratch and discontinuing its flagship Palm OS, why should it be a surprise if Nokia does the same? didnt Microsoft ditch DOS for Windows? and remember, the biggest problem of DOS is the same one dogging Symbian: Memory management.


if Nokia wants to be innovative and maintain its lead, it needs to explore other alternatives just as badly as Microsoft needs to overhaul its NT kernel.

the market is well and truly saturated with too many similar-looking and similar-featured Symbian devices already; pretty soon everyone is going to be fed up with that S60 interface and the same way of doing things.

Nokia continues to be the leader in the mobile market and The Symbian OS is the market leader open operating system for mobile phones. Nokia is not ditching symbian for any linux stuffs and even if a new OS is to be implemented in high end nokia phones is no indication of the limitation of th Symbiam OS. Sometimes, i wonder how we think and where we get our reports from?

Symbian OS has a microkernel architecture, which means that the minimum necessary is within the kernel to improve robustness, availability, and responsiveness. It contains a scheduler, memory management, and device drivers, but other services like networking, telephony, or filesystem support are placed in the OS Services Layer or Base Services Layer. The EKA2 real-time kernel has been termed a nanokernel, containing only the most basic primitives and supporting an extended kernel to implement any other abstractions.

Symbian OS v9.5 is the result of continued deep collaboration with Symbian OS licensees, the world’s leading handset vendors, and its user interface platform partners MOAP, S60 and UIQ. With over 110 million Symbian smartphones shipped, high smartphone growth in developing markets and increasing mass market requirements, Symbian’s addresses high end user needs.

They currently 50% of the market share of OS abd that is expected to rise.

46.6 % market share, and expected to slow because since q3 it grew only 5 percent while the entire smartphone market grew by 12%. Apple has 17% (and growing) RIM, once number 2 after Nokia, stands at 15.3% and Microsoft with WinMo AND WinCE combined at 13.5%. therefore, Apple has beaten Micosoft and RIM to be at the number 2 spot.

the statistics above are on the same wikipedia page where you copy-pasted the following:

Djcn:

Symbian OS has a microkernel architecture, which means that the minimum necessary is within the kernel to improve robustness, availability, and responsiveness. It contains a scheduler, memory management, and device drivers, but other services like networking, telephony, or filesystem support are placed in the OS Services Layer or Base Services Layer. The EKA2 real-time kernel has been termed a nanokernel, containing only the most basic primitives and supporting an extended kernel to implement any other abstractions.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbian_OS

yet you chose to omit the other statistics there and inflate Nokia's by 3.4%!

you also cleverly omitted the demerits of the OS on the same wikipedia page, demerits which are more than enough to justify the move to Linux!

here are some:

" Unfortunately, Symbian C++ programming has a steep learning curve, as Symbian requires the use of special techniques such as descriptors and the cleanup stack. This can make even relatively simple programs harder to implement than in other environments. Moreover, it is questionable whether Symbian's techniques e.g. the memory management paradigm are actually so beneficial. It is possible that the techniques, developed for the much more restricted mobile hardware of the 1990s, do cause unnecessary complexity in source code; programmers are required to concentrate on bug-prone low-level routines instead of truly application-specific features. It is difficult, however, to make a move towards a more high-level and modern programming paradigm in Symbian, because the platform is so tightly bound to semi-obsolete thinking models about mobile software development.

Introduction of the Symbian Signed system in which application developers need to pay in order to use some of the more attractive smartphone features (as contrasted to platforms like Palm OS and Windows Mobile) is making it an increasingly unpopular platform for Open Source projects, independent developers and small startups. This situation is worsened by the fragmentation of user interface systems (UIQ vs S60 vs MOAP), meaning that developers need to build and maintain multiple incompatible versions of their software if they want to target multiple devices which use the same underlying Symbian OS version."

look, we already know your proclivity for arguing blindly and copy-pasting techy stuff to impress those who know precious little. you like coming across as know-it-all egghead.

what ever kernel symbian runs on is far less powerful than Darwin/Mach kernel, (and Nokia is killing UIQ. )


Naijan asked for a link, i gave it, and you're STILL insisting otherwise. why oh why is it so hard to let common sense sink into your heads? what the hell is so special about symbian that nokia can't use alternatives? or are you suggesting all nokia innovations should forever revolve around symbian in these days when hardware is far outsripping software?

i don't know waht is the matter with you people; Nokia says its going with Linux in future phones, everyone else is claiming otherwise.

so even if Nokia sticks with Symbian for the likes of say E63 and utlilizes Linux Maemo or whatever Linux variant in flagship products, isnt that enough of a statement?


you keep insisting Symbian isnt limited; Nokia's proposal admits as much, as do developers and yet people in Nairaland are saying no, Symbian is the greatest and best OS for mobile devices.

sorry, but that OS is iphone OS X.

if you admit that the iphone got Nokia (and all others) scrambling to innovate, explore new boundaries (and OS's) and touchscreen then you have to admit Nokia with its "110 million" smartphones, is doing its scrambling in the face of threat from ONE SINGLE PHONE! Nokia is the market leader, so is Microsoft with Windows but that doesnt make Windows the best OS.

you also glowingly state that symbian has scheduler, memory management and device drivers; um, remind me but thats the work of every kernel OS! and symbian is terrible at memory management, leading to poor garbaging and and the infamous memory leaks. also, what runs the numerous iphone radios and touchscreen and USB interface but device drivers? or do they run off the ether?

and the "worlds leading handset vendors" which i take to mean Sony ericsson, motorola, and samsung, are ALL going with Linux (Android). even HTC, one of the biggest maker of smartphones uses WinMo and Android (on the G1).

the second largest, Blackberry, uses proprietary OS.

and the new kid on the block which has stolen the rage from BB, runs on OS X.


now if Nokia thinks as you do, that simply tweaking the microkernel is all it takes to put Symbian on a par with OS X, then it makes me wonder why they just don't save costs and do that, rather than going the linux way and spending huge wads of cash on R& and coding!


what you probably don't know is this: the high-end smartphone market is a niche market catering to a small segment of the overall mobile telephony density, ie the business community. the larger market sgement is made up entirely of the low-end feature phone. Nokia however, in spite of its domination or perhaps because of it, enabled this split with its Nseries/Eseries lines of devices, the former catering to the business segment while the latter serves the mass market media enthusiasts.

RIM too fell to the same foolish model, none learning the lesson of Palm.

then it took Apple to craft ONE device that amalgamated (or is trying to) both market segments; the busines and media/entertainment population. and that appeal is what you naysayers attribute to hype.

meanwhile ive always been ssaying Nokia should either go with Linux (which thankfully its doing) or wed its Eseries to the Nseries, which is what it has done with the N97.

anyone who has used Nokia N800/N810 will tell you Maemo Linux beats Symbian hands down (it even has Debian Apt!). just ask Bigbrovar.

mind you, for low-to mid-end devices Nokia will keep utilizing its Symbian range, but i bet you the N97 is the last Symbian powered highend phone to emerge from nokia's assembly lines. the rest will just be like the E63


probably symbian will be like Android: open and perhaps licensed  to smaller players.

when you mentioned Symbian OS EKA2 i honestly thought you were going to make a big deal of the single-core multifunction (userland and signal stacks on a single core) attribute of Symbian, which really is almost a big deal. on that, i have little defense.

you're looking at this as a programmer; I'm looking at it both as programmer and a professional financial analyst so market trends and those little squiggly graphs and charts and percentages hold more meaning for me than they do for your silicon-vapor saturated head.

note that whatever you type next wont elicit any further response from me on this issue, so go ahead and open a thread in my name as you did in the computer section.   

so, question time: if symbian is ultra-efficient, on a par with iphone os x, powerful and well-featured, what then informs Nokia's decision to favor Linux over symbian in future flagship phones?

Your posts tends to be much more of an attack and personal rather than technical. You make fine posts but wonder why u're very passionate with technical issues rather than facing issues squarely. As i've always said learn to be tolerant and factual.

I don't always like posting or stressing issues, but just to make some facts clear and make sure you use the right expressions when posting. It is very obvious to a newcomer that u've always FAVOURED the APPLE line of products even if it involves falsifying details.

Now for your information, On December 2nd, 2008, Nokia completed its acquisition of Symbian Software Ltd as part of its plan to enable the creation of the non-profit organisation Symbian Foundation. Promoting what will be useless isn't it?

All OS has it merits and demerits including the OS X and mind u will eat ur words that N97 will be the last high powered phone on the Nokia series. Thanks Guy.

No Qualms, Time will tell.

my, you have improved! not a single immature sentence!

well, clearly i have and will always favor Apple over the Miscrosofts and Nokias of this world until something better comes along. i suspect you yourself, given your programming background, know enough about the symbian/ iphone OS truth than you let on here. the problem is, sometimes some people just cant help being devils advocates.

to be honest, the Nokia fanboys here in this forum are much more passionate than we Apple users are about the devices we use. we argue and try to make our points based on facts (at least we hope so) and common sense; Nokia fans just make general statements like "nokia is da bomb" without saying how and why.

as for promoting symbian; i said nokia is using linux on HIGH END PHONES, so that means Nokia will still use symbian in other smartphones in the mid-range, as well as licensing it. so of course they'll promote the OS.

the N96 bring a resolution to the mobile phone industry!the Nokia Mobile Phone is my favorite(sfstacy)

nokia 5800 expressmusic available:
53k@slot
49k@capitol
hmmmm it sure wil go down come nxt yr

it'll be overshadowed by its bigger brother, the N97 especially given that price tag.

Ex Inferis:

it'll be overshadowed by its bigger brother, the N97 especially given that price tag.

i bet u d price wil be way above 150k,,,,,dats if it doesnt hit d 200 mark^{(trust dose naija thieves in computer village n som shops in V.I )}

lynxnoon:

i bet u d price wil be way above 150k,,,,,that is if it doesnt hit d 200 mark^{(trust dose naija thieves in computer village n som shops in V.I )}

abi? i hear say the N85 is $1200 or so unsubsidized! infact im thinking the N97 will be around 170k sef!

costs so much and doesn't even j\have a scratch-resistant glass or
any of those prceious stones and metals like the 8800 series

blackweaver:

costs so much and doesn't even j\have a scratch-resistant glass or
any of those prceious stones and metals like the 8800 series

LOL, maybe its features are its precious stones. . . (kidding!)

Ex Inferis:

Nokia fans just make general statements like "nokia is da bomb" without saying how and why.

On the contrary, SE fans make more of such statements. How many SE fans out there know what UIQ is? At least, the Nokia fans still know there's S40, and three editions of S60.

If you are not against microsoft, i think the most sophisticated and most powerful gadget right now is the HTC touch HD. For specifications please consult the webpage of the company at http://www.htc.com/www/product/touchhd/overview.html.

true that! but you gotta watch out for its touch-friendliness. it doesnt use a capacitive screen like the iPhone in an effort to still support the usage of a stylus as well. Not all elements of the windows mobile OS is thumbable at the moment but that should change with Windows Mobile 6.5 / 7. The Touch Diamond / Pro / HD are ready to be flashed with Windows 7 ROMs anyways so I dont think anyone would regret purchasing them now - their better days are still ahead

@Naijafan
could have sworn the touch HD used a capacitive screen. Only played with one briefly, but i guess you're right since it came with a stylus.

I'm gon' get that diamond. i saw it and it was off the chains

hello evryone.pls which sonyericson fone can be compered with n96 in terms of functions &specification