The Nokia 5230 is the Finnish firm’s attempt to cash in on the success – and shape – of the 5800 XpressMusic with a more budget-minded entry-level version, and going by gsmhelpdesk’s hands-on preview it sounds like they may be on to a winner. The 5230 gets praised for its ease of use and sound quality, happily using a standard 3.5mm headphone socket rather than anything unpleasantly proprietary.
Having dithered around its release date like a forgetful felon, the Nokia N900 looks to have finally been granted a more or less official launch window. According to the official US Nokia store, the N900 will begin shipping at the “end of October 2009“; that tallies with what Amazon UK were saying back at the end of September (October 26th), but the mega-retailer has now changed its tune.
Nokia have announced their Q3 2009 financial results, and when your “Highlights” section leads with the news that overall net sales were down 20-percent year-on-year, at €9.8bn, and mobile device volumes down 8-percent year-on-year (5-percent sequentially) to 108.5m units, you know it’s not been a good quarter. In fact, operating profit for devices & services was down 51-percent from the same three-month period a year ago, plunging from €1,602m to €785m.
CEO Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo is putting a positive spin on things, painting a picture of improving demand for products constrained by “component shortages we encountered across the portfolio”. Devices & services net sales have at least risen from the previous quarter, by 5-percent (6-percent when currency fluctuations are cancelled out), though Nokia Siemens Networks net sales continue to drag overall performance down.
We’re inherently sceptical of anything blurry that’s claiming to be a prototype, so throw some salt over your shoulder and take a look at what’s tipped as Nokia’s next-gen N9xx-series Internet Tablet device. According to imobile365 the Nokia N920 will be a touchscreen-only device, using a 4.13-inch capacitive touchscreen rather than the N900’s 3.5-inch resistive panel and supporting multitouch gestures on Maemo 6.
I mentioned back at the beginning of the month that the Nokia Booklet 3G had turned up in the Best Buy inventory with a price tag of $599.99 attached. Nokia has now officially confirmed that price tag for machines that are purchased without an accompanying data plan. It also appears that the netbook will be operate on the AT&T network and is a Best Buy exclusive as previously reported.
We have seen and talked about the Nokia N97 mini and know all the required details and such to determine if we want the device or not. Now that the handset is shipping it’s time for new limited edition versions to tip up and woo those undecided shoppers into buying. Today we spied the Nokia N97 mini RAOUL limited edition handset, and the thing actually looks pretty good.
The Nokia N900 was the stand-out device from Nokia World back in September, and we’ve been tracking the Maemo 5 smartphone ever since. Imagine our surprise, then, when a pre-release N900 dropped onto the SlashGear test bench today; the hardware is final, so the 5-megapixel autofocus Carl Zeiss camera is onboard, together with HSPA, WiFi b/g, a 3.5-inch 800 x 480 touchscreen and slide-out QWERTY keyboard, and you can check out our video unboxing and gallery after the cut.
In the second chunk of Maemo 6 news today, Nokia have been spilling details regarding the upcoming OS at the Maemo Summit. Steve from UMPC Portal has snapped some of the slides, with confirmation that Maemo 6 will support multitouch and capacitive touchscreens – as we already knew – together with some previews of potential UI designs.
Nokia have already been pretty upfront about their intentions with the cross-platform Qt framework and Maemo, but the company has just pushed out an official Qt port to Maemo 5 in the form of a “technology preview” release. Contrary to earlier news that Qt wouldn’t play nicely with Maemo 5, the OS which the Nokia N900 will run, but only Maemo 6 (expected in late 2010), the Qt port “is designed specifically to work within the Maemo 5 environment”.
Video demo on the N900 after the cut
We already knew that the Nokia E72 was coming this month – it’s been listed on Vodafone UK’s site since early September – but the Finns themselves have now got into the action with a SIM-free price. The E72 has been added to Nokia UK’s online store for preorder, priced at £359 ($572), though there’s no telling when they’ll actually begin shipping.
JP
