Advance interest in Nokia’s Booklet 3G is, if you believe the rumors, so strong that the Finnish company is already preparing the sequel, but we’ll wait until the first shipping units get played with before getting too excited. The Nokia netbooks have just started to ship in Europe, with O2 Germany offering the Booklet 3G for €249 ($371) with a 24-month, €20 ($30) data plan.
Mobile phone makers like Apple and many others are falling over themselves trying to get in the Chinese mobile phone market. The China market is booming and the country has more mobile subscribers than some countries have population. Nokia has announced a new mobile phone called the 6788 that is designed specifically for the China Mobile network.
Nokia’s N900 is already enticing developers, but right now there’s not the same compelling catalog of applications as you might find, say, in the iPhone’s App Store. Happily that just leaves room for Maemo coders to fill with their own apps, such as a homebrew open-source Spotify application.
Video demo after the cut
The first examples of Nokia’s Booklet 3G netbook are yet to drop into buyers’ hands, but according to leaks fizzing out of Taiwan the Finns are already discussing orders for their second-gen model. Notorious rumor-monger Economic Daily News has suggested that a new Booklet 3G with updated specifications is expected to be released in 2010, a statement that is, frankly, stating the obvious. However, reading between the lines we’d expect any updated netbook from Nokia to take advantage of Intel’s upcoming Pine Trail processors, such as the Atom N450, and we do know a little about that CPU’s release schedule.
Patent infringement suits are almost as common in the technology industry as the launch of new products. The latest legal row is between Nokia and Apple over alleged patent infringement. Nokia alleges that Apple has infringed upon several of Nokia’s patents for mobile phone tech with the iPhone.
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.
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