Nokia N96: The Beast Is Unleashed

If you take the world's most feature-packed mobile phone available (Nokia N95), which has sold more than seven million units worldwide since it went on sale last year, and enhance the spec a little bit such that you would get what Nokia calls as the "most advanced multimedia computer optimized for entertainment," but I prefer to call it just as "Nokia N96."

Officially, the eagerly awaited successor to popular N95 was at last unveiled in Barcelona today at the Mobile World Congress.

So what does this beasty phone has that it replaces another phone, which is still a beast by any measure? Well, surprisingly nothing big is happening here. The N96 weighs around 125 g and comes packing with a solid 16GB of storage internally, which is twice that of the N95, in addition, to a microSD slot (expandable to up to 24GB, three times that of N95 8GB, i suppose) should you still round out of space, something that N95 8GB lacks. The 5-Megapixel autofocus camera with Carl Zeiss lens carries over, but there is now two-LED powered flash and video light to offer. The 2.8” QVGA (240 x 320 pixels) LCD TFT with up to 16 million colors display comes in handy for the integrated DVB-H mobile TV tuner (470-750 MHz ) allowing the users to watch digital Live TV on the phone's 2.8” display, while the 3.5 mm headphone jack, A2DP, and integrated stereo speakers should take care of the audio with aplomb. As shown in the picture below Nokia has even added a little kick-stand to the handset, so you can prop it up on a flat surface to watch your favourite TV shows.

Other features include WiFi, AGPS, and morphing lights on the smaller second slide that hook the user up with game controls are similar to that of N95. Unfortunately, the first and the only version released thus far of the N96 supports HSDPA only on the 900 MHz and 2100 MHz bands, but I think the strength of the spec sheet should still be enough to sell a few of these when it launches in the third quarter of this year.

The N96 also supports Nokia’s "Ovi platform" for music downloads on demand and A-GPS technology to allow users to ‘geotag’ their snaps when uploading them to a social-networking sites. One can also view Flash-based internet videos and videos encoded in the Mpeg4 and WMV formats also on the N96. Nokia has also launched a Video Centre to bring together all its movie trailers and mobile video content in one place.

I think Nokia's N96 is a pretty much impressive phone, but there isn't much improvement over an already mighty impressive N95. It doesn't even have a touch screen, aren't all phones supposed to have those in this day and age? The only feature that I didn't like in N96 is that of the battery (Nokia Battery BL-5F, 950 mAh). I think given two-LED powered flash light Nokia should at least have provided a 1200 mAh battery. Hope they will upgrade it in their second release like they did with N95. The N96 is scheduled for retail in the third quarter of 2008 and will carry an estimated retail price of around €550 (USD $797).

Read more about N96 at its official Website.

Blackberry patents: Angled Slider and Multi-Touch Technology

After the iPhone, every major cell phone manufacturers in the world is working on somekind of touch-interface based device that would have a great impact on the design of the next generation of consumer friendly handsets. Having said this, here's the good news for all the Blackberry users around the globe. A new and interesting patent filed by the RIM Blackberry indicates a new direction that the smartphone company is heading into with its upcoming Blackberry 9000/9100/9900 series devices and consumer handsets giving us a valid reason to believe the rumors that RIM Blackberry may soon have its own touchscreen interface. However, there's not much information available about the new 9000/9100 line of Blackberries.

The first one is titled "Handheld mobile communication device with movable display/cover member," which as illustrated below, introduces us to an interesting angled Blackberry slider configuration whereby the keypad is hidden underneath the screen section, similar to the HTC Touch Dual or the Samsung SGH-i620 aka Sangria.

I think the intention behind this is to be able to use the Blackberry both in the standard as well as the angled-slider modes as needed, and in the closed position it could be operated via the touchscreen interferace, which brings us to the second patent filed called "System and method of integrating a touchscreen within an LCD," which means the company could be creating it’s own multi-touch touchscreen technology.

This patent relates to the field of liquid crystal displays (LCDs), more specifically to touchscreen LCDs. Although there are several types of touchscreens possible, the two most commonly used touchscreen in handheld devices are resistive and capacitive touchscreen. This new technology is said to be different from capacitive touchscreen used in Apple’s iPhones, which uses a metallic coating on a glass sensor, but somewhat similar to the touchscreen described in Nokia S60 Touch patents.

As illustrated in the picture below this also encompasses a touchscreen embedded within the LCD itself. Only instead of using light sensors, it uses an array of parallel electrodes throughout the display and measures the change in voltage between them as pressure is applied through the finger or stylus provided.


In addition of being able to detect multiple touches at once, the basis for Multi-touch, this technology also provides the capability to detect the level of pressure the user is making on the screen and that opens another set of interesting 3D touch interface design possibilities like zooming in and out by just increasing/decreasing the finger pressure on the display or switching between "scroll" and "move" similarly by varying the pressure applied during the sliding gesture.

It’s uncertain whether RIM Blackberry will be displaying any handset that uses either of the two concepts by the end of this year.

More details can be found at Unwired View .