Bloody Nokia
I paid a fair chunk of cash for an N70 last year in the expectation that it would be the solution to all my mobile app needs for the foreseeable future and replace things like the Tungsten T. Overall it’s a fine but slow phone and there are some nice applications for it (Opera mini being particularly good). But one thing that is annoying the hell out of me is that every new announcement from Nokia seems to only be about Series 60 version 3 phones. Are the N73′s etc really that much different from the N70?
The latest slap in the face for existing customers is their Smart2Go application (as reported in The Register)which looks really impressive by providing mapping and route planning on your phone. Whilst they fully support all “Generic Windows Mobile 5″ devices, they only support five of their own most recent phones. It’s amazing that I have to go to a Nokia site to find the best ad ever for buying a Microsoft powered phone.
Those Compact III Windows Mobile 5 devices from Vodaphone UK (made by HTC) look really really good – built in keyboard, Wifi and only £260 on eBay unlocked. If they had GPS they’d be perfect. Oh, and of course they run Smart2Go.
About Conor O'Neill
8 Comments for this entry
erwin
I’m quite sure, there will be a release for older S60 devices too. These guys at gate5 used to support series60 2.n in the past too. Maybe you just have to be patient for while.
Conor
But it hardly makes good business sense to fully support your competition but only half-support your own products at launch time?
Paul M. Watson
I am on the hunt for a good smartphone here in Ireland too and have been quite disappointed with the network operator’s support. You have to, as you are, go through eBay or expansys.ie to get what you want (I want the Nokia E60. Neither O2 nor Vodafone Ireland are going to bring it here.)
That Compact III looks pretty good, gets decent reviews.
As for the Nokia N73 I wouldn’t get one. A co-worker has one and it is slow, switching between apps is frustrating. All the additional CPU power they cram in they nullify with bloated apps. Keep it simple guys, give me performance.
Conor
I’m actually not going to change. N70 is fine for at least another year.
I just got a very lightweight small laptop instead – not as slick as some of those Smartphones but it’ll run 16-year old apps now and everything new that comes along for the next three years at least. And then I’ll put Ubuntu2011 on it and run it for another 4 years.
Sebastian
S60 3rd edition introduced a binary backwards-incompatibility in the file format for Symbian executables. So you cannot support both 3rd edition and pre-3rd edition phones with the same installation package. That is why you see so many applications limited to 3rd edition only, if only one application version is available.
Conor
Wow, I just assumed it was a memory or CPU thing. Now I’m even more annoyed!
You can criticise MS for many things but backwards compatibility at an application level is one thing they did 100% right. However, I don’t know if that’s true about WinCE/Windows Mobile.
bullrun
it uses some of the newer s60 stuff so it is not backward compatible. but, a version for S60 2.x should be coming soon …
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Lex Ferenda » Irish tech blogs - in a paragraph!, February 14th, 2007 on 9:01 pm
[...] Ken has an honest spammer while Justin has a bizarre law-related spam story. Away from the laptop, Nokia’s N70 causes problems and Top Gear gets into trouble. The Ireland-USA relationship is an interesting one; Intel’s [...]