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hollypolly15

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http://www.engadget.com/2011/02/11/exclusive-nokias-windows-phone-7-concept-revealed/

Nokia's future? Producing the Samsung Focus, I guess. Just another slab.

If they can put a decent camera in there and if MS can fill all the feature gaps in WP7 it might be worth looking at, but it looks like at least for now they're working hard on treading a path already unsuccessfully taken by other manufacturers.

I love the comments on Engadget. Suddenly Nokia is worth considering now that the OS and ecosystem are 2 years behind the competition instead of just one. Can't deny it - people love shiny things.
 
I've not nothing against WP7 specifically. If it could be a USB device, if it could play media without transcoding, if it could send files via Bluetooth, if it supported removable storage, if they improved the IE browser on it, if it had navigation and if it supported multitasking, I'd be just fine with it. But those are a lot of ifs.

I fully expect this render to be representative of Nokia's first efforts: generic. I'm sure it will do as well as similar, existing products too: not very. About all they can do is put a camera on it, but then again so can anyone else.
 
I realize its just concept image, but I admit those slabs look damn good to me. I was actually impressed and got just a tiny bit of wow looking at them.

I don't know where I stand on this whole change to windows. I liked the bold move, but windows will take years to acquire the feature set of symbian

God those slabs would be superb with Meego on them!
 
Microsoft is moving pretty fast, they'll get those features in pretty quickly, and at least we know they won't be taking important features out. With the SIP stack gone there really was no reason for me to buy a new Symbian phone for its software.
 
Yeah, thats just ridiculous.

They're 2 years behind now, and they're going to be another two years behind by the time they get a product out. At best, they'll be behind 3 years.

Do they think iOS, Android, and WebOS will standstill while they try to catch up?

And the existing platforms are getting screwed hard, despite their spin, so the existing platforms will get less R&D and overall less resources... What a short-sighted, bone-headed move.

Intel was your gateway to the NA market and Nokia just spat in their face.
 
The interface is still there for it on my 5230, which is 9.4 up from 9.1 on my N95 8GB, but I'm unable to actually make anything work. Maybe they put it back in for the N8, but it's pretty damn frustrating having a newer version of the OS that actually has less features, particularly when that's a feature I rely on. At least with Windows Phone 7 I'll know that anything I've come to rely on will stay in future upgrades, rather than being added and removed haphazardly at Nokia's whim.
 
Nokia doesn't make the components of its cameras. Lens from Carl Zeiss, which recently joined the Panasonic group along with Schneider. Sensors are Japanese.

Anybody can do it. The question is the cost. In order to meet a cost budget, you prioritize one department at the cost of others. Nokia has been pushing cameras while sacrificing basic electronics like CPU, memory and so on. HTC, Apple, Samsung took the opposite path, and look at the results.
 
Technically everyone could make a phone with as good reception as Nokia as well, but nobody's been able to pull that off in over a decade.
 
Honestly, I don't think we'll ever see some of those features in WP7. Microsoft has a vested interest in not embedding them in an effort to push their platform of products on you or to protect partner interests. Some will come, naturally, but others will be strictly forbidden for the same reason that they are on Apple platforms.

As for the renders, they're very now-chic. That's the hot look these days - big screen and square slab - they'd look the same with any other OS on them. I just happen to think they look very much like the Focus and, in fact, it seems that there's a very "WP7" look to phones delivered for the platform what with the nature of the angles and corners. This concept phone seems to follow the pattern closely. I wouldn't be surprised if Microsoft produced the render as opposed to Nokia.

Anybody can put a great camera into their device if they want. Nokia may have its ongoing agreement with Zeiss but you don't need Zeiss optics. Japanese manufacturers actually make some of the finest optics in the world and sensors are basically commodity goods. I'm sure that this next product cycle commencing at MWC will imaging-centric phones. Nokia proved that there's demand by selling 4+M units in a quarter basically on the camera alone (at least insofar as bloggers, analysts and other pundits are concerned).

As to Drillbit's assertion that Nokia has focused on imaging at the cost of CPU and RAM, I say again that Nokia chose its specs precisely to meet its needs. The BCM2727 does most of the leg work in most use cases and it's very powerful indeed. You can keep repeating falsehoods all you like and convince any number of people, but they remain falsehoods regardless.
 
Here. I whipped this up in 1 minute: have yourself a chuckle.

IiJLt.jpg


Are they suddenly less attractive?
 
Most of the real flat phones I see now have very good reception. Even voice quality. In fact, Nokia's traditional strengths of RF and voice quality no longer stand out. I know for a fact my Nokia N85 and 5530 has worst voice quality than my Nexus One or my Galaxy S. My daughter commented on the voice quality of the Galaxy S the first day she got it, and she's been a Blackberry user for three years now.
 
Don't tell me there is some kind of magic involved with Nokia's camera.

It only depends how much cost you want to invest on a camera. The rest is post processing.

I don't see how a 680Mhz ARM11 chip is "powerful" these days. You have no idea how fast devices with true superscalar CPUs can do.

An ARM11 is still a scalar CPU. The fastest possible execution time of a single instruction is one clock cycle. Most do more than that.

Snapdragons and Cortex A8 chips are superscalar. That means they can execute multiple instructions within a single clock cycle.

If you have an 800MHz ARM11 processor against a 600Mhz Cortex A8 processor, the A8 is still much faster. Much faster.

When you start factoring GHz speeds and dual cores, it becomes even more so.
 
I've been playing with a relative's N8 the past few weeks, and I find it funny that the phone was actually fairly speedy at interface operation when compared to these "superscalar CPUs". The browser shows the weakness of the ARM11 (in my understanding, the processor does all the work with the current nokia and android browsers?) but for the N8 the arm11+broadcom chip wasn't a bad combo for a good experience.
 
Nope, like I said anybody could do as good if they wanted to and I think we'll see some examples at MWC.


You also don't see that the CPU in the N8 doesn't perform difficult media tasks, so it doesn't need to be much more powerful. Check out the block diagram of the BCM2727 in this datasheet:

http://www.curiouscat.org/Steve/Media/2727-PB01-R.pdf

Virtually all of the most taxing functions that you'd perform with the phone are handled by special silicon on the BCM2727. The CPU calls the shots, but the BCM2727 does all the heavy lifting. It does the image processing. It handles the display. It delivers HDMI out. It does vector math. It is a 2D and 3D graphics accelerator. It does the video encoding and decoding. It provides interfaces to storage. It does audio encoding and decoding.

As an example, there's no way a general purpose CPU of any sort will be able to encode/decode H.264 as quickly as a purpose-made piece of silicon. That's why Intel embedded special encode/decode engines in Sandy Bridge that smack the 4-core 3.6GHz CPU they sit next to around like a rag doll.

Nobody is saying that the CPU in the N8 is "powerful." It's not - you're right. I'm saying it doesn't need to be a dual core 1.2GHz Cortex A9 because it would mostly sit idle while the BCM2727 still did all the leg work. Symbian itself needs relatively little compared to the competition. The functions you perform with it are handled by the BCM2727, and I say again that that chip is pretty darned powerful.
 
No, all S^3 devices in the quarter was in excess of 5M. The C7 and C6-01 didn't start shipping until half-way or later through the quarter and if you look at the ratio of product reviews amongst the phones you'll see that the vast majority of sold units were N8s.

You can confirm this for yourself by comparing the ratios of customer reviews of the N8 to the C7 and C6-01 at vendors who sell all three and by comparing the ratios of customer reviews of apps on the Ovi Store by phone model. There were 10 reviews from/for the N8 for every one from a C7 or C6-01 throughout Q4, although the C7 is starting to make headway and that ratio has changed somewhat. Still don't see a lot of C6-01s.

The likely breakdown, and numerous analysts agree, is suggestive of around 4M N8s sold.
 
UI is fairly simple. So it doesn't tax the processor or the GPU. FYI, an LG Optimus One with a 600Mhz ARM11 processor still has a snappy interface. A Blackberry Bold 9000 with a 624Mhz ARM11 processor is quite snappy.

But when it comes to fast rendering of web browsers, it shows. You can't pass Javascript and HTML processing to a GPU or DSP.

Then on and on to many apps as well. When you start to do photo editing on your phone, whether its mobile Photoshop, Instagram on iOS or Camera360 on Android, again brute force matters. You want to edit those pictures and post them to Facebook, Flickr right now without going to a desktop.
 
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