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  • Tech Throwback: Nokia 5100 Series

    Tech Throwback: Nokia 5100 Series

    Its that time of the week I like to take a look at where I’ve been to evaluate where Im going. Technology is cyclical after all… wait no its not. That said I still like all the feels that come rushing back like a flood of nostalgia every time I get my hand on the tech I grew up with. I’m going to go back periodically and take a looking at the stuff that used to blow our hair back and get our minds rolling. Some of these device blew up and changed the world, some where ahead of their time and some just fell flat and became colossal failures. A stroll down memory lane with the phone everyone and everyone’s mom had. The Nokia 5100 series

    The Original Nokia 5100 Series

    Nokia 5100 Series is a Nokia GSM mobile phone model that was consuming the US market in 1998.  The main culprit of this explosion of tech was The Nokia 5110 was rugged, had excellent battery life, and featured an 84 by 48 pixel monochrome LCD with four LED back lights, operated by the Philips PCD8544 display controller.  This was also one of the first mobile phones to feature the game Snake. It became one of the most popular phones of its era. The Nokia 5110 was discontinued in 2001, replaced by other smaller and lighter device

    It Was Free!

    The big reason for the massive success of this Nokia 5100 series is the fact the carriers where forcing down out throats for free, or $.01 with a 2 year contract. Great right? will not so much the $250 subsidy cost built in to the cost of your plan at $25 a month was hardly a good deal. We didn’t care, everyone had one and everyone else was envious.

     

    Customization of  Faceplates

    The Nokia 5100 series was one of the first mobile telephones with a replaceable faceplate. Nokia called them “express plates” . This was a concept they incorporated into several other consumer-oriented cellphones aimed at the young adult market, allowing users to customize their device. I was big on this, I was the guy that would “pimp out your phone”. People across town would pay me to make their phones “da bomb”. With about $3 in parts from china I could replace your phones face plate with a glow in the dark face, add a light up led antenna and a vibrating clear battery and add a few of the hottest ringtones. It was all the rage of 1999- 2001 and I would charge up to $50 for this service. It was a new century and I was flush with success.

     

     

    The Final Though

    Basic as fudge. Nokia 5100 series, It’s the original basic. Text was a coming soon feature, it could call and program up to 50 numbers in your phone book that is it. Not only could you make or receive a call anywhere you are but because of its success and desirable price point every one could. Thus the cell generation was born and like that answering machines died over night. Tune in next week when we talk about the tape based answering machine.

     

  • Nokia 6.1: Resurrection of an Old Name

    Nokia 6.1: Resurrection of an Old Name

    While Apple’s iOS phone operating system is only available on their proprietary phones, Android is an open-source platform. As such, the Android OS is rife with competition. Some of the fiercest competition this year is coming for the Galaxy line of smartphones from Samsung. On the one hand, Google’s own Pixel smartphones are gunning for the throne. Even Motorola, once a maker of budget-friendly phones, is aiming to be the greatest high-end Android these days. One phone, however, is aiming to bring great power at a great value. And that phone is the Nokia 6.1, coming in at an impressive $269.

    The Specs

    The Nokia 6.1 is a technically impressive smartphone considering its cost. It’s powered by a Snapdragon 630 and sports a 5.5-inch 1080p display. It’s working with 3GB of RAM, and it rocks 32GB of internal storage. The rear camera has 16 megapixels, and the phone even sports a 3.5mm headphone jack. Like most modern smartphones, it charges with a USB-C port, which is nice.

    Design

    All of that is housed in a solid-feeling metal casing, giving the phone heft and making it feel durable. The flash is somewhat far from the rear camera, and the phone has a good bit of character. The design feels premium, if somewhat minimal. One would expect a phone in this price range to be bland and faceless, but the 6.1 is no such thing. It simply feels like a modernization of Nokia’s older design principals. That said, the design isn’t perfect: the rear fingerprint scanner is somewhat small. However, that’s a small gripe, as the phone otherwise carries that legendary Nokia durability.

    Nokia 6.1 Bottom Line

    If you’re looking for a good, clean Android phone with a lot of design purity, this is it. No frills, no gimmicks and no heavily-rebranded Android OS cloud this phone. The experience is minimal, the presentation is tasteful, and the price is right. If this phone is any indication of the types of things we’ll see from the new Nokia, then we can’t wait to see what they make next.

  • Tech Throwback: Nokia N-Gage

    Tech Throwback: Nokia N-Gage

    I like to take a look at where I’ve been to evaluate where Im going. Technology is cyclical after all… wait no its not. That said I still like all the feels that come rushing back like a flood of nostalgia every time I get my hand on the tech I grew up with. Im going to go back periodically and take a looking at the stuff that used to blow our hair back and get our minds rolling. Some of these device blew up and changed the world, some where ahead of their time and some just fell flat and became colossal failures. Today I’ve got my hands on the old Nokia N-Gage

     

     

    Around 2000, gamers increasingly carried both mobile phones and handheld game consoles. Nokia spotted an opportunity to combine these devices into one unit. Nokia announced in November 2002 that they would develop the N-Gage, a device that integrated these two devices. Instead of using cables, multiplayer gaming was accomplished with Bluetooth or the Internet (via the N-Gage Arena service). The N-Gage also included MP3 and Real Audio/Video playback and PDA-like features into the system.

     

    The original phone’s taco-shaped design was considered clumsy: to insert a game, users had to remove the phone’s plastic cover and remove the battery compartment as the game slot was next to it. Another clumsy feature was the speaker and microphone being located on the side edge of the phone. This often resulted in many describing it as talking into a “taco phone” or “Sidetalking”, or simply that they had one very large ear, because the user held the edge of the phone against the cheek in order to talk into it. Usual for a phone, but unusually for a game system, it had a screen taller than it was wide, with a size of 2.1′ and resolution of 176 X 208, giving an aspect ratio of 11:13; most televisions and portable game screens were 4:3.

    We all thought the N-Gage would define the mobile gaming market: a device that can serve as a mobile game platform, a tri-band GSM phone, an MP3 player, an FM tuner, an e-mail client, and a personal information manager. Unfortunately, several design flaws severely limited the device’s usefulness, and t the N-Gage went down in history as a poorly implemented great idea.

     

    Hands On 15 years Later

    The original lithium battery on this device has failed but i was able to find a fresh replacement at a pretty reasonable price on eBay. It powers up just like you remember all Nokias did, it has that heavy toy feel as well. I got approximately 6 hours of game time and a few hours of music time. When I spent 5 hours playing games and listening to music, however, the battery died shortly after.

    Its Got Games

    The main purpose for this was to open up the mobile gaming market. We were all dieing to play video games where ever we went in the early century but their just wasn’t the options. Game boys and Sega had games but for a young adult wanted more those were for kids. I’ve been able to locate a copy of Civilization II ans Spider-man 2 and have been playing them all day. The N-Gage is the first place I played Civilization and started a long hobby over many tech devices since. Snake, some Xmen game and a few Tom Clancy games where available as well. Im sure as you all remember the games all came on a MMC card. I tried to condense all the games to one larger card but have been unsuccessful. Playing games on the N-Gage is kinda difficult, mostly because the buttons designed for a phone, are not well-suited for gaming.

     

    The Final Thought

    It was a leap forward, this was the device that got people thinking my phone can do more, it can be more then just a phone. The PDA functions and bluetooth synchronization lead to a big main stream increase in data being held on a phone. Before this I would only keep 40 or so contacts in my Nokia phones because they wouldn’t transfer from phone to phone. You have to re enter them all over again. I enjoyed my few hours with the phone but finished through everything it offered in a few hours and could imagine needing to revisit it again.

  • SmartPhone Spotlight: Nokia 8 Sirocco

    SmartPhone Spotlight: Nokia 8 Sirocco

    Nokia has officially launched the Nokia 8 Sirocco  at the MWC 2018, which will be available from April 2018 . In fact, this is the most powerful phone that will support  Android One.

    The Great

    • Premium Line
    • Solid Stainless steel build
    • Qi wireless charging

    The Not

    • No headphone jack
    • Poor battery performance
    • Snap dragon 835 not 845 processor

    The Conclusion

    a Snapdragon 835 chipset, 6GB of RAM, 128GB of storage, dual rear facing camera, a fingerprint sensor, face unlock and Android 8 Oreo onboard – ensuring the Nokia’s 8 Sirocco has a sizable spec sheet to justify a lofty price tag. With a slew of new  android flagship phones launching from every direction, the Sirocco will have its work cut out to steal some of the market share.

     

    The smartphone is constructed from a single block of stainless steel  a lot like the Apple iPhone X. This makes the Nokia 8 Sirocco a very durable smartphone with stainless steel being much stronger than the Aluminium. It will be  IP67 water and dust resistance. As for size  it measures just 7.5 mm at its thickest point and 2 mm at it thinnest. This will be the first Nokia Android smartphone to support wireless charging as  well.

     

    Quick Spec Look

    The Nokia 8 Sirocco has a 5.5 inch pOLED QHD+ 2560 x 1440 px display with 18:9 aspect ratio. The display offers a dual curved design with the vacuum moulding technology with Gorilla Glass 5. The device is powered by Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 chipset with 4GB RAM and 128GB storage.

    The Nokia 8 Sirocco comes with dual primary camera setup, powered by Zeiss. The primary 12 MP sensor has an f/1.75 aperture with 1.4-micron pixel size and the secondary 13 MP telephoto lens has an f/2.6 aperture. The device has a 5 MP front-facing camera with f/2.0 aperture and 1.micron pixel size. In fact, the primary camera setup found on the smartphone is exactly similar to the Nokia 7 Plus’s camera specifications.

    The device does offer additional features like NFC, 4G VoLte, Bluetooth 5.0, and a rear-facing fingerprint scanner. However, this is the first Nokia smartphone to remove the 3.5 mm headphone jack.

     

    The Final Thought

    Underneath that glossy exterior sits a Snapdragon 835 which enables VR goodness, but is still yesterday’s news compared with the brand new Snap Dragon 845.  This gives one big reason to pass on Nokia’s new bad boy, but nothing stands out as a good selling reason to grab one.

  • The Matrix is Calling from the Nokia 8110 Reboot

    The Matrix is Calling from the Nokia 8110 Reboot

    Nokia has debuted a wide range of promising Android phones across a full pricing spectrum, from the slick Nokia 8 Sirocco at the top to the ultrabudget Nokia 1, which runs the stripped-down Android Go operating system. The most exciting news from Nokia is that they are bringing back the Nokia 8110.

    Morpheus?

    The original Nokia 8110 popularised the slider phone. You know the one we all wanted from the Matrix. We got our first look at the rebooted classic alongside a slew of new phones from Nokia at the annual phone fiesta MWC in Barcelona.

     

    Looks like a Banana

    The classic model’s curved case also earned the nickname the banana which Nokia alludes to in the bright yellow colour of the new model. I’m personally going to go full Keanu and get the black. However it is not spring loaded. When asked Nokia’s Raun Forsyth explained: ‘We looked into it but it was a matter of the complexity and the cost and space it took up. So, the width grew, the thickness grew, there were difficulties of making it reliable and risk-free. In the end we had so many concepts on how to do it: one guy wanted an eject button, then we needed something to dampen the eject and so on. In the end, it came down to that conversation of the sweet spot of being reliable, essential, not over-complicated. The phone’s dimensions are very important. Keeping this to what we consider the perfect size is a real challenge.’

     

    It’s a blast from the past with a tiny, non-touch screen and a 0-9 keypad. Navigating it is just as hard as you’d expect until you remember you actually owned Nokia devices 15 years ago. Fortunately that unsightly top antenna from the original phone is nowhere to be seen.

     

     

    Quick Spec Look

    • Smart Feature OS
    • Dual-core 1.1GHz Qualcomm 205 processor
    • 512MB RAM
    • 4GB internal storage
    •  2.4-inch, 320×240-pixel display
    •  Micro-USB charging port
    • Micro SIM
    • 3.5mm headphone jack
    • 1,500 mAh battery

     

    The Final Thought

    I’m getting one, for $60 it will be a nice back up and it’s makes me feel like I can still walk in to a blockbuster video or call Trinity. I know shouldn’t even care about this phone’s specs because it isn’t a smartphone, so specs don’t really matter. It’s just at a 2.4-inch display, Snapdragon 205 processor, 512MB of RAM, 4GB of built-in storage, 2-megapixel camera, and 1,500 mAh battery that is removable. Remember removable batteries…. I remembers.

     

  • 5 Things We are Anticipating From the MWC 2018

    5 Things We are Anticipating From the MWC 2018

    MWC (or Mobile World Congress to give it its full name) is one of the biggest events on the mobile calendar, with 2017’s Barcelona show bringing us the LG G6, Sony Xperia XZ, and Huawei Pro among dozens of other devices. The 2018 Congress takes place February 26th- March 1st in Barcelona. Here are the Top 5 reasons to pay attention to the MWC this year

     

    1. Samsung Galaxy s9

    The Galaxy Flagship latest installment is going to be one of the highlights of MWC 2018. This upcoming flagship has  already been confirmed for the show. Samsung is having a unveiling conference the day before on the 25th, but all the hands on and non corporate views will happen at the MWC.  From what we are guessing the Galaxy S9 and its larger sibling are rumored to have a similar design and screen to the S8 range, meaning a metal frame, a glass back and an almost bezel-free curved display, but with the fingerprint scanner likely moved from beside the camera to below it. What we dont know is what will blow our sock off.

     

    2.Nokia 7+

    One of the devices we see is expected to be the Nokia 7+. We have all been waiting for our old trust Nokia to jump in to the android game and bring snake with it. The picture shows the front of the Nokia 7+, and as you can see, this will be the first Nokia phone to adopt a modern design with slim bezels. The Nokia branding can be found near the top left next to the front-facing camera, and the fingerprint sensor will be moved to the back.  rumored specs for the phone include an FHD+ resolution for the screen, Snapdragon 660 processor, dual 12MP and 13MP cameras, microSD card support. Im really hopping this one is a boom and not a bust, id love to see a big Nokia return.

     

     

     

     

    3. LG

    There are two options we could see out of LG. while we’re fairly certain we’re going to see an upgraded LG v30 at MWC, stocked with a new AI.  That means better image recognition for the on-board camera, so it can recognize what you’re shooting and adjust the settings accordingly, and an improved set of voice commands for Google Assistant. On the other hand there is buzz we will see the new G7, but most insiders are speculating that LG is going to push the launch of the successor to the LG G6 to later in the year

     

     

    4.Huawei Honor 7X and Watch 3

    Last Year, Huawei took full advantage of MWC to announce the P10. Whatever this new smartphone ends up being called, it’s likely to be the star of Huawei’s MWC 2018 appearance that won’t include the announcement of the P20 and P20 Plus flagships with them being pushed to a late march release. We are also hoping to see a Huawei Watch 3 upgrade. Some patents suggest added sensors would detect gestures you make on the back of your hand, so you could for example sketch a letter with your finger and have it appear on the watch screen, or make double tap and long press gestures, allowing you to interact with the watch without touching it.

     

    5. Motorola: New G6 or Z Force3

    The latest rumors have Motorola planning to announce a series of successors to last year’s Moto G5 lineup. The phones I’m looking to see are the Moto G6, Moto G6 Play, the Moto G6 Plus or a Z force3. Some mind blowing Moto Mods would be exciting as well. It is noted thought that Motorola does not have an event scheduled at MWC, so maybe not.