N9 Countdown Timer Pulled Off Nokia Sweden

The N9 Meego-powered handset is one of the most anticipated handsets from Nokia. This is the last Meego handset that Nokia will deliver, since they are now looking at Windows Mobile to power their smartphones. The expected date for the release of this 3.9-inch handset was supposed to be the 23rd of September, 2011. A countdown clock was put up on Nokia's Swedish website, indicating the same. However, this timer has now been quietly taken down. Hopefully the N9 will release on time According to a report by GSM Arena, the countdown clock was put up on the website 50 days prior to the launch of the handset. When the timer popped up, there was no major announcement, and its removal was done as quietly. Hopefully, for those looking to get their hands on the N9, the launch of the phone should not get delayed. We certainly are hoping for the launch, as soon as possible. A brief look at the specifications of the Nokia N9: 3.9-inch AMOLED capacitive touchscreen with a resolution of 480 x 854 pixels 3G, Wi-Fi, GPS with A-GPS support Bluetooth 2.1 with A2DP and EDR, NFC 8 megapixel camera with autofocus and Dual LED Flash 3.5 mm audio jack Dolby Mobile Sound Enhancement with Dolby Headphone Support 1GB RAM 16GB/ 32GB 1 GHz Cortex A8 CPU

BlackBerry Bold 9900 Reviewed

Research in Motion (RIM), the maker of BlackBerry has been under adverse market pressure for a while now and one of its key strategies to turn things around was to speed up its release cycle. The RIM head honchos in Waterloo, Canada have probably heard enough ranting about BlackBerry smartphones featuring fairly dated processors and a visibly aging OS.

And of course, nothing makes things crystal clear to head honchos as a dip in market share, which is exactly what RIM has been witnessing globally. Even as I write this, Gartner’s latest data shows that RIM’s market share in mobile phones has fallen from 3.2 percent in Q2 2010 to 3 percent in Q2 2011, while Apple’s has nearly doubled. Of course the once mighty mobile phone leader Nokia has crashed in a far more spectacular fashion, and seeing Nokia’s fate and its own crashing stock price must be making the once-upon-a-time smartphone leader RIM quite wary.

RIM’s response: A whole new series of smartphones with mouth-watering specs have been announced and are being launched in the next few days and weeks. This is the biggest launch in RIM’s history—never before has the smartphone maker launched so many devices in so short a time, but I guess tough times demand drastic, out-of-comfort-zone measures. And the first in the pack is the BlackBerry Bold 9900.

Check out our quick video review below -

Blackberry 9900

Form Factor
At first glance the Bold 9900 reminded me of the Bold 9000, the first BlackBerry to feature the ‘Bold’ brand and which brings back great memories for a BlackBerry regular like me. Trawl any BlackBerry-related forum and you’ll see many users wistfully remembering the Bold 9000 despite two more great Bold smartphones (the 9700 and the 9780) being released in later years.But that’s where the similarity ends. The Bold 9900 may look like the Bold 9000 from the front, but is thinner, slightly smaller and if you compare what’s inside the difference would be as stark as comparing the insides of a Toyota commuter car with a Porsche.

Very elegant design

Touted as the thinnest BlackBerry yet (115 x 66 x 10.5 mm), I think the Bold 9900 looks great—very businesslike and is built like a tank. I don’t like bling and the brushed metal rim with a thin polished edge is the very opposite of bling, as it gently whispers class. The rear battery isn’t faux leather as in the 9780, and is smooth as they come, and with good reason. Under the rear cover is the Near Field Communication (NFC) antenna, so the rear had to be smooth carbon fibre so there would be no signal disruptions. Fortunately, thanks to the gentle protrusion at the rear which is rubberised, the device won’t slip from your hands. Brilliant design!

Weighing in at 130 gms, the Bold 9900 is heavier and bigger than its immediate predecessor. RIM is swimming against the usual flow here, but I think it’s a great decision — I loved the feel of the 9900 in my hands. Incidentally, some informal dipstick surveys I did revealed that the fairer sex may find it a tad too large. Button positioning is a bit different from the standard BlackBerry style. On the right of the 9900 there are now four buttons, as opposed to the usual three. Three are media buttons with a welcome pause button in the middle and the bottom one is a convenience key you can customize as per your liking.

The slimmest Bold yet

Unfortunately, there's no convenience key on the left, a glaring omission I didn't like one bit. There's a micro USB port for charging and sync and a standard 3.5mm audio out slot with a nice contoured design. On the top there's a single lock button which is placed bang in the centre and far easier to click than the top lock button on some earlier BlackBerry smartphones.

The 9900 boasts of a 2.8-inch, 640 x 480 pixel capacitive touchscreen that is incredibly sharp thanks to BlackBerry 7 OS' Liquid Graphics technology. This is the best BlackBerry display yet. The touchscreen is very precise and responsive and the trackpad plus touchscreen combo works great. Even though I prefer QWERTY over touchscreens any day, I found myself intuitively using the touchscreen often. 
I'm usually not the betting kind, but in this case, I’ll bet large amounts that the QWERTY keyboard on the Bold 9900 is the best on any smartphone. Period. In my opinion, the erstwhile Bold 9000had the best QWERTY keyboard till date, but that great keyboard has finally been dethroned by one that's even more silky soft, slightly larger and is all-in-all, jaw-dropping amazing. Not one wrong keystroke from the get go - it's that good.

Features & Performance
As mentioned earlier, what’s inside this baby is very different from your standard BlackBerry. For years, RIM used a processor clocked at 624MHz across 3 generations of Bold devices and finally (yes, F-I-N-A-L-L-Y!), the new Bold 9900 is powered by a swift 1.2 GHz processor backed by 768 MB RAM and 8 GB of onboard memory. If you consider that its predecessor (the Bold 9780) had just 2 GB on onboard memory, you’d realise this is a drastic change for RIM, and a welcome change at that. There’s also support for up to 32GB more via micro SD. Unfortunately the card is not hot swappable, which is a step backwards for the 9900 over its predecessor.

Thanks to the snappy processor, this BlackBerry was a dream to use. Quick and responsive. Even reboots were no longer a pain in the you-know-where.

Office features for the business-person on the go

Some thanks for the boost in performance must also go to the new BlackBerry OS 7, but only some. This was originally codenamed as OS 6.1 and frankly, that’s what it is and RIM should have left it at that, but perhaps RIM marketing felt otherwise. While a definite and welcome improvement over OS 6, this is the best BlackBerry OS yet, but still has some way to go before the iOS and Android fan boys will be amazed, and that way is the QNX way, which is now on the BlackBerry PlayBook and which is expected to be the next big thing from RIM. But till then we’ll live with OS 7.

As on OS 6, you get application icon views or drawers that can be swiped vertically as well as horizontally through categories like All, Favourites, Media, Downloads and Frequent. My greatest joy is that horizontal swiping can be disabled--I found it annoying since I would keep swiping to the next category accidentally. There's also the familiar drop down notification view, which is now much faster. And of course there's Universal Search that has now been upgraded to being voice-enabled. A few updated icons are also thrown in and there's now some more choice in the Settings menu. All welcome changes, but despite these and upgraded apps I still feel giving the OS a whole new number series is a bit much. Speaking of apps, Documents to Go Premium edition now comes preloaded and there's a new BlackBerry Balance feature for business users where you can automatically separate management of work and personal data. Corporate data can be managed and wiped by BES admins, but personal data is kept separate.

Excellent audio quality

However, OS 7 definitely seems to have some issues when it comes to backward compatibility of apps. My favourite Social app, SocialScope Lite refused to run. Even apps downloaded from the BlackBerry App World available on the 9900 (Burrp! for instance) refused to run and worse, even froze up the smartphone. I believe all apps need to be recertified for OS 7, which is not a great thing. RIM certainly needs to sort out this issue and quickly. It reminds me of the BlackBerry PlayBook application disaster that RIM has still not fixed, though this is of a much lesser intensity considering I faced this problem with only around 4-5 of the 25-plus apps on my BlackBerry. Also, disclosure must be made that I used a pre-release device—commercially available devices may not face this problem.

The 9900 also features an Orientation Sensor (Accelerometer), Digital Compass (Magnetometer) and a Proximity Sensor, which should help it take advantage of BlackBerry 7 OS support for augmented reality apps.

Media
Audio on the Bold 9900 is absolutely awesome with exquisitely clear tones and a heavy bass line without a hint of jarring and well-balanced higher and mid level tones. You’ll notice some layers you never thought existed in your favourite music. Audio Boost certainly helps with output and so do the EQ presets. However, we don't recommend peaking the volume, not that you'll ever need to. At 75 percent, the decibel level is high enough to drown out the outside world.

Liquid Graphics make for clear and easy viewing of videos

We also tested it with various video formats. MP4, AVI, 3GP, MOV and WMV formats worked well and it plays up to 720p. 1080p is not supported. However, the 9900 doesn't read MKV or FLV formats.

Connectivity
Browser
I'd agree with RIM's claims that this is the best browser yet on a BlackBerry. It's not very far from the best browsers in the market, and a larger screen size might have really, really brought it very close indeed, but that's out of the realm of possibility, so let's focus on the possible. There are definite performance gains in terms of web page rendering and pinch and zoom thanks to Liquid Graphics. The excellent resolution makes web pages look great. But when I zoomed in and swiped down, rendering took some time. And there's still no Flash support and that's why I'm not so gaga over some of RIM's improved browsing claims.

Pinch to zoom now avilable for web browsing

NFC
I’ve mentioned NFC capabilities earlier, but if you’re wondering what this is all about—NFC or Near Field Communication makes possible transactions, data exchange, and connections with a mere touch. So, you can purchase products and transfer secure information by simply touching devices. For instance, if you're in Mumbai and the Mumbai Metro finally becomes reality before the world comes to an end, you could simply take your BlackBerry close to a reader to pay for the ticket from your mobile wallet. Besides electronic money, other possibilities include file sharing, mobile gaming and more. RIM is one of the first major vendors to actually go beyond talking to deploying NFC on devices and must be commended for that.

Camera The camera is the same 5 MP (fixed focus) one with an LED used on the 9780—the only new feature is that OS 7 now supports up to 1280 x 720 video recording. Do remember though that at those specs a 21 second video I recorded gobbled up 35 MB of storage space on my media card. Outdoor images look ok but colors aren't retained too well Photographs clicked in good light were decent and colours were fairly well reproduced, though it wasn’t anything to write home about. Surely RIM could have provided a camera with a higher rating on its top-of-the-line smartphone rather than use yesterday’s camera that was also available on the BlackBerry 9780. Indoor pictures in slightly low lit conditions are grainy Battery This is another grouse. There’s nothing really wrong with the thin 1230 mAh battery, but in my opinion RIM should have gone for a thicker 1500 mAh battery like the one on the 9780 rather than sacrifice capacity in the quest for the thinnest Blackberry yet. But that’s my personal opinion. RIM claims OS 7 results in lower battery drain as compared to older OS’ despite the faster processor and the touchscreen. We put the device through our tech2 battery loop test where the first loop consisted of 1.5 hours calling, 2 hours of video, 2 hours of music playback and 2 hours of audio streaming via WiFi. At the end of this tough regimen, the battery still had enough juice to go on standby for 6.5 hours before it finally went dead. I used the 9900 over BES and as my primary calling device, and it lasted me around a day. We reckon it should last around 24 hours with full usage that would include BIS or BES (push e-mail), BBM use, social networking and web access with a little music thrown in. That’s definitely not bad at all. But imagine what a 1500 mAh battery would do? That’s my only grouse. The Bottom Line Yes, this is the best BlackBerry out there and finally something that puts RIM’s offering on par with the best when it comes to a simple spec-to-spec shootout. Of course, BlackBerry fans know specs are not everything—there’s the legendary messaging capabilities, the fearsome security that has governments across the world trying to arm-twist RIM to give them access to the otherwise unbreakable encryption, the unmatched data optimisation and compression strengths (which is why if you receive the same e-mail messages and surf the same websites, your data bill will be lower if you use a BlackBerry as compared to other devices). Sophisticated and ready for work or play So, when you put together the looks, the specs, the performance and the price of Rs 32,490 (MRP), you have a great combination. Yes, there are niggles like the dated camera and my wish for a 1500 mAh battery, but when compared with the whole package, they seem small. The Bold 9900 is the top-of-the-line BlackBerry and overall, it lives up to the iconic Bold brand. I expect to see this smartphone flying off the shelves. If you’re in the market for a top-end smartphone, do give this one a good look and if you’re a BlackBerry fan, well, you’d go buy it anyway because there’s no other BlackBerry better than this one.

Android Honeycomb 3.1 - A Quick Breakdown

Google’s Android operating system for tablets has had mixed reactions.

Google’s Android operating system for tablets has had mixed reactions. On one hand, users seem to like Android for the mobile phone, and on the other hand, there’s Honeycomb 3.0 that lacks the finish and refinement seen in its primary competitor - iOS. Many of us agree that the OS is far from complete and there are some bugs that need to be ironed out. The iPad has been a runaway success and Google is hoping to catch up once Honeycomb matures. We just got news of Motorola launching Android 3.1 for the Xoom tablet and that’s something we’ll see across the board very soon. Here’s a quick look at what key features and enhancementsHoneycomb 3.1 has to offer. Improved USB support While tablets were designed to replace netbooks and notebooks, one of the key things stopping users from doing so was poor connectivity with other devices using the USB interface. Come Honeycomb 3.1, users will be able to use a wide variety of USB devices with their tablets. USB open to a variety of devices; game controllers included This means, everything from keyboards, mice, other input devices and even digital cameras will be able to work with tablets. Imagine typing on a tablet using a portable, folding keyboard and transferring images from your camera or a card reader to your tablet, and viewing photos in real time. Google says that you can even use Bluetooth-based input devices with the tablet. Resizable Widgets Sure, this is something that third party window managers bring, but Android has never really had a built-in feature to do this. This means, anyone using Honeycomb had to be satisfied with the size of widgets. The new widget system lets you drag widgets into the screen of your choice and then adjust its width by holding it down, similar to what LauncherPro would let you do. Improved Wi-Fi capabilities Well technically, it’s not going to be faster or anything of that sort, but there will be bits and pieces added to the functionality. For example, users can now turn off the screen and the tablet will continue to stream content over the network for extended periods. Wi-Fi optimized for longer battery life There’s also an option for users to use HTTP proxies for separate Wi-Fi networks, so you no longer have to switch networks and set a different HTTP proxy each time. Google claims that their new Preferred Network Offload (PNO) feature will help reduce battery drain during long Wi-Fi sessions. App Updates There are a bunch of Google apps that come bundled with any Google Android OS. Google has tweaked many of these for the 3.1 release. The browser, for example has an improved Quick Controls UI that’s bound to make navigation and multitasking between tabs easier. The browser has been upgraded to allow HTML5 video playback, so you no longer have to depend on Flash versions of Vimeo and Youtube videos. UI tweaked and enhanced to allow easier navigation Ability to save web pages for offline viewing is also a part of the browser now. Users should also notice some performance benefits, all thanks to hardware acceleration support through plugins for the browser. The Gallery now supports something called PTP (Picture Transfer Protocol). In simple terms, you can import photos from a camera to the Gallery easily. Other apps to receive enhancements are E-mail, Contacts and Calendar.  ASUS Transformer - one of the tablets to get the 3.2 update Whether or not Google is successful in impressing users will only be known in the weeks to come, as manufacturers start rolling out these updates. Google has already started work on 3.2 andmanufacturers are announcing that the update should be available sometime in August.

Nokia X7 Symbian Anna Smartphone

Nokia’s had a big screen presence for a long time, and the X7, like many predecessors made a debut in one of this year’s blockbusters i.e. Transformers: Dark of the Moon. It definitely has stage presence is what I thought, and was quite eager to put it through its paces. The handset made its way to our labs and after having used it quite thoroughly for a few days here’s what I can tell you about Nokia X7. 

Form Factor
Nokia’s latest trend for their high-end touchscreen handset seems to be ‘uni-body’. The X7 is a rather odd looking device that tapers towards the ends on both sides. Whipping it out of your pocket, you’re going to get confused as to which side is up till the screen comes on. The stainless-steel body does however, give it a very sturdy look and feel. Speaking of the screen – the 4-inch Gorilla Glass encased AMOLED touchscreen sports a 360 x 640 pixel resolution, which is quite low when compared to its peers the Optimus Black and the Samsung Galaxy S that features 480 x 800 pixel resolutions. Nevertheless, the colors are quite vivid and black levels are quite deep, although not as deep as the Optimus P970.

Widgets for all your apps on the homescreen

The X7 has the weirdest and yet oddly innovative slots for the SIM and microSD cards. The trays need to be pulled out and they’re not the easiest things to deal with. Of course, it’s not like you’d need to keep removing and re-inserting the cards, but I would still have liked them to be a bit more accessible. You need to push one side of the slot in and when the other pops out, grab and pull. I call the it the ‘pop, grab n pull’ system. A micro USB connector is located at the top near the 3.5mm handsfree socket and the power/screen lock button that’s also designed to look unconventional. The volume rocker and camera shutter release are placed on the wrong side of the curve making it quite difficult to access when required. They should also have been a bit more raised.

The headphone and power ports

Unconventional. That is the word for the X7, but it doesn’t necessarily work for it. This all metal, hardcore looking handset weighs in at 146g making it quite heavy. The built in speakers are quite loud and the bundled handsfree kit is comfortable on the ears.

Features and Performance
Interface 
Symbian Anna really didn’t impress me too much, as it’s really quite like the original S60 touchscreen edition with just a few cosmetic changes. The icons are larger and have rounded edges, like on iOS, except here, brighter colours are used. Real-time scrolling’ i.e. the screen moves with your swipe isn’t really a big deal, but does make the UI seem a little more fluid. There’s a hint of lag that’s evident while accessing apps and features. I also noticed that while bringing the handset out of sleep mode, shortcut options in the desktop tabs took about 2 seconds to refresh. It seemed like the 680 MHz ARM 11 processor had a little difficulty keeping up now and then, but functioned well enough most of the time including providing a smooth transition effect when the screen changes orientation. Multi-touch zooming is also present.

The new Anna icon set is refreshing

Although Nokia has taken on a whole new visual for their virtual keypad, I’m quite disappointed with it. While Android and iOS allow you to type and view the chat/message screen simultaneously, Anna does not. It opens up a whole new page with a text field occupying one half and the keypad with rather tiny keys taking up the bottom half. This means it takes one extra key press just to reply to a chat or to send a message. In landscape mode though, the on-screen QWERTY keypad was definitely more versatile.

Comfortable to use

Nokia has still not found a way to integrate the phone book with social networking options. Once again we see Android and iOS a few steps ahead. While they do offer a certain amount of syncing to join contacts from your phone's memory with their corresponding details found via Facebook and Twitter syncing, with Anna, like all previous Symbian versions that offered this, it has to be done manually on a contact to contact basis. It’s quite time consuming, even if you have to do it just once.

Media Once again, I’m appalled to find a new version of an old operating system come minus media features that matter. While the native music player offers Loudness and stereo widening with a few presets thrown in, Nokia has still left out a customizable EQ function. Audio quality is crisp and clear with bass levels deep enough to enjoy without complaining too much. Personally though, I would have preferred them to be delivered at slightly higher decibel levels. Nokia has also thrown in Shazam for getting details on music you’re listening to. The FM radio was thankfully a non-issue. It did, however find only 4 out of the 9 or so available stations. Reception was not bad in most places, but just a little skewed while commuting. A photo editor is also thrown in. Multi-touch zooming works well Video playback was also quite average. With the ability to read DivX and XviD coded files, it managed to play a few of our test videos, but 720p came through sans audio for some reason. It was vice-versa with 1080p videos. We did not expect them to play in the first place, either. The X7 also supports FLV files, but you won’t know that till you actually go through the file manager, find them and play them from there. My FLV test files refused to show up in the video player’s list, but played quite well directly from the card. A video editor is also on board, which allows you to create slide shows for your images or make a few minor adjustments to your captured video files.  Gaming on the X7 is pretty good, and although the higher end games available for download are a bit jittery now and then, visually they look pretty good on the display and control is just about right. Needless to say, Anna has done nothing major on the media front.  Connectivity The Nokia X7 does offer a decent amount of connectivity options, but nothing that would compete with even some Android devices priced at about Rs. 6,000 less. 3G and EDGE support is of course provisioned for and so is Wi-Fi connectivity, but no hotspot creation or DLNA support is provided. Other options included VPN access, Bluetooth 3.0 with A2DP and USB 2.0 with modem support. The new Anna browser is a breath of fresh air and is designed to support HTML5 with Flash Support. Web browsing is actually one of the X7’s better features. AMOLED screen offers really good picture quality Nokia’s Social app allows you to connect to Twitter and FB simultaneously and whether you like it or not, will update posts in both places if you don’t access either one separately. The Symbian version of Whatsapp is a real let down and is no where as neat or streamlined or basically as visually neat as the other OS'. Other apps for chatting on Gtalk etc. will need to be downloaded off the Ovi Store. The Setting up email accounts is as easy as it is with any other smartphone thankfully and support for Microsoft Exchange is also present. Nokia has also preloaded their YouTube, Nat Geo, Paramount Movie Trailer, CNN Video and E! video streaming apps.   Nokia Ovi Maps have been seriously beefed up and not only look better, but also seemed to function better. The UI is simplistic and getting directions is almost as simplistic as Google Maps. 3D views and add-ons like Burrp!, TravelAdvisor and Lonely Planet are well integrated into the system.  Misc. Features The Nokia X7 is bundled with a few extra features that are pretty standard as mobile handsets go. An alarm clock, calendar that syncs with your Microsoft Exchange account, converters, a memo pad etc. are on board. Nokia has bundled the Traveler app that provides all kinds of details from plane schedules to currency conversion and more. What is a bit of a disappointment is QuickOffice is a read only version. To edit files you’ll need to download the paid version. Text to speech is also part of the X7’s make up.  Camera I’m not sure why Nokia’s been launching handsets these days with fixed focus cameras. The X7 is unfortunately no exception. The 8 megapixel fixed focus camera comes with a Dual LED flash and features like face detection, geo-tagging, scene modes, white balance, Exposure, ISO settings and a timer to name a few. The outdoor pictures are clear with good amount of detail, even after zooming in. The colours are good as well with no fringing seen around edges. Plenty of options to tinker with The X7 can also record HD video up to 720p @25fps. Overall, video recording was not bad, save for a little bit of grain in low lit conditions, but videos come out quite crisp in outdoor well lit areas. Captures good details Battery Life We ran the X7’s 1200mAh battery from 100 per cent to dead with a video test and it ran for an impressive 8 hours and 50 minutes non-stop. All settings were kept standard including screen brightness. The next round of testing consisted of loops – 2 hours of video, 2 hours of audio, 1 hour of calling, 2.5 hours of streaming radio and then we repeat the process to see if the battery can take a licking and keep on ticking. Here, the X7 stopped just short of the call test in the second cycle. This shows that the X7 was quite a capable device. The Bottom Line With a price tag of Rs. 20,990, the Nokia X7 fails to compete very well with the likes of Android devices in the same range. You’d be better off with the Optimus Black, that’s slimmer and lighter (but not as sturdy) and although has a 5MP camera, at least it’s auto focus and also captures 720p videos. The Samsung Galaxy S is also a contender and both these devices also come with 1GHz processors easily making them faster and more capable. The Android Market Place also has so much more to offer than the Ovi store.  So, although Symbian Anna looks and feels a little better than the previous editions, Nokia fans will find it a little impressive. However, the rest in the smartphone community might just hope to see this 'futuristic' albeit un-conventional looking handset run a slightly better OS like maybe Windows 7. I know you’re thinking Android, but alas, that’s not going to happen.