Nokia announced an update to their Sirocco line of fashionable handsets. The Nokia 8800 Sirocco Gold comes with 18-carat gold plating.

Named after a Sahara desert wind, the Sirocco line offers expensive, luxurious devices in the Nokia portfolio. Equipped with a 2 megapixel camera, a 262K colors TFT display, FM radio and Bluetooth, along with a smooth sliding mechanism, the Sirocco handsets as always tend to speak more of their owners than your usual feature phone.
The Nokia Sirocco 8800 Gold comes in stylish golden color further enhanced by white gold trimming, thus creating a truly luxurious piece of mobile device. The product also comes with a Bluetooth headset with a matching design.

In the final part of our initial E90 coverage Steve looks at the Nokia E90’s GPS and navigation capabilities. The navigation features are good, but there is room for improvement too. Steve also rounds up a few software odds and ends before summarizing his summary  of the new Nokia E90 Communicator.

We’ve covered the Nokia E90 in some details in the previous parts of this review series: Nokia E90 - the Early Verdict, Nokia E90 - Adapting the Applications, Nokia E90 - Web and Work and Nokia E90 - Camera and Multimedia.

At a press conference in India, Nokia has launched seven new mobile phones, that provide functions and features specifically designed for consumers in emerging markets. “India is very important to Nokia and to the global mobile communications industry as a whole,” says Soren Petersen, Senior Vice President, Mobile Phones, Nokia. “One of the fastest growing markets in the world, India is also home to several Nokia facilities, including R&D and manufacturing. We’re very proud to be part of their growth.”

Nokia 2630

The thinnest handset in Nokia’s portfolio at 9.9 mm, the Nokia 2630 balances a modern design with a full range of features to meet the needs of emerging market consumers. A camera combined with Bluetooth technology. Convenient productivity tools such as email, MMS, calendar and a calculator satisfy the work side of life, while features such as an FM radio, with direct access shortcut key and MP3 ringtones satisfy the entertainment side

Nokia 2760

The Nokia 2760 features a digital camera, giving many consumers their first experience with digital photography, and Bluetooth technology to make it easy to share the photos that they capture. The Nokia 2760 also features video recording, video playback, and FM radio. The combination of Bluetooth and GPRS creates a convenient way to access data on the go for email and Internet. It also features extra large storage to save up to 1000 contacts in the phonebook.

Nokia 2505

One of Nokia’s sleekest fold-style phones for the CDMA market, the Nokia 2505 offers a unique smooth-back design. The Nokia 2505 is expected to be available in selected markets in Asia/Pacific, Middle East, Africa, China and Latin America during the 2nd quarter of 2007. The phone meets practical needs as well with easy-to-use functions including text messaging, speaker phone, calendar, a personalized voice reminder and an alarm clock. Other features included with the Nokia 2505 include pre-loaded games, a 300-contact phonebook, up to 3 hours of talk time and 156 hours of stand-by time.

Nokia N95, a much-awaited smartphone with a unique handset design has started shipping in India.

Its front slides up to reveal a traditional numeric phone keypad and can also slide down providing access to a row of dedicated multimedia playback control buttons, automatically switching the screen to landscape mode and launching the multimedia menu.

Hardware: It is powered by the fastest processor currently used in the Symbian operating system devices and is faster than Dopod D600, a Windows Mobile 5 PDA.

The Nokia N95 sports the regular 64 MB RAM (E90 claims to offer almost 80 MB of free operating memory) and about 160 MB internal storage memory and can be expanded with microSD cards to 2 GB.

Dopod D600 comes in with built-in 128 MB ROM, 64 MB RAM that gives N95 a close run.
Bells & Whistles Nokia has topped the N95 with a GPS receiver. And a 5 megapixel (sufficient for even 11×14-inch sized prints), autofocus camera can deliver delightful pictures. Dopod’s D600 is a 2 MP camera, but when viewed on D600’s 71.1mm TFT LCD display, it can put other business phones to shame.

While Nokia has put in a secondary camera to support video calls, despite being a PDA D600 seems to have omitted it. Although DVD quality is certainly an exaggeration by Nokia, but video recorded on N95 definitely offers quality of amateur single-sensor mini-DV camcorders.

Even though the Nokia N800 received a rather major upgrade recently, that hasn’t stopped the Finnish developer from working on the handheld’s successor. What you see before is the rumored follow-up to the Nokia N800 Internet Tablet. As I’m sure you can see, this time around they’ve included a slide-out QWERTY keyboard, clearly responding to the feedback Nokia received on the first N800.

With the keyboard the way it is, the next-gen Nokia N800 — whatever they’re going to call it (N801?) — bears a striking resemblance to the several Pocket PC devices created by the team at HTC, except that the new Nokia will be quite a bit bigger than a regular Pocket PC phone.

The super shiny, almost chrome or stainless steel-like finish is also very attractive. We’ll have to stay tuned and keep our eyes peeled for any details as they arise. I’d imagine that Nokia has quite a bit in store for us.

Nokia Corp. introduced Skype Internet-calling software for its N800 Wi-Fi tablet on Wednesday, providing another alternative to using a cell phone, while a debate in the U.S. over what networks such devices may be able to use in the future heated up.

When the N800 was introduced at the International Consumer Electronics Show in January, Nokia and eBay Inc.’s Skype Ltd. division said they were working on including the popular software in the device. Nokia delivered it on Wednesday with an upgrade to the N800’s software. Current owners of N800s can download the software from Nokia’s site.

Skype, with a claimed 196 million registered users, has expanded from its roots as a popular PC-based free calling system and offers text messaging, video calling, and low-cost dialing to and from traditional phones. There are already Skype clients for mobile devices and even some cellular smart phones, but some mobile operators try to block VOIP (voice over Internet Protocol) calls because they can eat into their voice business.

Unlike the Apple Inc. iPhone — available in the U.S. only through AT&T Inc. — the N800 doesn’t have cellular connectivity, only Wi-Fi and short-range Bluetooth technology. So the device can access the Internet in a home or office, at a public hot spot or on a municipal Wi-Fi network, but not in the vast areas covered by cellular data networks. The N800 is available at retail stores and Nokia’s Web site for a list price of US$399.99.

EBay is among a group of companies calling on the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to encourage more competition against incumbent mobile operators when it auctions off prime radio spectrum in the 700MHz band. FCC Chairman Kevin Martin is advocating setting aside part of the spectrum for a network that would allow use of any application on any device, getting away from carriers’ limited handset offerings and “walled gardens.” But Skype’s parent has joined consumer groups in calling for rules that would force spectrum holders to sell access to their networks wholesale to competitive service providers.

In addition to the Skype client, the new software version includes an Adobe Systems Inc. Flash 9 Web browser plug-in and lets customers use larger capacity memory cards up to 8G bytes. The N800 has slots to accommodate Secure Digital (SD), MicroSD, MiniSD, Multimedia Card (MMC) and Reduced-Size MMC cards. The Linux-based device also has a built-in camera and an on-screen touch keyboard and uses the Opera browser.

Nokia today launched its third GPS navigation-enabled mobile phone handset, the Navigator 6110, which incorporates Navteq maps providing over 99 per cent coverage of Australia’s one million kilometres of roads.

The 6110 follows the Nokia N95 and E90 handsets in incorporating GPS navigation capability.

“The integration of navigation into mobile handsets is a key trend this year,” said Nokia general manager, Shaun Colligan.

“Just like many believe the mp3 player will be marginalized by converged devices – and we have already seen digital cameras experience the same marginalization with high quality camera phones – we’re going to see this with navigation.”

The 6110 comes with A-GPS technology, which uses the phone tower to pinpoint the phone’s location much faster than other GPS units, taking just one minute instead of up to five.

According to Nokia, the 6110 Navigator provides around 99.9 per cent mapping coverage of Australian roads out of the box thanks to its partnership with map provider Navteq.

Navteq, a publicly-listed US company, has been in Australia for over 2.5 years and has established partnerships with around six navigation product manufacturers including Road Angel and automotive navigation installers for Peugeot and Chrysler.

The company deployed 100 staff to Australia including 50 drivers and 50 geographic analysts to scour the country’s one million kilometers of roads, recording over 12.5 million addresses and 64,000 points of interest in the process.

“Research we have done with our customers confirms that an up to date map and accurate map is considered a necessary requirement for a navigation product. We have found that driving the roads is an essential element in putting together a good map,” said a Navteq spokesperson.

Navteq is one of just a handful of multinational mapping companies creating maps for GPS navigation devices for 16 countries around the world. To date, GPS mapping has been regionally-based with many independent operators servicing just their local area.

Nokia’s GPS phones also allow new software applications beyond just navigation, such as the Sports Tracker software which uses GPS technology to give riders and joggers information on their workout including speed, altitude, duration and route of travel.

The actual hardware is going to remain unchanged for the time being, but this latest firmware update provides the Nokia N800 Internet Tablet with a whole whack of new goodies.

By far the most notable upgrade is the includes of Skype support, providing the device running Internet Tablet OS 2007 Edition with a little chattiness to go with its web surfing capabilities. You’ll also find Flash 9 browser support, love for 8GB memory cards, an integrated Rhapsody music player, and vastly improved touchscreen sensitivity. They say that this last bit will make you “able to work your way around the menu much easier than before.” Through a little tweaking, Nokia was also able to provide the N800 with better battery life.

If you thought the Nokia N800 was hot before, wait until you check out the upgraded version. That’s hot.

The world’s top mobile phone maker, Nokia announced its new short-range technology operating in the unlicensed 2.4 GHz band that will be a cost-effective “complementation” for the Bluetooth standard. The new technology is will less power and costs less. The company believes this technology might soon become an industry norm.

But, Wibree uses range (10 meters) and data rate (1 MB) are almost identical to that of Bluetooth. The main difference being, Wibree uses a fraction of the power used by Bluetooth. This helps enabling personal-area communications with watches, wireless keyboards, toys and so on which have limited battery capacity.

Bluetooth uses fixed packet lengths, whereas Wibree utilizes dynamic lengths and that is why consumes less power. It also does not incorporate frequency hopping as Bluetooth does. Wibree is perfect solution in situations where bursty data transfers are needed. Bluetooth is better equipped to handle larger data loads.

Bluetooth devices are able to communicate with each other to ask about capabilities and functions. This is known as the Service Discovery Protocol. It prevents the user from sending documents to your headset or routing a phone call to your printer. Wibree will have something very intelligent to replace this, but we don’t know that as yet.

Lots of companies are working closely with Nokia to define the Wibree specification. Companies such as Broadcom, Epson, and Nordic Semiconductor. Nokia is hoping to submit the technology to a worldwide standardization process, which could eventually help it to gain wider support.

Nokia’s Wibree is not the only one contender for use in wireless sensors. There are rivals like Zigbee and Zensys too. Zigbee is an ongoing standardization project and has similar characteristics to Wibree. As per the sound byte from these rivals they feel Wibree seems like a marketing spec and are not worried about it at all. They also think Wibree is simply a proprietary solution masked as some type of industry driven push.

Nokia on the other hand believes Wibree will be most successful in four markets: sports, healthcare, entertainment and in the office environment.

Nokia has announced the launch of the Nokia 5700 XpressMusic mobile phone, which by the sound of it is meant especially for music enthusiasts. This phone has already been launched worldwide and is now available in India.

First of the Nokia 5700 XpressMusic phone features a twist design, allowing users to switch between four modes namely music player, camera, video call and smartphone.

The 5700 XpressMusic phone happens to be the first music device to be augmented with a dedicated audio chip. Not only that, it features a 2 mega pixel camera as well.

Loading songs on to the Nokia 5700 XpressMusic phone is quite a breeze. It also supports various formats such as WMA, MP3, eAAC+ and MP4. IT can store up to 1500 tracks on a 2GB microSD that works out to around 86 hours of music.

According to Devinder Kishore, Director Marketing, Nokia India, “The Nokia 5700 XpressMusic adds a new twist to the mobile music experience with compatibility for tracks purchased from many Internet music stores.”

“In addition the Nokia 5700 XpressMusic features a dedicated audio chip for improved music performance which consumers can further enhance by selecting from an ever increasing line of compatible audio enhancements,” he added.