Nokia 6650, Super 3G Phone 184
Ch_Omega writes "Nokia has announced the 6650, which in short, is the first phone ever to meet the 3G-standard! It combines GSM and WCDMA into a single handset, then throws in a VGA still camera and video camera with sound. More info on Infosync and and Nokia forums!"
Re:Great! (Score:3, Informative)
It works out to something like 5e28 addresses per human being.
Re:Hold your horses (Score:4, Informative)
From the website:
My Ericsson T68 with the battery bar at half:
I've never had a Nokia even go close to this phone. I get about 5 hours of talk time on my phone, and I've verified it's battery reporting function too.
I'll stick with Sony Ericsson
Nokia are trying very hard but WCDMA is doomed (Score:2, Informative)
IMHO they deserve it. Good phones, well designed.
But Europe's mobile phone market is very sick.
The operators paid heavily for near-useless licences.
They cannot get WCDMA to work (first pilot in Finland was cancelled).
They cannot change to CDMA2000 (against their license terms).
They cannot sell or trade their licenses.
Basically, Europe's telecom regulators have screwed it and lost their world lead with GSM.
For Nokia, this is very serious: Europe is their main market.
Look at Japan: CDMA2000 got 2m subscribers, WCDMA got 150,000. In the same time period.
Qualcomm is looking like a very interesting company. They will find themselves in a monopoly position.
Not because they have twisted anyone's arms. Simply because their technology is better.
Re:Sad to see that pop(3) is not supported. (Score:2, Informative)
About pop3, I have a sony ericsson t68i and it has a pop3 email client. I tried to configure it but I have some problems in the wireless data configuration. For some reason it wants use pop3 over wap, when I just want a regular dial-up connection (in operator (vodafone portugal) wap is about 10x as expensive as a regular data call, go figure that)
But it supports email download (full or just the header), smtp sending and lots more I haven't got the time to explore fully.
Plus it is very small, with a reasonable color screen, and the digital camera that plugs in it is ok for 640x480 daylight photos. I can send pictures as MMSs, but these are expensive and more important, I don't know anyone with a MMS capable phone to send them. And as MMS the photos are sent as 140x80 or something like that.
GSM 900/1800/1900, IR, bluetooth, and a a calendar that at first sight is not that much different from my palm m100 calendar.
Great little phone. If only I could get specs and program for it, I would make a Goo clone taking input from the digital camera.
Re:Awesome! Finally, a 3G phone...wait a second... (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Nokia 6610 vs. 6650 (Score:2, Informative)
You are correct that xx50 used to mean that it was an US verison, but only on earlier phones that had the xx10 designation in Europe. This way of defining versions of different Nokia models, cannot be transfered to the phones with x650 modelnumbers(7650, 3650, etc), or any of Nokias triband phones. The 3650 [nokia.com], is f.eks. a triband GSM phone targeted towards both the European and Asian markets, as well as the US one. 6610 [nokia.com] does also have triband, and nothing should prevent it from being used/sold in the US, as oposed to the older dualband-phones(900MHz/1800MHz) such as the 8210 and 5110, where they needed to make an own version for the US 1900MHz networks
The x650 model designation, simply means that it uses the Series 60, symbian-based OS, and have imaging(vga camera) capabillities.
Re:Awesome! Finally, a 3G phone...wait a second... (Score:2, Informative)
WCDMA is a component of UMTS, the world wide 3G telecommunications standard being put together under the auspices of the ITU.
CDMA2000 is US PCS technology company Qualcomm's rival 3G standard.
The reason for CDMA2000 is primarily because Qualcomm wants to keep control over CDMA technology, and because UMTS has limited capabilities to integrate with old cdmaOne type networks such as that used by Sprint PCS and Verizon. It's also strictly a one-airinterface-technology standard.
Re:WCDMA is doomed (Score:2, Informative)
I'm glad you are impatient, but I'm afraid you're going to have to wait a bit longer. After all, this posting is about the cosmetic launch of one of the first commercial WCDMA phones (excl. FOMA). Cosmetic, since the phone itself won't be in stores until somewhere in the 1st half of 2003. But at least we get to see the slideware already.
Before WCDMA will be launched massively, some things need to be sorted out. There need to be phones of course, or any network launch is useless. And some mandatory features like roaming (shown last year [3gnewsroom.com] between Vodafone Spain and J-Phone Japan) and WCDMA to GSM handover (hand off) are a must. Last week we saw reports of the first demonstrations [cellular-news.com] of such a handover in the Telia/Hi3G network in Sweden, with a Sony Ericsson handset. And we saw a network launched (Mobilkom Austria [cellular-news.com]). But what is such a launch worth when there are no handsets. That said, it's excellent news that Nokia already shows us the slides.
CDMA2000 has been launched earlier, yes, since it's a relatively small upgrade from IS-95. On the other hand, upgrading from GSM to WCDMA is a revolution in the radio access network. If EU operators are looking at any alternatives to WCDMA, it would be EDGE [3gamericas.org], a natural upgrade from GSM, delivering throughput in excess of 384 kbps and therefore labeled "3G", and somewhat behind WCDMA in network development. No phones announced either. Will probably fly high in the growing American GSM markets.
The situation in Japan is particularly curious, since they're looking at 3 operators each deploying a not-interoperable wireless access technology. There KDDI's CDMA2000 1x (offering 144 kbps), NTT DoCoMo's proprietary FOMA system (a WCDMA dialect), and J-Phone's true WCDMA. KDDI appears to be winning, which is not because CDMA2000 is technologically superior, but because there's variety and choice in phones.
Let's see where WCDMA is going, there's a big test [yahoo.com] for one of the keenest WCDMA investors coming up soon.