The Nokia 3650, greatest phone money can buy, is
free at Amazon. I've collected some of my thoughts on the phone inside...
About 6 months ago, I wrote a sticky note for myself entitled "When I'll get a phone." T-mobile made the Nokia 3650 available on April 1 and I received mine that day. After a month, here's how it's going:
full .Mac integration: Address Book groups, multiple iCal calendars (at mediarights we use about 12), IMAP mail, all over bluetooth
iSync support isn't there yet (
this month, allegedly) but the Bluetooth adapter (D-link DBT-120, from
tekserve) works well for exchanging midi files, photos, addresses, appointments and .sis (program) files.
The IMAP mail program is great. I don't expect to ever write much mail on it, but when I need to it's more than serviceable. I do wish I had smarter junk mail filtering, but the .Mac screening does pretty well.
color screen
It's beautiful. I don't notice "only" 4096 colors on this tiny thing. Anyone who says different is lying. It's very very bright when the backlight is on, and dim but not unreadable when it's off.
affordable Internet plan (only sidekick has this?)
I pay $10/month for 10MB from T-mobile. I've used about 2/3rds of it. You can use the phone as your primary Internet connection for your computer via bluetooth, and if I ever needed this I'd tear through those ten megs and wish for sidekick's unlimited plan. Until then the 10 megs are plenty.
GPRS/GSM network and good reception(only T-mobile has this)
The reception is great nearly everywhere, even in Park Slope & Williamsburg, two areas where cell phone reception is notoriously bad. The photo pictures send very quickly, and the web loads fast enough to be usable.
a nice camera, 640x480 at least!
The camera works wonderfully - much better than any other camera I've seen on a phone/palm/hiptop device. You can see some pictures
from Shea Stadium or
our garden in Brooklyn taken with the phone and judge for yourself. To me, the quality of the pictures is the most pleasant suprise of the phone.
It is a little grueling to send photos over bluetooth one at a time. The picture syncing should work exactly like iPhoto. Of course, it doesn't yet on the Mac, but I think there is a utility like that for the PC. Once I get my head on straight, I'll join
bluetooth-dev group, I'm hoping a fairly simple script could bring over all new photos at once and delete them from the phone. What I'm really hoping is that someone else will do this, of course.
There is a lot of good documentation available for developers, but the
Nokia Developer's website is ridiculously difficult to navigate. There is no one page with all documentation indexed by phone or platform, and most of the URLs resist bookmarks. I also hate looking at URLs with commas in them, but that's a personal bias. And forget about Mac support - even though the sample code (C++ and Java) is perfectly readable and heavily commented, you can only compile it into a .sis file on Windows. Most of the good stuff is on the
Series 60 and
Java pages. There is also a
Linux port, so there is hope. I can only assume better OS X support is coming, since the
Symbian platform is becoming the standard.
Nokia's video recorder uses the
new 3gpp format. I stress
new because it's entirely unsupported on Windows & Mac OS X. It's supposed to play on the Real One player, but not until the next version. It is a special feeling to take 15 seconds of video on your phone and play it back.
And speaking of Real One, it's nice that it comes with a native Symbian Real One player, but it won't stream anything better than a 40kbps stream. I guess this is to keep bandwidth costs down, but it strikes me as not quite ready. Rob Glaser is betting the bank on Real One being the best mobile streaming software, but I'm not sure they've got the inside track yet.
The CNN graphic artists are the best on the Internet, bar none, but ABCNews is trying to get in the game with this beautiful companion to their article 
