Sony gets the design plot, but Nokia doesn’t

They may belong to different price segments but they are both 5.0-megapixel phones with Xenon flashes, and claim to be choc-a-bloc with multimedia goodness. And neither can claim to be remotely slim. And yet one manages to look good while the other is a bit of an eyesore. Well, I am talking of the Sony Ericsson K850i and the Nokia N82. I reviewed the former, Nidhi has reviewed the latter and well, both of us feel that somewhere along the like, Nokia needs to work on its design. Sony Ericsson clearly doesn’t – the company managed to plonk a D-pad right in the middle of the K850i’s keypad and still managed to make it look good (they even gave it different shades).

On the other hand, Nokia’s N82 did try to take a leaf out of the Sony Ericsson book – it had a metallic looking keypad with sliver-thin keys – but still managed to muck things up. The phone looks bulky, and even the metallic finish falls flat thanks to some rather peculiarly placed keys. And of course, the K850i also manages to add an automatically activated camera lens cover as well as the facility to remove the battery, SIM card and expansion cards without having to remove the back panel. And talking of the back panel, Nokia muffed things up by giving the shiny front panel of the N82 a rather drab back.

All of which is a colossal pity because for all its faults, the Nokia N82 is a very powerful device, laced with the goodness of Symbian, GPS and a host of other features. But the only thing sleek about it is its ad campaign - yeah, we love the 'storytelling' line.

Beauty may be only skin deep, but it’s time Nokia realised that in the era of the iPhone and RAZR 2, cellphone users are not likely to shell out big bucks for plug ugly devices!

Maria, Maria: From Moto to Sony?

Sony Ericsson made the news recently when it signed on tennis star Maria Sharapova as its first “global brand ambassador.” Now, we are sure Sony thought long and hard before signing on the Russian, who for all her looks (and grunts), seems to switch brands at the drop of a hat (or should that be "cheques?")

For, just in case you have forgotten, it was La Sharapova who was peddling the limited edition pink Moto RAZR and the all-white Moto PEBL not too long ago. While her fans will no doubt be swayed by whichever product their heroine endorses, one just wonders what regular gadget lovers will think of this volte face from the lissome Russian. We are, of course, not impressed and feel that it just provides fodder to those who think blondes have nothing upstairs.

No, we don’t know if Sony Ericsson have plans to include the Sharapova grunt as a ringtone for their forthcoming phones.

New phones, anybody?

Towards the end of 2007, we would not have blamed you for thinking that it was raining new phones in India. Rarely a week went by without a major phone being released. If that sounds difficult, just take a look at the phones that came out in November and December of the recently passed year – the Nokia N82, the Nokia 6110, the LG Viewty, the Samsung G600, the Moto Q9h, the Sony Ericsson k850i, the Sony Ericsson T650i, the HTC Touch Dual and so many others.

Well, 2008 seems to be different. Call it the New Year hangover, or maybe the companies being too busy with the forthcoming 3GSM event in Barcelona, but this year has been remarkably quiet on the cellphone front – we are well into the third week of 2008 and so far have seen neither hide nor hair (or should that be screen or keypad) of a major new phone. In fact, there are not even the usual rumours about new phones in the market. No one is even talking about the iPhone!

Hey fellas, come out with some new stuff, will you? We are getting bored out here!

Cheating is a bad Idea!

Next time you get a call from your service operator about any new scheme, just don't believe them. There is every possibility that the scheme might not work and the customer care of your operator might deny having called you.

Day before yesterday, I got a call from Idea Cellular stating that my validity will expire in a day's time. And if I go in for an easy recharge of Rs 90, I will get four months validity in next 48 hours with some talktime. After a few minutes, my sister received a similar call and we got our number recharged.
Yesterday, we both got calls from the same number confirming that the validity will be transferred in 48 hours from the time of the recharge. But today, when I woke up in the morning, I was shocked. My cellphone was working but my sister's connection wasn't. When I called her number, I heard the message - " services to this number are temporarily on hold".
I spoke to customer care executives twice and both times their versions were different. The first person who answered my call informed me that there was no call made from Idea Cellular to my sister's number. When I called again after some time, the lady on the other side informed me that the validity will be transferred by the evening today.

It's almost 45 hours and still her cellphone is not working. It's not done. My sister is helpless at this moment because she is not able to access calls all because she believed what the Idea executive told her. If she had gone for a regular recharge, her phone would have been working today.

Q up for this Moto!

When one buys a high-end cellphone, one does expect to get some freebies with it. You know, the odd memory expansion card, some handy software and of course, the handsfree (Bluetooth if you are lucky, wired if you are not). Some companies even throw in some extras as a "limited period offer" or a "special offer."

But we were still staggered by what Motorola had thrown in with its Moto Q9h. Just take a look at this:

• 1GB memory expansion card (worth about Rs 1,200)
• Documents to Go software suite (worth about Rs 1,300)
• Opera Mobile cellphone Internet browser (worth about Rs 1,000)
• A portable charger that allows you to charge your phone when there are no outlets handy (worth Rs 3,500)
• An extra battery that can be added to the phone to almost double its battery life (worth about Rs 1,500)

(And yes, there is the standard handsfree as well.)

All of which adds up to something like Rs. 8,500 - give or take a few hundred. Which is more than a third of the price of the phone (Rs. 19,000). And it is a terrific phone too, although we do wish they had included Wi-Fi!

For some reason, Motorola has not mentioned all this in their ad for the device. We bet people would be queuing up for the Q if they had. Pun intended.

I can walk on water! Thanks, Navigator!

The Nokia 6110, nicknamed the Navigator, is supposed to be the ultimate device for working out routes and finding your way through a city, thanks to its superb GPS and mapping features. Well, it is also capable of a few miracles. For instance, it made me walk on water!

Well, to be more accurate, it had not mapped the old Delhi bridge across the Yamuna. So when I was crossing it, it actually showed me walking on water for a short time.

Who said cellphones cannot do magic!?

Upgrade phone firmware? No, thanks!

We just heard that Nokia has announced a firmware upgrade for the 8GB version of the N95. And it seems to be rather interesting – among the features it adds are support for flash lite and flash video as well as fixes that make the phone work a lot faster.

Well, two of my acquaintances have the N95 8GB version and have no plans of installing the upgrade!

Their rationale is simple – the process takes too long and is risky. They have to back up all the content on their phones, download the upgrade, wait for the new version to get installed and then transfer their data back to the phone – all of which means not being able to use the phone for upto an hour. What’s worse, all both said that they had ultimately ended up losing some data or features in the process – one of them lost 2-3 games that he had downloaded when he upgraded the firmware of his p1i, while another claimed that upgrading her Treo 600 firmware had seen her lose a number of browser bookmarks! The result: none of them had any intention of doing a firmware upgrade and in fact, even warned me against doing so. When I pointed out the benefits of the upgrade, one them snapped: “I don’t care if I have a slower phone with fewer features. I did not bust Rs 25k on a phone to lose data.”

Perhaps it is time cellphone manufacturers came up with a better method of installing upgrades. Any suggestions?