Sean Mountcastle

My friend Dave is was looking to get an iPhone now that his Treo died. I already have AT&T service and I’d love to upgrade to an iPhone as well. Being an old AT&T Wireless customer from before they were purchased by Cingular and renamed (and now back to the old name) does not appear to be an asset. I’ve had the service before I was married, consequently if I’m going to upgrade my phone, consolidating my service with my wife’s through AT&T’s family plan would probably be best for us.
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Russ has posted a great piece entitled What’s on my Nokia 6680. I’ve been interested in this phone since I first heard about it several months ago and it looks like Cingular is finally going to start selling the 6682 version shortly.

The great part about Russ’s post is the list of all of the applications available for the Series 60 phones. I wasn’t even aware of several of them. Though my personal favorite is the Super GoBoy from WildPalm. Being able to play your GBC games on your phone is just incredible. And playing your old NES games is even better (using vNes)!

If you’re interested in writing games for the Series 60, then the open source Frozen Bubble is a great place to learn from as all of the source code is available at SourceForge.

Take the time to go and read through Russ’s post, there’s a bunch of great information there (both about the 6680 and Series 60 apps in general).

Nokia has announced their new N-series phones. One in particular, the N91,
stores 3,000 songs. First off, this is a naming change for Nokia since most of their previous models (except for the N-gage) are designated by four digit numbers (i.e. 6620, 3650, etc). Since the features of the N91 interest me the most, I’ll focus on that phone.

The N91 has the following interesting features:

• 4GB hard drive
• WiFi
• 2M pixel camera
• USB 2.0 sync’ing
• Stereo-mini jack (for headphones)
• and it supports Microsoft’s WMV, Apple’s AAC (sans FairPlay), M4A and MP3

All in all a pretty darn sweet phone. They’ve basically stuffed an iPod mini into a Nokia phone. And WiFi support? That’s amazing, I’m curious if this means VoIP support or a future firmware upgrade which enables this. Though with some carriers (*cough* Verizon *cough*) crippling Bluetooth, I wonder if the same fate is in store for WiFi. Plus since this thing is so media/music friendly, it seems that there must be some sort of iTunes-like store in the works — though I suspect the carriers want to run these themselves and capture that additional revenue. Nokia has also announced partnerships with several top-of-the-line audio brands to make accessories for this phone (Sennheiser head phones anyone?)

I think the carriers in North America need to wake-up and allow unlimited SMS messaging and a reasonable amount of data transfer in all of their plans. Having just got back from Italy, I’ve seen the difference in how they use their cell phones from SMS’ing like crazy to paying for items (mostly vending machines) using their cell phone. If the carriers would stop nickle-and-diming their customers there are whole revenue streams which would open up for them as well as third parties (premium SMS anyone?).

Well, it looks like I’ve strayed from my initial topic, so I’ll end this now. Send me your thoughts on the new phones from Nokia.