<![CDATA[Gizmodo: nokia tube]]> http://tags.gizmodo.com/assets/base/img/thumbs140x140/gizmodo.com.png <![CDATA[Gizmodo: nokia tube]]> http://gizmodo.com/tag/nokiatube http://gizmodo.com/tag/nokiatube <![CDATA[Nokia 5800 XpressMusic Abused by Britney Spears in New Video]]> Thanks to about a million tips, I've been forced to sit through the new Britney Spears music video for "Womanizer" because the flashy Nokia 5800 XpressMusic 'Tube' makes an appearance. The phone is used to take a picture of a ridiculously be-wigged Britney before she violently attacks the photographer and slams his face into a photocopier, sending the poor phone flying. But that's not the end of the technology in the video!

I won't get into any depth on the song, because this is Gizmodo and when a song only has two words and both of them are "womanizer," it's tough to glean any gadget connection. But the Nokia first makes an appearance at breakfast, when Britney's antagonist checks his calendar to see what kind of womanizing he'll get up to today.
It's pretty obvious product placement when the words "Nokia" glimmer for no reason, but I was too distracted by what he was eating to care:
Okay, a square egg is easy, you can just cut the white into whatever shape you want. But the YOLK is square too! Britney should stop singing and open a restaurant, because that's goddamn amazing. Luckily, all this happens in the first minute so you don't need to sit through the awful inane screeching for too long. [- Thanks, everyone who sent this in]

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<![CDATA[Chinese Nokia 5800 XpressMusic Won't Have 3G, Wi-Fi, Reason To Exist]]> Just like the iPhone, Nokia 5800 XpressMusic 'Tube' won't have 3G or Wi-Fi enabled when it makes its way to China, which pretty much negates any reasons that customers might have to want one. The 3G exclusion can at least be blamed on China's lack of coverage, but disabling Wi-Fi on every new phone just doesn't make sense. All China's regular internet traffic is filtered anyway, so regulators either have a crucial misunderstanding of what Wi-Fi is or a serious problem with people enjoying things. [Nokia - Thanks, Lauri!]

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<![CDATA[Nokia 5800 XpressMusic Phone Will Miss Xmas Release Date in US]]> It looks as though the highly anticipated Nokia 5800 XpressMusic (aka 'Tube') will not make its way to the US in time for the Xmas season. Instead, Nokia seems to be content with focusing on emerging markets like India, Indonesia, the United Arab Emirates, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Russia and Spain before setting their sites on developed markets like the US. Analysts seem to think the move makes sense from a business perspective, but customers waiting patiently for Nokia's first touchscreen Symbian S60 phone may feel otherwise. [Reuters]

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<![CDATA[Nokia Releases 5800 XpressMusic 'Tube' Full Video Tour]]> Our hands-on with the Nokia 5800 XpressMusic 'Tube' was pretty conclusive: the 5800 is a solid, capable but somewhat underwhelming music phone. For a first attempt at a full touch interface, though, the adapted S60 operating system is actually pretty good. Slashphone has unearthed a mountain of demo footage displaying the different functions of the OS, so you can make your own judgment, but as with our hands-on video, you'll just have to try to ignore the damning, repeatedly unregistered touches that keep happening whenever the screen isn't pre-rendered.

The social networking tools are highly functional, but I'm not sure how eager people will be to build vanity feeds for their friends.

Excited about using your 5800 with Flickr, YouTube or Facebook? Well, Nokia's got a sort clone for you, I guess.

And finally, the most telling "feature": two styluses (styli?)—a guitar pick and a traditional pen. Manufactures should should really be required to call these thing "pokescreen phones." [Slashphone]

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<![CDATA[Nokia 5800 XpressMusic: Hands-on With Nokia's First S60 Touch Phone]]>

The 5800 XpressMusic (aka Tube) is the first touchscreen Symbian S60 phone from Nokia—a surprising fact considering how prominent touchscreens have quickly become over the last few years. And instead of rolling out the new touch-specific S60 Fifth Edition on a flagship N-series phone, Nokia has decided to position the 5800 as a music phone for the kiddies, packaging it with their all-you-can-eat (and keep) Comes With Music service. This choice is probably a brilliant one, because after our quick demo, this thing needs a bit more time in the oven before it can stand with the big guys for a touchscreen-only device.

For a mid-range music phone with touch, though, the 5800 is pretty well equipped: 640x360 touchscreen with haptic response, Wi-Fi, A-GPS, 3G on the 850/1900 MHz band (works with AT&T here in the States), 3.2MP camera with Zeiss lens, and an 8GB microSD card for music in the box. But while the touchscreen is sharp and bright, it's resistive rather than capacitive, which means instead of accurately picking up the light zap of electricity from your fingertips, it registers where two thin layers of the screen get pushed together under your finger.

On the prototype we played with briefly, it's much harder to get touches to register, and far less accurate than the iPhone's capacitive screens. The 5800 packs a built-in stylus for this reason—you'll be using it a lot. Text entry can be done with a full-screen QWERTY, a mini-QWERTY for the stylus, T9 on a touch dialpad, or using handwriting recognition w/ stylus. It's almost exactly like what's found on Nokia's touchscreen internet tablets like the N810, which makes sense, since Nokia recently folded the tablet group in with the smartphone folks to help develop touch features for S60 v5.

Other touch-specific additions are a new Contacts bar similar to T-Mobile's myfaves that can replace application shortcuts—giving quick access to calling or texting your four favorite folks, as well as the option to add an RSS feed of that person's blog or Twitter updates. Application menus also appear on a nice translucent overlay in most applications instead of Symbian's usual pop-up lists, making the camera much easier to operate while switching options, for instance. And a dedicated button on the upper right brings up the Media Bar, which gives quick touch access to the music player, camera, contacts, and web browser at any time. If you're used to Symbian's browser, you'll fit right at home with the touch version. Basically touching replaces the scrolling cursor for zooming and scrolling a page. It's a pretty solid experience, although pages still tend to load their mobile versions by default like in S60 v4.

For music the device looks capable—there's a 3.5mm headphone jack thank God, and 8GB of space on the included 8GB microSD. In the States, the 5800's price (which is not yet set, but the Euro version is €279/$389) will include a year of Comes With Music downloads, which can then be kept. Going beyond Nokia's proprietary sync software (for iTunes, etc) will be like in any other Symbian phone—not super convenient. Comes With Music allows you to sync albums grabbed on the web to your device over 3G, though, which is nice.

The 5800 seems like a solid mid-level touch phone for music—especially if Comes With Music pans out as a cool service. But don't plan on using this thing for heavy emailing or texting—you'll probably be using T9 text entry with the touch dialpad or the stylus for most of your text entry unless you have the patience of a monk, which kind of defeats the point for an all-touch device these days. Look for it hitting before the end of the year for an as-yet-undisclosed price.

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<![CDATA[Nokia Tube Launch Is Pretty Much Happening on October 2nd]]> Reuters is claiming that the long, long-awaited Nokia 5800 XpressMusic Touchscreen "Tube" will be launched in London on October 2nd, according to their sources. This confirms the rumor that we floated Wednesday, when the first actual picture of the device surfaced. (It's mostly screen. Surprise!). As with most of the glut of new touchscreen phones out there now, the key to Tube's success as well as the most exciting part of the launch will probably be the device's software, which is rumored to be a touchscreen revision of the venerable Symbian S60 OS [Reuters]

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<![CDATA[Smudgy Pictures of Nokia's Tube Show New, Bland Interface]]> A bunch of new photos and specs for Nokia's Tube, a.k.a. The 5800 XpressMusic, have been leaked to the internet. The alleged iPhone killer will apparently come with a 16:9 16 million color TFT LCD display with 640 X 360 pixel resolution, haptic feedback, a 3.2 megapixel camera with Carl Zeiss optics, Dual LED flash, a built-in GPS and 140MB RAM. Also, lots of grease and fingerprints, it seems.

It looks like Nokia's updated the interface since the last round of leaked pics, but while the new design is cleaner, it's also flat and uninteresting. If Nokia wants even the slightest sliver of possible iPhone users to sit up and take notice, this had better not be the last version of the phone's UI. [Boy Genius]




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<![CDATA[First Pictures of Nokia Tube iPhone Killer, Allegedly]]> Here are the first—alleged—pictures of the Tube, the codename for Nokia's response to the iPhone we talked about yesterday. It seems that these images were taken at the same developers conference in California. Looking at the second photo, it seems it will have stylus support.

tube02we6.jpg

According to Symbian Freak, the 16:9 three-point-something-inch phone is quadband, 3G-ready, has Bluetooth and integrated GPS with geotagging support. The camera is "better than the one that we can find on an iPhone."

The interface design doesn't seem finger-touch friendly, judging from the size of the "options" and "exit" items, which may also be controlled by the two buttons on the bottom of the phone. However, we will have to wait and see how the final interface is. Until when?

First quarter 2009, they say.

Too bad. And maybe too late. [Symbian Freak —thanks James]

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