RAVI

Nokia 5300 Xpress Music

The good: The Nokia 5300 world phone has a great display, user-friendly controls, and a wide range of features including a music player, a 1.3-megapixel camera, Bluetooth, an expandable memory slot, and support for push-to-talk networks. Plus, it delivers on performance as well.

The bad: The Nokia 5300's memory card slot is an inconvenient location, and its internal memory is a measly 5MB.

The bottom line: The Nokia 5300 is a well-designed, user-friendly music cell phone that offers an amazing range of features backed up by outstanding performance.

Details

Music cell phones have become a hot commodity in 2006, with almost every manufacturer getting into the game. Sony Ericsson's Walkman handsets in particular have emerged as favorites of mobile music fans, but Nokia has countered with its quality N-series smart phones that come packed with multimedia features. But let's face it, not everyone needs a fancy smart phone such as the Nokia N91 so we're glad to welcome the new Nokia 5300 Xpress Music. Packed into a unique but user-friendly design is an exceptional music player and a broad range of features including a 1.3-megapixel camera, Bluetooth, and an expandable memory slot. And yes, it delivers on performance as well. As of this writing, the GSM 5300 isn't available with a U.S. carrier, so it will cost you. But even at $300, we reckon it's worth it.

At first glance you might think there's nothing cutting edge about the Nokia 5300's design. Yes, it's a bit boxy and a little bulky (3.6 by 1.9 by 0.8 inches), but it's lighter than it looks (3.6 ounces), and ultimately it's a form factor that deserves closer inspection. First off, the 5300 Xpress Music is a slider phone. Though Nokia is just starting to ease into the slider craze, it hasn't stopped the company from succeeding here. The slider mechanism slides up and down with one hand, yet it is sturdy enough to feel comfortable in the hand. Our only quibble--and this is a small one--is that the 5300 feels somewhat top-heavy when the slider is up. As with most slider phones, the 5300 won't cradle against the curve of your head, but we've never considered that quirk to be a big deal. Durability is a key theme with this phone; its midsection is wrapped in a rubberized covering that extends down to the navigation controls (see below). We also like the offbeat red-and-white color scheme--call it the Austrian phone--but there's a black-and-white version for more traditional tastes.

The picture-perfect QVGA display measures 2 inches (320x240 pixels) and supports 262,144 colors. Equal to the gorgeous screen on the Nokia 6126, it offers an eye-popping array of colors, and displayed everything from graphics to texts to games beautifully. The simple but attractive menus are also a treat to view, and we love that Nokia provides a description of unfamiliar applications if you hold the cursor over the corresponding icon. You can change the font size and the backlight time, and even though you can't alter the brightness, the display is plenty bright as it is.

Below the display are the spacious and user-friendly navigation controls. As previously mentioned, they are covered in a rubberized skin, which makes them quite tactile and easy to find by feel. A five-way toggle also acts as a shortcut to four-user defined functions, and there's a selection of additional shortcuts on the standby screen as well. There are also two soft keys, which are programmable for one-touch access, and the Talk and End buttons. Our only complaint was that the backlighting on these keys is a bit dim. To reveal the keypad buttons, just slide up the front face. Spacious and brightly backlit, the individual buttons are raised above the surface of the phone. Such texture is unique for a slider phone, but it's a welcome change as the keys are easy to use even if they are a tad slippery.

We liked the 5300's music controls.

Lining the immediate left side of the display are dedicated music controls that give easy access to the music player. Once inside, you can play, pause, fast-forward, and rewind your tracks. Fortunately these buttons are also covered in the rubber skin, so they're every tactile and easy to find when you're not looking at the phone. The left-facing keys may be unintuitive to some users, but we didn't mind. On the right spine of the bottom half of the slider is a volume rocker and a dedicated camera shutter. The rubber texture extends here as well, and raised ridges make the volume rocker easily accessible when holding the phone to your ear. As with many other camera phones, the Nokia 5300's ergonomics give it a camera-like feel when you hold the phone horizontally with the shutter control facing up. The camera lens sits on the back of the phone, with a self-portrait mirror, but we're disappointed there's no flash. The infrared port sits on the right spine, while the power control and ports for the mini-USB cable and the charger rest on the phone's top end. Finally, the headset jack is in the top-left corner.

Our only real design complaint concerns the placement of the Micro SD card slot. You must remove the battery cover to access it, so make sure you sharpen your nails. Though you don't have to remove the battery as well, it's still a bit annoying.
There's a lot to talk about when it comes to the 5300's features, but we'll get the basics out of the way first. There's a large 1,000-contact phone book with room in each entry for five phone numbers plus a PTT number, e-mail and Web addresses, a job title and a company name, work and home street addresses, a birth date, a nickname, a formal name, and notes (the SIM card holds an additional 250 names). You can organize callers into groups or pair them with a photo for caller ID purposes. For a music phone, the choice of polyphonic ring tones was small--you get just 10, 64-chord tones--but they're assignable to contacts as well. Other standard offerings include a vibrate mode, text and multimedia messaging, a voice recorder, e-mail and instant messaging, an alarm clock, a calendar, a to-do list, a notepad, a calculator, a countdown timer, and a stopwatch.

Despite the music focus, the 5300 comes with a raft of business features including full Bluetooth with a stereo profile, an infrared port, a speakerphone, PC syncing, a mini-USB port and a unit/currency converter for international travelers. Support for push-to-talk networks is also onboard, but since the phone is unlocked, you may not be able you use it with your carrier's PTT services. For example, Cingular typically doesn't allow unlocked phones access to its PTT network. Though the 5300 comes with a Micro SD card slot that supports cards up to 2GB in size, the internal memory is a skimpy 5MB of shared space. True, you're more likely to use a memory card for storing multimedia files, but we still think 5MB is much too small for this caliber of phone.

Now, it's on to the 5300's star attraction: its superior music player. Though a lot of cell phones have experimented with mobile music, few of them get it right, beyond the Sony Walkman phones. But the Nokia 5300 has everything we look for a in such a phone--there's stereo Bluetooth and a large selection of features, it's easy to transfer files to the phone, it's user-friendly with a simple interface and well-designed controls, it has few restrictions, it offers plenty of memory, and last, but certainly not least, it offers exceptional sound quality over stereo speakers. The player supports, MP3, AAC, AAC+, and WMA files.

As previously mentioned, the 5300 has large and tactile controls that give easy access to the media player. With a press of the exterior Play button, you can play your tunes; another press stops the player. While that method will open the player in a minimized form, you can access the full interface by going through the main menu. On that note, the player's design is minimalist, but it's still attractive and easy to use. It displays the track name and length, artist, and album name, while an icon mimicking the navigation toggle indicates how you can use it to control the player. Features include shuffle and repeat modes, stereo widening, an equalizer with five settings (two are customizable), an airplane mode, and the option of saving tracks as ring tones. And we're especially happy to report there's stereo Bluetooth as well. Please see below for an explanation of the player's performance.

The 5300's camera lacks a flash, unfortunately.

The 5300 has an first-rate 1.3-megapixel camera that takes JPEG pictures in six resolutions: 1,280x1,024; 1,290x960; 800x600; 640x480; 320x240; and 160x120. You get a variety of camera settings including three quality modes, five color effects, a note mode, a 10-second self-timer, a sequence mode for shooting three photos in rapid succession, adjustable white balance, and an 8X zoom. The only thing missing is a brightness setting, but we're willing to overlook that omission. And as for camera sounds, you can turn them off but you can't choose a particular shutter tone. The aforementioned camera ergonomics and the slick camera interface make for a great user experience.

The camcorder shoots 3GPP videos in two resolutions (176x144 and 129x96) with sound. Other options are similar to the still camera, and you can mute the sound if you wish. The default mode lasts just 6 seconds, but you can also shoot longer clips, depending on the available memory. Image quality was pretty good for a 1.3-megapixel camera phone. Object outlines were distinct, but colors were somewhat faded. Video clips were fine--a bit grainy, as expected, but suitable for short clips. Besides saving photos to the phone, you can also send them via Bluetooth or a multimedia message or use the USB cable to transfer them to a computer for printing.

The 5300 had decent image quality.
You can personalize the 5300 with a large variety of screensavers, wallpapers, themes, color styles, animations, and sounds. Gamers get Java (J2ME) support, but your choice of included titles will vary. We found Snake III, Pro Snowboard, and Music Guess on our test phone. The latter title asks you to match the tunes with the song on your playlist.

We tested the quad-band (GSM 900/1800/1900) Nokia 5300 world phone in San Francisco using T-Mobile's service. Call quality was quite admirable, with excellent clarity and little distortion or interference from other devices. We felt the volume could be a bit higher; it was a little harder to understand conversations in noisier environments. Callers didn't report any significant problems, but voice-response systems had trouble understanding us unless we held the phone very close to our mouth. Speakerphone calls were fine, but voices were slightly more distorted on our end. We didn't have any issues with calls over a Bluetooth headset. Lastly, we had no problem getting a signal, and we were glad to see support for EDGE data networks.
Music quality was excellent and a step above most music phones. The stereo speakers put out sharp, clear sound with much more volume than voice calls. Sound quality diminished at the highest volume level, but we hardly consider that a sticking point. Music also sounded great over the included wired headphones, but the headset connection was a little loose. We liked, however, that Nokia chose a standard 2.5mm connection.

Getting music on the phone was a breeze with the included Nokia PC suite. We transferred 46MB of music in 3 minutes, 45 seconds, which is pretty fast when compared with the Motorola Razr V3i. The software, which you can use to sync your phone or to transfer a variety of file types, was easy to install and use, but with one tiny caveat: after transferring tracks, you'll have to update your music library in order to access the new tunes directly from the player.
The Nokia 5300 has a rated talk time of 3.2 hours and a promised standby time of 9.3 days. Our tests revealed a talk time of 3 hours. According to FCC radiation tests the Nokia 5300 has a digital SAR rating of 0.8 watts per kilogram.

posted by RAVI @ 12:25 AM 0 comments

Mobile phone

Mobile phones from various years

Several mobile phones

A mobile or cell(ular) (tele)phone is a long-range, portable electronic device for personal telecommunications over long distances.
Most current mobile phones connect to a cellular network of base stations (cell sites), which is in turn interconnected to the public switched telephone network (PSTN) (the exception are satellite phones). Cellular networks were first introduced in the early to mid 1980s (the 1G generation). Prior mobile phones operating without a cellular network (the so-called 0G generation), such as Mobile Telephone Service, date back to 1945. Until the mid to late 1980s, most mobile phones were sufficiently large that they were permanently installed in vehicles as car phones. With the advance of miniaturization, currently the vast majority of mobile phones are handheld. In addition to the standard voice function of a telephone, a mobile phone can support many additional services such as SMS for text messaging, email, packet switching for access to the Internet, and MMS for sending and receiving photos and video.

The world's largest mobile phone manufacturers include Audiovox, BenQ-Siemens, High Tech Computer Corporation, Fujitsu, Kyocera, LG, Motorola, NEC, Nokia, Panasonic (Matsushita Electric), Pantech Curitel, Philips, Sagem, Samsung, Sanyo, Sharp, Siemens SK Teletech, Sony Ericsson, T&A Alcatel and Toshiba.

The world's largest mobile phone operators include Orange SA, China Mobile and Vodafone.
There are also specialist communication systems related to, but distinct from mobile phones, such as Professional Mobile Radio. Mobile phones are also distinct from cordless telephones, which generally operate only within a limited range of a specific base station. Technically, the term mobile phone includes such devices as satellite phones and pre-cellular mobile phones such as those operating via MTS which do not have a cellular network, whereas the related term cell(ular) phone does not. In practice, the two terms are used nearly interchangeably, with the preferred term varying by location.

Worldwide deployment


Radio phones have a long and varied history that stretches back to the 1950s, with hand-held cellular radio devices being available since 1983. Due to their low establishment costs and rapid deployment, mobile phone networks have since spread rapidly throughout the world, outstripping the growth of fixed telephony.

World mobile phone usage

In most of Europe, wealthier parts of Asia, Africa, the Caribbean, Latin America, Australia, Canada, and the United States, mobile phones are now widely used, with the majority of the adult, teenage, and even child population owning one. Taiwan had the highest mobile phone usage in 2005 at 111 subscribers per 100 people. Hong Kong has the highest mobile phone penetration rate in the world, at 127.4% in June 2006. The total number of mobile phone subscribers in the world was estimated at 2.14 billion in 2005. Around 80% of world's population have mobile phone coverage as of 2006. This figure is expected to increase to 90% by the year 2010.

At present India and China have the largest growth rates of cellular subscribers in the world. The availability of Prepaid or pay as you go services, where the subscriber does not have to commit to a long term contract, has helped fuel this growth on a monumental scale.
The mobile phone has become ubiquitous because of the interoperability of mobile phones across different networks and countries. This is due to the equipment manufacturers working to meet one of a few standards, particularly the GSM standard which was designed for Europe-wide interoperability. All European nations and most Asian and African nations adopted it as their sole standard. In other countries, such as the United States, Australia, Japan, and South Korea, legislation does not require any particular standard, and GSM coexists with other standards, such as CDMA and iDEN.

Mobile phone culture or customs

In fewer than twenty years, mobile phones have gone from being rare and expensive pieces of equipment used by businesses to a pervasive low-cost personal item. In many countries, mobile phones now outnumber land-line telephones, with most adults and many children now owning mobile phones [citation needed]. In the United States, 50% of children own mobile phones. It is not uncommon for young adults to simply own a mobile phone instead of a land-line for their residence [citation needed]. In some developing countries, where there is little existing fixed-line infrastructure, the mobile phone has become widespread. According to the CIA World Factbook the UK now has more mobile phones than people.

With high levels of mobile telephone penetration, a mobile culture has evolved, where the phone becomes a key social tool, and people rely on their mobile phone address book to keep in touch with their friends. Many people keep in touch using SMS, and a whole culture of "texting" has developed from this. The commercial market in SMS's is growing. Many phones even offer Instant Messenger services to increase the simplicity and ease of texting on phones. Cellular phones in Japan, offering Internet capabilities such as NTT DoCoMo's i-mode, offer text messaging via standard e-mail.

The mobile phone itself has also become a totemic and fashion object, with users decorating, customizing, and accessorizing their mobile phones to reflect their personality. This has emerged as its own industry. The sale of commercial ringtones exceeded $2.5 billion in 2004.

The use of a mobile phone is prohibited in some rail carriages

Mobile phone etiquette has become an important issue with mobiles ringing at funerals, weddings, movies, and plays. Users often speak at increased volume which has led to places like bookshops, libraries, movie theatres, doctor's offices, and houses of worship posting signs prohibiting the use of mobile phones, and in some places installing signal jamming equipment to prevent usage (although in many countries, e.g. the United States, such equipment is illegal). Transportation providers, particularly those doing long-distance services, often offer a "quiet car" where phone use is prohibited, much like the designated non-smoking cars in the past. Mobile phone use on aircraft is also prohibited, because of concerns of possible interference with aircraft radio communications. Most schools in the U.S prohibit cell phones due to the high amount of class disruptions due to their use, and due to the possibility of photographing someone (without consent).

Camera phones and videophones that can capture video and take photographs are increasingly being used by companies like Scoopt to cover breaking news. Stories like the London Bombings, the Indian Ocean Tsunami and Hurricane Katrina have been reported on by camera phone users on photo sharing sites like Flickr.

In Japan, cellular phone companies provide immediate notification of earthquakes and other natural disasters to their customers free of charge. In the event of an emergency, disaster response crews can locate trapped or injured people using the signals from their mobile phones; an interactive menu accessible through the phone's Internet browser notifies the company if the user is safe or in distress.

Mobile phone features

Invented in 1997, the camera phone is now 85% of the market. Mobile phones also often have features beyond sending text messages and making voice calls—including Internet browsing, music (MP3) playback, personal organizers, e-mail, built-in cameras and camcorders, ringtones, games, radio, Push-to-Talk (PTT), infrared and Bluetooth connectivity, call registers, ability to watch streaming video or download video for later viewing, and serving as a wireless modem for a PC.

In most countries, the person receiving a cellular phone call pays nothing. However, in China (including Hong Kong), Canada, and the United States, one can be charged per minute.

Technology

Mobile phones and the network they operate under vary significantly from provider to provider, and even from nation to nation. However, all of them communicate through electromagnetic radio waves with a cell site base station, the antennas of which are usually mounted on a tower, pole, or building.

The phones have a low-power transceiver that transmits voice and data to the nearest cell sites, usually 5 to 8 miles (approximately 8 to 13 kilometres) away. When the cellular phone or data device is turned on, it registers with the mobile telephone exchange, or switch, with its unique identifiers, and will then be alerted by the mobile switch when there is an incoming telephone call. The handset constantly listens for the strongest signal being received from the surrounding base stations. As the user moves around the network, the mobile device will "handoff" to various cell sites during calls, or while waiting (idle) between calls it will reselect cell sites.

Cell sites have relatively low-power (often only one or two watts) radio transmitters which broadcast their presence and relay communications between the mobile handsets and the switch. The switch in turn connects the call to another subscriber of the same wireless service provider or to the public telephone network, which includes the networks of other wireless carriers.

The dialogue between the handset and the cell site is a stream of digital data that includes digitized audio (except for the first generation analog networks). The technology that achieves this depends on the system which the mobile phone operator has adopted. Some technologies include AMPS for analog, and D-AMPS, CDMA2000, GSM, GPRS, EV-DO, and UMTS for digital communications. Each network operator has a unique radio frequency band.

Controversy

Health controversy

As with many new technologies, concerns have arisen about the effects on health from using a mobile telephone. There is a small amount of scientific evidence for an increase in certain types of rare tumors (cancer) in long-time, heavy users. More recently a pan-European study provided significant evidence of genetic damage under certain conditions. Some researchers also report the mobile phone industry has interfered with further research on health risks. So far, however, the World Health Organization Task Force on EMF effects on health has no definitive conclusion on the veracity of these allegations. (See also electromagnetic radiation hazard.) It is generally thought, however, that RF is incapable of producing any more than heating effects, as it is considered non-ionizing radiation; in other words, it lacks the energy to disrupt molecular bonds such as occurs in genetic mutations.

Driving controversy

Another controversial but more lethal health concern is the correlation with road traffic accidents. Several studies have shown that motorists have a much higher risk of collisions and losing control of the vehicle while talking on the mobile telephone simultaneously with driving, even when using "hands-free" systems. Other studies have shown that using a mobile phone while driving poses the same risk as someone operating a vehicle while under the influence of alcohol. Four U.S. states and many countries have now restricted or prohibited the use of mobile phones while driving. In the UK and in Israel, driving whilst holding a mobile phone to ones ear is illegal.

Potential danger during electrical storms

In 2006, it was reported that mobile phone users suffer much more serious lesions than non-users, in case of being struck by lightning during an electrical storm. Cell phones do not, however, present the danger of a land line during an electrical storm; whereas wires can carry a lightning strike to a nearby telephone user, cell phone signals are immune to such danger.

Security concerns

Early mobile phones were limited in their security features. Some problems with these models were "cloning", a variant of identity theft, and "scanning" whereby third parties in the local area could intercept and eavesdrop in on calls. Analogue phones could also be listened to on some radio scanners.
Although more recent digital systems (such as GSM) have attempted to address these fundamental issues, security problems continue to persist. Vulnerabilities (such as SMS spoofing) have been found in many current protocols that continue to allow the possibility of eavesdropping or cloning.
Location tracking using mobile phones is also a concern.

posted by RAVI @ 4:18 AM 0 comments