A new music smartphone has come out from Nokia called the 5530. It is a nice looking model that comes in a variety of colors and a screen that is hard to beat. Take a quick look in this article at the features and abilities of this second-tier phone from Nokia.

Music is the main focus of the Nokia 5530 smartphone. This bright new phone comes with something called ” XpressMusic “. The 5530 even comes with its own four gigabyte microSD card to prove the seriousness of Nokia towards the storage of songs on their new phone. You do not have to feel tied down to using their card, you can install a 32 gigabyte microSD for eight times more storage space. You can do this while the phone is on. This is called “hot-swapping” and comes in handy.

The screen on the 5530 is bright and stands up to viewing under the suns bright light. It is slightly smaller than some other flagship models, but still not bad at 2.9 inches. It is a resistive touchscreen display and has 640 by 360 pixels. The screen is the main aspect of the front of this device. Nokia designed the front of the 5530 to only have a screen and no mechanical buttons. This can wind up being a problem if the smartphone crashes and you need to do a reboot. The volume and on off are on the sides. Using the XpressMusic icon brings up the browser, Ovi icons, photos, and of course the music section. The screen has the accelerometer option so you can view it horizontally or vertically. This comes in handy when typing in some fast text messages to your friends.

The speakers are at the top and bottom and sound good for being so small. The Nokia 5530 supports bluetooth so you can use head phones without cables if you want. The smartphone comes with a pair of cable head phones and a 3.5 inch connector for them. Some other things that Nokia provides with this device is a travel charger, a connectivity cable ( CA-101D ), mini DVD, a stylus for the screen and the user’s guide. All the connectors are at the bottom of the phone.

The 5530 has a decent web browser and is supported by symbian software. If you are near a Wi-Fi hotspot you can take advantage of this feature along with email. The email is supported on all popular protocols. The SMS feature has seventy megabytes of storage available to it so you may never fill it up. You do not have to delete text messages one by one. You are given the ability to delete multiple messages at once, a true blessing to those who get lots of texts.

The phone application on the Nokia 5530 has the regular functions that everyone is accustomed to for cell phones. Call waiting and conference call are available, along with contacts with images. GSM is not a network you can send data over though. This phone has GPRS and EDGE networks. CSD and HSCSD networks are also supported.

The camera is a middle-weight, coming in at 3.2 megapixels. Video is included and you can take videos that are longer than an hour with the 5530. You can edit your videos, but you will have to review them on the phone. There is no connector for preview on a television or other device.

As stated the Nokia 5530 is built upon the idea of being able to travel with your music with you. All popular formats for audio files are supported. This is coming out soon and will be around $300 dollar range. If predictions are right, it may be sold out by Christmas.

Nokia has had plenty of good introductions in the past and now they have come up with one more; the N900. The N900 is the dream-come-true for power mobile users. Take a look at this brief review of the N900 and see if it does not beat what you have been using.

The first thing you notice about the Nokia N900 is that it is unobtrusive. Do not let the mild exterior fool you. Inside the package is about as much memory as perhaps two “regular” smartphones. The N900 is the newest flagship for Nokia and rightly so. The N900 is sometimes known as a handheld computing device. I would put it right up there with netbooks. The last Nokia flagship, the N97 was a bit anemic in the memory department. The N900 has no such problems. The processor is an ARM Cortex-A8 600 Megahertz ( Mhz ) powerhouse with its own 256 Megabytes of Random Access Memory ( RAM ) and 768 Megabytes of virtual memory. There is also one Gigabyte of application memory. There is 32 Gigabytes of integrated storage which is upgradeable to up to 48 Gigabytes with a MicroSD card. Your applications will not be running slow while you use the N900.

One of the bigger questions for most mobile users concerns Wi-Fi. Yes, the N900 has Wi-fi capability. It also has bluetooth ( 2.1 ) and HSDPA connectivity. This means triband WCDMA 900/1700/2100 and quadband GSM. It is slated to start running on the T-Mobile networks. One very nice feature is the FM transmitter. You can take advantage of all that memory space to store music and broadcast it to your car radio with the built-in FM transmitter of the N900.

In the visual department this N900 is no slouch. It comes with a five Megapixel camera. The camera is video-ready and has a cover that slides shut to protect the lens while you are not taking photos or video. That is an important feature because the lens includes Carl Zeiss optics. The screen is a resistive-touch model that is a WVGA model. It is 3.5 inches in size, equal to the iPhone. The N900 has the same appearance of the iPhone also, at first glance.

The greatest feature of the N900 is the one inside; the operating system. It uses a version of Linux called Maemo. This is a true computing device that also allows you to make phone calls. The N900 uses a browser made by Mozilla, the same folks who make Firefox. What can you do with this Maemo operating system ? For one, you can customize your “desktop” to however you like it. With Maemo, multi-tasking is made easy. You can make contact with your friends or family using Gtalk, Ovi, Skype and other IM friends, and do it from the same page. Automatic geotagging allows you to take photos and know exactly where it was you snapped them. Maemo will turn an ugly GPS tag into something understandable automatically. These are just some of the abilities of the Maemo system that form the core of the new N900.

The appearance of the Nokia N900 is right up there with the “big boys”. It comes with a keyboard slide-out that has directional arrows, which is convenient for choosing items from the screen. You can be sure you will be getting some looks when you pull this out of your pocket. If you are one of those mobile “power users” this is the next toy you will want to get your hands on. 597

It started with the 2-Way

Ever since the early days of the two-way phone, we have been fascinated with the ability to communicate with each other from remote locations. “Mobileers” as they were affectionately referred to made the two-way the first popular mobile device ever. It originally was installed in automobiles then we felt the need to be well..mobile. Around the early 1950’s we had our first signs of phones that were actually mobile. This sparked a new trend with the “bag phone”, a phone that you can detach and attach to your car through the cigarette car lighter, Motorola’s first mobile effort spawned the “walkie-talkie” and it became very popular as a mobile way of communication. All these new inventions made one realization clear: the mainstream loves to stay in touch.

The first mobile phone

The first commercial mobile phone arrived in 1981. It came in the form of the “Motorola Dynex 8000X”. Sure it was almost as big as a VCR, but hey you could call from anywhere and that had many excited. This phone spawned an array of copycats in the 1^st Generation of mobile phones. It wasn’t until the 1990’s that the second generation of smaller, & more powerful mobile phones arrived. The new breed was here.

“2G”

With the new generation of phones came a new generation of radiowaves that could carry their cellular signals. These Second Generation radios aka “2G” were: GSM, CDMA, & TDMA (to name a few). These new phone systems had the capability to process faster transmissions and phone to network signaling. The newer systems also meant that newer phones were smaller and faster than the previous gen due to battery and energy efficient advances in the mobile phone industry. These new smaller phones became standard and the “brick” phone soon become a forgone memory.

Present Day

Nowadays, we are pretty much spoiled with choices. NTT DoComo was the first to market with “3G” networks in Japan on October 1, 2001. The U.S. was soon to follow. The “3G” networks are blazingly fast compared to previous networks. Our mobile phone experience has dramatically changed as well. In fact, some insiders are now calling the modern day mobile phone a “convergence device” . This term was previously coined by the guy behind the game-changing Apple Iphone: Steve Jobs. The reason it’s being labeled as such is the fact that we can now surf the web, watch TV, voice-navigate our road trips, create a resume, film videos, take pics and (did I mention) make phone calls with our new touch-screen mobile phones. Yes, we’ve come a long way since the two-way. Ahh the wonders of technology.