Roland Tanglao's Weblog

David Ayre likes his Blackberry Pearl and found an unexpected bonus: watching video on his 45 minute (one way) commute into Bryght!

I've been sick and reading fiction books (I finished The Ash Garden before I slept at 8p.m. last night, recommended!) and not tech stuff but I had a dream last night that Nokia introduced the N999 blogaphone in 2007 with:

• 5 megapixel still camera with GPS and with a real xenon flash with lens and camera provided in partnership with Canon or Nikon and DVD quality video with a dedicated public/private button as I discussed in my blog post about ShoZu everywhere and the shoot-publish-respond workflow
• a full QWERTY keyboard like the E61 or an almost QWERTY keyboard like the Blackberry Pearl
• standard USB including power, standard headphone jacks and video out ports
• quadband GSM, UMTS, HSDPA and WiFi
• built in ShoZu technology that automatically over whatever the cheapest bandwidth the user has configured (which by default is WiFi, but those who are lucky enough to live in an area with affordable 3G could configure that too) uploads videos and photos with suspend and resume via the Atom publishing protocol to any website that supports this including flickr and blip.tv (blip doesn't support this today but I know they would in a heartbeat if they were the default for videos like flickr is with today's Gallery app)
• out of the box support for syncing with Mac OS X and Windows
• enough onboard RAM (which is about double the amount of RAM in the N93 I wager) to surf flickr.com/photos/roland :-) , run the podcasting client, run ShoZu in the background and the other apps mobile content power creators and consumers use
• 4 Gig of built in storage plus a micro SD slot for people like me who would put in even more storage, anything less than 2GB doesn't cut it for 5 Megapixel stills and DVD quality video
• costs less than $US 1000

I know I am dreaming (I have no insider knowledge about Nokia or anybody else in the mobile world's plans for blogaphone-like devices) and the N999 ain't coming soon but it is doable and I'd buy one in a heartbeat with my own money. This certainly ain't the Apple iPhone. Too power user and due to it's 'frankenphone'-like nature too cumbersome and harder to learn but I bet others want it.

Regardless, for me 2007 will be the year of the blogaphone for power users. Why pack a laptop when you can get all your multimedia consumption and creation done with a device like the N95? The N95 + bluetooth keyboard looks to be an early contender for 2007 blogaphone of the year!

[Assuming the pictures are better than an N93 and there's enough RAM to run the Series 60 browser, ShoZu, the wireless keyboard app and the camera app simultaneously which may prove to be an unwarranted assumption!]

The BlackBerry Pearl (linking to gizmodo because it's more informative! ) was launched today complete with a 1.3 megapixel camera.I am sure the email features are great. And the web browser is passable (Opera and the Nokia browser are better I bet).

I am sure the Pearl will be a hit for normal people.

Lots of questions (the official Blackberry Pearl site s*cks! Why doesn't it have a proper specs page?): Does ShoZu run on it? Does it run Java? If it does, I assume ShoZu could be easily ported. How good are the photos? I bet they s*ck compared to a modern cameraphones like the N70, N73 and Sony Ericsson 750, 810, etc.

All in all a fine device for the masses it would appear (I haven't tried it).

However for mobile cameraphone early adopters like myself it needs to have a modern camera and ShoZu support and WiFi (most people can't afford to upload more than a handful of photos a month over GPRS or 3G!) before it is compelling enough to buy or want.

I am sure these feature upgrades will happen over time. Until then I am quite happy with Nokia (Nokia add one your great 2 megapixel cameras to the E62 and put back WiFi and you will have a device that is much better than the Pearl!). Vive la competition! Go RIM and Nokia go!