Roland Tanglao's Weblog

Steve Rocks (literally since he's a bass player! And figuratively since he's an articulate and very cool person!) ! Met him in Finland at Nokia Open Lab 2008. I applied to the program so, "Global Omnipresent Delivery Services" (GODS hat tip to Neal Stephenson) and Nokia willing, the N96 will make its way to Vancouver (apparently the N96 was designed/integrated in Vancouver) for me to take it on a bicycle and have my devious (ha ha !) ways

QUOTE [From N96 World Tour starts here! — Steve Lawson: Bass 2.0 — the soundtrack to the day you wish you’d had]

A few weeks back I was contacted about a project involving the Nokia N96 - the idea was to send one round the world, getting various people to use it, upload video and photos, add apps to the phone itself, leave stuff on it, basically put it through its paces and tell a story… It’s a great fun idea, and I’m the first one to get it! So I’ve got a brand new lovely N96 to play with for a week or so.

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For those who don't follow the Nokia soap opera, the N96 flagship (with 5 megapixel camera and an incredible 16 GB flash card built in with a micro SD slot so you can expand to 24GB and soon 32GB but with a low res 320x240 screen) introduced today at the Mobile World Congress looks almost exactly like the N81 (major difference: N96 is a dual slider)

Not a big fan of the N81 (it's a great Walkman for those who don't want an iPod and have lots of money but the 2 megapixel camera is b*gus) but it does look a lot better than the N95. I do wish that Nokia had come up with something more radically beautiful when designing its next flagship. Shame the N96 has the same lock switch as the N81. Fingers crossed that the N96 lock switch is less finicky than my N81 (my N81 lockswitch sticks). But oh the possibilities with 24GB of storage! Yum! Go Nokia go! Now just fix S60 and make the screen bigger and you'll finally have one device that does everything!

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In a previous post I expressed by appreciation for the Nokia N81. The simplicity and balance of the design certainly make for a classic look. Hence, I was really pleased to see that the industrial design of The Dark Knight (N96) borrows so heavily from the N81.

There is a real attention to detail here. Is it perfect? No. Is it close to perfect? Yes.

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