News: Nokia N91 Phone Starts Shipping
It’s official: the Nokia N91 cell phone aka “the iPod crusher,” has started shipping to the USA.
As you may have read here, the N91 is Nokia’s first hardcore music phone, sporting a 4 gigabyte hard drive, 2 megapixel camera, and a battery that can provide up to 10 hours of continuous music.
More in the full entry.
The Nokia N91 is encased in a stainless steel body that includes dedicated music playback buttons - and the front music panel can slide down, uncovering the keypad.
Nokia is currently pushing the fact that the N91 comes with preloaded Live8 concert content. Wait, I should say, “exclusive Live8 concert content.” There we go. To me, this is a useless addon that Nokia could’ve just NOT preloaded and instead dropped the price by about 50 bucks. That would’ve made me a lot happier.
As the Nokia N91 is a 900/1800/1900 mhz/wcdma phone I’m really not sure where it’s headed. T-mobile? Sprint/Nextel? Definitely not Cingular as it’s missing the key 850 mhz band.
The N91 should also be Nokia’s first cell phone that also has a 3.5mm output jack. That means you can use any kind of standard headphone plug which differs from Nokia’s previous (and current) Nseries phones that require a stupid looking Pop-port to 3.5mm jack converter.
While I definitely have to applaud Nokia for taking the big chance of releasing this hardcore of a music phone, I’m still a bit on the fence about the N91. 10 hours of battery life without including voice calls is a little in the poor zone for MP3 players, especially with newer playeres pushing out almost 20 hours of continuous music before dying. Couple that with the fact that you’ll probably be making at least 1 or 2 voice calls, AND the cell phone’s idle period and you’re looking at something like 7 hours for the Nokia N91.
The original iPods only lasted 6-8 hours. But then again, that was when there was no real hard drive based MP3 player competition. Now the playing field is littered with mountains up mountains of portable music jukeboxes.
Another factor to take into consideration is price. According to the press release, the N91 will be available on NokiaUSA.com for the initial price of $599. Compare that to one of Sony’s (ahh!) Walkman phones which retail at about $299. I know, the N91 is a hell of a lot better in a million ways but American customers (especially myself) are very finicky people. I also think it’s been ingrained into our brains that any phone over $250 bucks is just crazy. Which is just too bad.
At any rate, I hope the N91 takes off and completely proves me wong. I’d definitely feel a little better knowing that other people besides myself carry around $500 phones.
Read the original Nokia N91 Phone preview here.
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