Diaries of a Nokia Fan Boy

Well this was kind of a slow day in the news department until just now. A German website, NokiaPort.de, claims to have reputable information regarding the future Nokia roadmap. Now most of this information should be confirmed on September 2nd, so we don’t have long to wait to see whether this is true, although the information does seem to be logical, for lack of a better word, so I would say that if its not all true, then at least most of it is.

Xseries
This is claimed to be the successor of the XpressMusic line, which seems to make sense, and that the line will be introduced with a new phone released at Nokia World 09. The phone is rumored to be similar to the recently released 5530 XM but with 3G, GPS, and costing about an extra 50 Euros. Quite a fair deal for something that takes the best from 5530 XM and the 5800 XM and meshes it into a better phone.

Honestly, I don’t know how I feel about the Xseries line. I mean I understand that its a natural extension of the Eseries and Nseries line-ups, but I rather liked the XpressMusic line. It clearly indicated that it is not a smartphone, but a music-centric feature phone. I suppose that doesn’t really matter anyway since the XpressMusic line only contains smartphones anyway. And with that, what will be differentiation between the Nseries and Xseries? I guess we’ll just have to wait until NW09 to find out.

Cseries
Sadly, the only news on the Cseries is that it is likely to be introduced (and explained?) at NW09.

Maemo 5
The recently previewed N900 is likely to be the only Maemo 5 device for a while. However N920 is rumored to come out next year, but we may get a chance to see it on Sept 2.

Touchscreens
More touchscreen devices will be announced at NW09, with most of them staying in the same segment as the N97 Mini. To me this means it will be the “high-end-but-not-flagship” segment, and even I don’t know what that means. However speaking of touchscreens, it appears that Nokia will be moving to capacitive screens in the future, i8910 already proved S60’s compatibility. I think this is both good news and bad news, as capacitive is great, but resistive can use styli and consume much less battery power, so its a trade off.

Eseries & Touch
Not news: Nokia is working on a touch enabled, S60 5th Edition device for the Eseries; still not news: the device will be available no sooner than in 2010. Will we see a preview of it at the conference? Who knows.

Xenon flash
Sadly, Xenon flash seems to be an unpopular feature with Nokia, with it appearing only intermittently on its devices. This comes as a disappointment to me as that would have swayed my decision in my next flagship purchase quite a bit. I understand the reasons behind this: expensive on the battery and on the wallet, but it would have been nice to see this on flagship and camera-centric models at the least.

OMAP3 entering the mix
Its nice to see that Nokia is finally starting to use more leading-edge CPU’s in their phones. Hopefully this will bring things like HD video playback and HD TV-out to their models, maybe even higher resolution screens! But I guess we’ll just have to wait and see.

September 2nd is looking to be a VERY exciting day!

-Nokia FanBoy

via: NokiaPort.de (read)