*scottstuff*

Engadget thinks that the Nokia N91 might be delayed into the first quarter of 2006. The latest round of rumors suggested that the phone was going to ship in December of 2005, but that really just means that one lucky guy in Finland will have one; I’d be amazed if it shows up legally in the US before March or so, and it may be a few month after that before either of the GSM carriers pick it up.

On the other hand, Cingular has been doing a good job lately with high-end Nokia phones–they’re supposed to start shipping the Nokia 9300 soon, and there are rumors about them and the N90 as well. So we’ll see how this goes–there’s a chance that they’ll manage to surprise us.

There’s a rumor going around that Apple and Nokia are going to partner and produce a mobile iTunes application for the Nokia N91. Nokia is denying it, but the phone’s still months away from its launch, so there’s plenty of time for things to change.

As I see it, there are sort of three levels of iTunes integration for portable devices:

1. The device syncs with iTunes and can play encrypted iTunes Music Store .m4p files. Right now, this is pretty much just the iPod, although the long-rumored Motorola iTunes phone will join it once it’s released.
2. The device syncs with iTunes and can play MP3s and maybe unencrypted AAC files. Before the iPod took off, most MP3 players fit into this category, but I don’t know if Apple has continued supporting their competition.
3. The device and iTunes don’t know anything about each other, and the user is stuck looking for third-party tools.

I suspect that the N91 will fit into the second category–just plug it into your computer using a USB cable and iTunes will copy things over. It’s possible that we’ll need a bit of glue code, but that shouldn’t be too hard to write. Worst case, it should only take a few hours to write something that can read through iTune’s XML database and copy playlists to the N91.

PhotographyBLOG says that the Nokia N90 has been named the European Phone of the Year.

This is obviously just marketing fluff, as the N90 has only been shipping for a week or so, but it looks like a cool phone, even if it is kind of huge. It’s pretty obvious that the N90 and N91 are Nokia’s current showpieces for what they’re going to be able to do with next-generation phones–the N90 has a huge screen and a decent camera, while the N91 has real multitasking, 802.11g, and a hard drive.

It looks like the Nokia N90 is shipping. This is Nokia’s high-end cameraphone, with a 2 MP camera, a real lens, and a HVGA-ish display.

I’m still waiting for the N91.

Om says that the Nokia 6682 is now availably directly from Nokia’s website for $599. The 6682 is Nokia’s current high-end business phone–you can spend more on one of their communicator models or on a fashion phone, but if you’re looking for a regular phone with lots of features, the 6682’s about as good as you’re going to do in GSM-land.

The site that started this also mentions that the Nokia N90 is nearly available. The N90 is basically a specialized camera-phone, with a real lens and a formfactor that’s designed to make the camera more usable. It also has the highest-resolution screen that I’ve ever seen on a phone–352x416. If it had WiFi like the N91, then I’d probably be drooling over it. As it is, I’m waiting to see what’s available in February when my current Cingular plan runs out. If the N91 actually includes a SIP client (as has been rumored), then I’ll be very tempted.

Darn it, I think I’ve fallen in love with another unreleased phone.

This week, it’s the Nokia N91. It was announced a couple months ago, and isn’t supposed to ship until late in 2005. It’s going to be marketed as a “music phone,” but I think the specs more or less speak for themselves:

• 4 GB hard drive
• 802.11g
• Bluetooth
• 2 MP still camera, 352x288 video capture
• Series 60 3.0 software
• Video player (MPEG4, Real, H.263)
• GSM/EDGE/WCDMA (3G) support
• FM radio receiver
• mini-USB jack (can act like USB mass storage device)
• phone keypad and music controls, but no keyboard
• battery life: 12 hours music playback, 3-4 hours talk time, 7-ish days standby time

You can get more details from Nokia’s own flashcrapular site.

It’s not a small phone by any stretch. It’s very slightly smaller then a Treo 650–4mm narrower, 1mm thinner, 16g lighter.

The thing that I find so fascinating about the N91 is that it can replace practically every device that I’ve been cramming into my pockets:

• phone
• iPod–the N91’s not as nice as the iPod photo, but for light use, it’ll probably be good enough.
• pocket camera–much better then my T616 (which is worthless as a camera). 1600x1200 is big enough for web photos and the occasional whiteboard photo at work. If the shots are anything like the N90 sample shots then I’ll be happy.
• organizer (it’ll sync with the Mac once Apple tweaks their list of supported Series 60 devices). It’s not quite as capable as the Clie that I’m still dragging around, but it’ll probably be good enough.
• USB flash drive (you’ll need a mini-USB to USB zip cable, but they’re small)
• video player (er, well, if you don’t mind watching on a 2” screen)
• photo album – if the iPod photo can do it, why can’t the N91? Their screens are basically the same resolution.

The other thing that fascinates me about the N91 is its SIP support. The specs list support for JSR-180, which is SIP for J2ME apps. There are rumors online that the demo N-series phones have native SIP support in the phone UI. That’d let me use the N91 as a cordless phone when I’m at home or at work, which is just one more thing to like about it.

Of course, there have to be downsides–the camera doesn’t look as good as the one that comes with the N90 (but the N90 doesn’t have 802.11 or the hard drive). It doesn’t have the N90’s video-conferencing camera, either (that’d be cool with SIP). It’s kind of big. It doesn’t have a keyboard (although external bluetooth ones will work). It won’t ship until the very end of 2005. The specs don’t list 850 MHz support, although they’re clearly marketing this to the US, so presumably there will be a US model with 850/1900 MHz support. Finally, the price: at least $700 US before subsidies, possibly closer to $900. So, frankly, it’s probably too expensive for me to buy, but I’m going to be really tempted. Since Palm is rumored to be saving the next Treo for Spring of 2006, the N91 may not even have any competition for “Cool Phone of the Year” in my mind.

I want to see a combination VoIP/MVNO double-play. That’s one company that sells cellular service (using someone else’s network), sells VoIP service, and integrates the two services.

There are two specific scenarios that seem obvious:

1. They sell the customer mobile phone service and VoIP service via an ATA or SIP hardphone. This would be great for people who have turned off their home phone service while continuing to pay for some form of Internet access. One number would ring both devices, the first one to pick up wins. Outgoing calls would have the same caller ID from either device. Alternate products would be family plans with multiple phones, each with their own number, then a shared number that will ring all devices; and centrex plans for small businesses, where the company provides both VoIP desk phones and mobile phones.

2. They sell the customer mobile phone service and act like a SIP client. This way the customer can integrate their mobile phones directly into their existing phone system. Ideally, the MVNO’s SIP gateway will register and unregister with the SIP PBX as the phone gains and loses service; this will let the PBX do the Right Thing with voicemail, and also enable a number of other services.

Personally, I’d love to buy services like this. I’d prefer GSM phones, simply because the most interesting phones are almost always GSM-only. Accoring to Cellular News, there are at least three GSM MVNOs in the US right now, using both Cingular and T-Mobile’s networks, so this is certainly possible.

On the hardware front, several companies seem to be providing GSM/SIP gateway equipment:

• Bridgeport Networks seems to be marketing these exact ideas to carriers.

• Blueslice concentrates more on WiFi/GSM roaming, but the basic technology seems similar.

It’s possible that Earthlink will be rolling something like this out soon–they’re building a MVNO, and they share at least one board member with Bridgeport Networks. They seem to be concentrating more on EV-DO then anything GSM-related, though.

There seems to be a huge push in the cellular industry to integrate SIP into their networks, so something like this will be possible sooner or later. My current contract with Cingular is up in 6 months; it’d be nice if someone has something on the market that I can buy by then.

This isn’t exactly new news, but Cisco bought Sipura yesterday. Sipura makes a number of VoIP products, including the SPA-841 phone that I’ve been using for the past few weeks. They’re generally considered to have the best SIP implementation of any of the cheap vendors, and they make good, solid products for low prices. It’s a nice combination. Cisco has been licensing Sipura’s technology and using it in Linksys’s cheap VoIP hardware for around nine months now. Linksys has had to jump through a number of hoops to keep Sipura happy recently; apparently Sipura didn’t like customers buying the unlocked Linksys PAP2-NA instead of the more expensive Sipura SPA-2000. Now that Cisco owns both companies, I suspect that they’ll work out their differences.

Hopefully Cisco won’t gut Sipura to keep them from competing with Cisco’s more expensive products. The jury is still out on Cisco’s Linksys acquisition–they haven’t released many exciting new products since Cisco bought them, but they haven’t killed off any of their interesting product lines or tried to stop the flood of alternate Linux firmware distributions for the WRT54G family either.

One thing that’s interesting about this acquisition is that Sipura was formed by a bunch of ex-Cisco people. After Cisco bought Komodo in 2000, a bunch of the Komodo people left Cisco to go form Sipura. Now they’re back at Cisco again. This seems to be how Cisco does R&D these days–it spins employees off to work on their own products and then acquires them if they accomplish anything interesting. I’m not convinced that it’s a bad way to deal with R&D risk in a huge company–it shields Cisco from the cost of failure and promotes risk-taking by R&D engineers, but it doesn’t do anything to help unify Cisco’s massively fractured product lineup.

I ordered a Sipura SPA-841 SIP phone from VoIPSupply.com last week, and it arrived last night. I haven’t had enough time with it yet to write a really comprehensive review, but I’d like to share a couple first impressions.

First–the SPA-841 is a lot smaller then I’d expected. It’s under half the volume of my Cisco 7940. It fit into a 2” tall FedEx mailing box, which I didn’t expect at all. Even though the base is small, it’s not very light–it feels like a real office phone, even if it’s a lot smaller then most of the office phones that I’ve used. It doesn’t seem to slide around too much on my desk.

Once I plugged it in, it booted very quickly. The Cisco phone takes around 30 seconds to boot, while the Sipura is ready for use in under 10 seconds.

The SPA-841 comes in a box with no documentation. Once you plug it in, you can configure it via HTTP using a web interface that the phone provides. Supposedly it’s also possible to feed it a configuration file, but Sipura only gives out the configuration file documentation and tools to VoIP service providers, not end-users. Personally, I’d rather edit text configuration files on a server and upload them to the phone then fiddle with the hundreds of settings that Sipura provides on their web interface, but if I’m only dealing with one phone, it isn’t a big difference. If I end up buying another couple SPA-841s for around the house, I’ll probably start agitating for open provisioning tools.

Even though there isn’t a whole lot of documentation, the phone isn’t too hard to configure. I spent about 15 minutes with it and had it accepting incoming calls, dialing out, and handling voice mail. The voice mail light (Message Waiting Indicator, or MWI) is just a dinky red LED sitting in the middle of the phone; I really like Cisco’s MWI a lot better. The Sipura also provides a MWI stutter dial tone, and it’s hard to miss that, even if you don’t see the tiny LED shining at you.

At this point, it seems to work, but I’m not completely happy with the way it’s configured. Once I’ve finished tweaking the config, I’ll write up a full review with pictures comparing it with the Cisco phone and provide a few configuration recommendations.

Update: I haven’t had time to finish the review yet, but I wanted to add a couple quick notes:

• The phone does come with a getting-started flyer, a glossy 8.5x11 mini-booklet with directions for plugging it in, connecting it to the network, and configuring it to talk to a few different SIP providers. It doesn’t come with anything more substantial. Sipura’s website has had a 71-page PDF Users’ Guide for a while, and just recently added a 79-page PDF Admin Guide. I haven’t had time to read the admin guide yet.

• The audio quality seems perfect. I’ve only spent a half-hour or so on the phone, but I haven’t noticed any dropouts. The handset is pleasantly loud.

• The latest firmware release, 3.1.1 (the update from last week’s 0.9.5–nice version number jump) includes support for “SIP-B,” which is apparently a standard being pushed by a few phone and softswitch vendors that make it easier to add PBX-like features to SIP phones. This includes bridged line appearances, shared missed-call DBs, called-number ID (the opposite of caller ID–it shows the name that goes with the number that you dialed), standardized call park/pickup support, and a few other useful features. Unfortunately, the SIP-B spec doesn’t appear to be public right now, even though the vendors involved have made some attempts at running pieces of it through the IETF’s standardization process. I suspect that SIP-B is really just a blanket name that covers a bunch of small, independent SIP enhancements that will be pushed through the I-D/RFC process one at a time, but for now there’s no real documentation available. Hopefully that will change soon so Asterisk can better support SIP-B hardware. (Micro-update: Sylantro has sent me a pile of documentation on SIP-B. I’m not sure that it’s complete, but there’s quite a bit of it, and they’re getting ready to put it on their website. So I’m mentally adding them to the “good guys” list when it comes to standards compliance and promotion)

• Several people have mentioned that they’ve had problems with the rubbery phone buttons on the SPA-841 sticking. I suspect that they’ve fixed this with more recent phones, as mine has been perfect. I wouldn’t say that the buttons are as nice as Cisco’s, but I don’t have any complaints.

I guess that’s a good summary of the phone–it’s not as nice as Cisco’s phones, but I have no complaints about it, either. It seems to work well enough, it has a decent feature set, and it’s cheap. I’d love to see them add PoE support, a ‘SPA-842’ model with a built-in Ethernet switch, a backlight for the LCD and buttons, and some way of supporting external dialing directories, but none of these are really critical–as it is, the phone works quite nicely, and I’ll probably order 2-3 more SPA-841s over the next few months.

It looks like Cingular’s Treo 650 page went live at 9:00 PST last night. Surprisingly, they’re selling it for only $400 after rebates, with a 2-year contract. I was expecting a price closer to $600. In addition, PalmOne is now selling unlocked GSM Treo 650s direct for $599.

If I read Cingular’s web site correctly, it looks like I could get a 650 for $400 and swap to a new contract without paying any early termination fees, but I’d have to buy a new phone for my wife. On the other hand, going through PalmOne’s site makes it pretty clear that they can sell me an AT&T-locked phone for $549, but then I’d have to fight with Cingular to get them to add EDGE data support to my existing AT&T contract.

Frankly, this looks like enough of a headache that I’m going to put off dealing with it for a month or two. I mean, I’ve been waiting on the 650 since June of last year, I guess another couple months won’t kill me.