Martin Gumucio

This is the same model cellphone as the first one I owned. I didn't have the flashy headset however.

It’s been a while since i bought a new cell phone. As a matter of fact the only phone I ever bought with my own money was my first phone. An Ericsson, back in 1997 or something like that when it was still quite exotic to have one.

You would think that that technology has progressed since then, but what we see today is a market totally overcrowded with bad products. I’m not joking when I tell you that the SonyEricsson p990, a phone I had the misfortune to meet at my current job, actually choke on the task of dialling a number. Out of memory after two digits! Receiving a call was the same gamble, the phone could run out of memory as it tried to recieve the call.. system restart.

So it was with pretty low expectations that I went shopping last week. What I wanted was so simple.

• A phone that is small, and that I can drop without it going a million pieces. A “vacation” phone if you will.
• Not an iPhone clone.
• As less keys as possible and as minimal design as possible.
• Wi-fi  and ability to stream music from my home network.

Ok so that last point was a bit of a joke, because I never expected to find a phone like that. The iPhone does that kind of, via the tversity web-interface. But it’s pretty slow and only works when it feels like it.

But what do you know, looks like Nokia r&d have been reading my mind.  I went and bought a Nokia 5630. The rest of this post is going to be about how great it is, and how UPnP changed everything.

I bought a budget Nokia for emergencies some months ago, it’s in itself a pretty good device, but as basic as you could possibly get. So the question arises: What else could you possibly need to have in your phone?  Turns out… lots of things!

The Good

There are the normal things you would expect, here are the things that first strike you:

• Its fast
• Its stable. I have managed to crash it a few times, but nothing major.
• Good battery time
• Nice design! Minimal.  Me like.
• Games games games. The Ngage gaming platform is built in. And no, I don’t care about that.
• Good camera.  Video editing is built in.
• It’s Symbian OS, so you can install lots of nice apps. I have seamless syncing with Googles Calendar and Contacs for example. Everything i put into the phones calendar, gets auto-synced.

The Awesome

Nokia 5630

Here is a rundown of the features that for me were totally new: I didn’t know any phone could do this.

• The voice-control is amazing: You can call anyone in your contacts by saying their name and what number to use. ie “Anders, mobile”. You can also say the name of any artist, album or song that you have in your phone, and it starts playing it.
• Total support for UPnP. That means that you can browse up music from your computer to your phone and stream it. So for example listen to anything you like when in bed, your whole collection at your fingertips, from your cellphone. Or why not copy it over so you can listen to it later when you leave home? You can also play music from your phone, on your computer or whatever else you happen to have in your home that supports UPnP. I have an old hacked xbox, works great. Fantastic way to move music between friends etc.
• Support for wi-fi.  Auto-detects hotspots and shows you an icon when there is a hotspot you can connect to.  This is the smallest cellphone I know about that supports wi-fi.
• Support for SIP.   I realize I’m coming late to this party, but it seems that there is built-in support for Voip (voice over internet).  That means that when the phone is without wi-fi range, I should be able to get a SIP account somewhere, and make REALLY cheap calls with my normal cellphone. The tech in itself is not so cool, but boy, that it comes built into my cellphone, that is pretty cool indeed.
• Podcasts,  every morning it grabs the latest episodes of whatever is new. Automatically, over wi-fi. This is how it should be.
• It can read you your new SMS’s and emails. (again to your headset if you like). A bit cheezy perhaps, but I like stuff like that.

The Problems

Here’s what doesn’t work:

• It’s pretty clear that this device was meant to be sold in Finland. The manual was in Finnish.. no big deal I thought I can get the manual from the web in some non-ugric language. But sadly there are functions in the phone that are in finnish only. Still trying to sort this out with Nokia support. Update:  I discovered that you can also download a voice for almost every language on earth for this feature. Very cool.
• This phone is not listed on the Nokia Support pages yet.  Update: Don’t bother with Nokia support. Read forums instead.
• When listening to music over bluetooth, there is no way to adjust volume. I trust this will be fixed. Right now its LOUD.  Very bad for my tinnitus.
• After installing some apps, the camera no longer works.  No big deal since It’s not a feature I use a lot, but still annoying. Update: After a  complete wipe of the phone the camera function is still broken! I guess I have to take it in for service. First time I own a phone where a software installation messes it up for good!