The Government has offered Australia's three mobile operators, and vividwireless, renewal of their existing spectrum allocated on 15 year licences in the late 90s and early 2000s at set prices, while the Government expects to rake in $3 billion.
Nokia’s stated talk time for the 6301 is 3.5 hours with a 14 day stand-by time, although this is likely only for GSM calls, with no call times claimed for Wi-Fi yet, but whatever the talk time ends up being, the charging dock and the fact the Nokia has a removable battery mean serious users don’t have to worry about battery life if they don’t want to.
The 6301 itself has a standard Nokia 2 megapixel camera with 8x digital zoom, a 2-inch QVGA screen, 30MB inbuilt, a 128MB microSD card in the box, and significantly for those wanting to carry a nice selection of MP3 music files, video clips, photos or simply to have a spare gigabyte or two of space to use your phone as a USB memory drive when connected with the USB cable, the 6301 has compatibility with 4GB microSD cards.
On the topic of music, Nokia’s standard MP3 player, FM radio and voice recognition capabilities for command, dialling and voice recording are included as standard. The size is 13.1mm - not quite as thin as the iPhone’s 11.6m, but thin nonetheless.
No mention is made of the operating system used, but it seems obvious that it will be the latest version of Series 60, for which a range of third party programs are also available to download.
Competing VoIP Internet phone programs could theoretically be used with the 6301. An example is a free software app called Fring www.fring.com, offering N95 and other eries 60 Nokia users the ability to use their phone’s data network to make VoIP calls to Skype users or fellow Fring users.
Skype itself is available for Nokia users, with 3 Mobile offering Skype compatibility for their mobile phones with the Skype network, while traditional Internet phone companies are also offering phones such as the N95 the ability to sign up to a phone service that gives you a regular local phone number in your location, turning your cell phone into a landline phone, able to make local calls at very low rates, while letting others call you on a landline number at cheaper rates than when calling a mobile phone number.
French mobile phone company Orange is the first operator to offer the 6310 to its customers, and promises the “convenience of a single phone and a tariff at home and on the move” - implying a cheaper rate when used at home with Wi-Fi, and the normal rate when out and about making calls on the GSM network.
Nokia says the phone will cost 230 euros and will go on sale in ‘select’ European markets before the end of the year.
Clearly, especially with Wi-Fi’s high power requirements, we are still at the beginning of a world where making a call over a Wi-Fi network is a common as making one over GSM.
But the sands are irreversibly shifting, and the networks we can use to make calls and communicate are increasing, with WiMAX and even faster 3.5G HSDPA or 4G networks to come.
David Bass
| ComOps, a leading Australian provider of business software products and services, has won a competitive tender to deploy its Salvus safety, r…
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