The phone that knows too much?

The United States is an odd market for mobile technology. In Asia and Europe, color displays and rich messaging are considered baseline requirements for cell phones. Stateside, most mobile phones are just smaller, lighter remakes of the original, bulky car phone. Most users here expect their mobile phone to do only one thing: Make and receive voice calls.

That drives worldwide manufacturers such as Nokia and Motorola -- and international carriers including T-Mobile -- absolutely nuts. Elsewhere, premium services make handsets and networks profitable; the American subscriber hauling around a barebones phone with a voice-only rate plan is not making phones or networks better. So Nokia’s 3650 is a surprise. It is precisely the kind of do-everything device that American consumers and businesses won’t buy: It shoots pictures and movie clips, it makes audio recordings, it sends and receives e-mail using your existing mail server, it surfs the Web in color, and it will link your Bluetooth-equipped notebook to the Internet. If two Nokia 3650 users are in a basement conference room and blocked from cellular access, the phones can hop over to Bluetooth to send messages, share files, and exchange address book entries.

We pored over the 3650’s technical documentation for weeks before we received the phone, which is a prototype distributed to developers. The more we read, the more we thought, “This isn’t a phone.” Quite right; voice calls are almost tangential to its design, although with a speakerphone, voice dialing, and a backlit keypad, it does voice as well as any mobile phone we’ve used. The 3650 is clearly a networked pocket computer, a portable mesh node, a reference platform for developers. This device, and the ones that will branch out from its design, are also remarkable business machines.

Every which way

The 3650’s networking capabilities are astounding. Just spelling out the acronyms of the protocols and standards it implements would fill the rest of this space. The phone is designed to move voice, text, audio, photos, video, and arbitrary data anywhere. The phone supplied for review was activated on T-Mobile’s network, the same carrier used for our Research in Motion BlackBerry 5810 review unit (see " Shirt-pocket Java "). The devices use the cellular network in a very similar way. In areas that provide only voice service, the units work as basic cellular phones, and they can send and receive SMS (short message service) messages. In a GPRS (General Packet Radio Service) service area, the devices can browse the Web and access e-mail through T-Mobile’s gateways.

Beyond that, the 3650 defines its own course. RIM has the advantage of having new e-mail messages pushed to the BlackBerry when they arrive. That’s technology Nokia has licensed from RIM but has not yet built into a phone. The 3650’s e-mail capabilities use standard IMAP, POP, and SMTP protocols, so the phone can pull messages from multiple mail servers. The e-mail feature is easy to configure (a set of PC-based tools is provided on CD). The lack of an alphanumeric keyboard is a hindrance for sending replies, but the 3650’s display and Symbian GUI are exceptional for reading incoming messages.