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.

For those situations that call for a QWERTY keyboard capabilities, the 3650 will push and pull files to a notebook using its Bluetooth interface. We set up an Apple PowerBook G4 with a D-Link Bluetooth device. The 3650 is not configured into Apple’s iSync multi-app synchronization software yet, but I had no trouble bouncing text files and address book entries between the PowerBook and the phone. The PowerBook recognized the 3650 as a Bluetooth modem for Internet connections. Mac OS X makes using the 3650 as an Internet gateway nearly effortless, and T-Mobile’s GPRS data speed was better than we expected. It’s more than sufficient for transferring e-mail with attachments and doing basic Web browsing.

We were pleased to find that all of the phone’s network options are consistently offered throughout its interface. If you shoot a picture with the internal camera, a pop-up menu offers to send it to another user via SMS, MMS (multimedia message service), e-mail, infrared, or Bluetooth. You can also save images and video and audio clips to a removable MMC memory card. A 16MB card is included with the phone. Its location is the phone’s one major drawback: You must remove the battery to change memory cards.

Encouraging customization

As mentioned, the 3650 is more of a development platform than a consumer device. Nokia’s C++ tools run under Microsoft Visual Studio 6. J2ME (Java 2 Micro Edition) programs can be created using just about any Java environment and sent to the phone via the wireless network. That’s an interesting feature of this device: There is no cradle. It has so many wireless connectivity options that a serial or USB sync cradle would be redundant.

We had only enough time to scratch the surface of Nokia’s Series 60 operating environment and programming interfaces. For this phone, custom development is where the action is. The built-in PIM applications are quite good for a phone and make the best possible use of the 176-by-208 color display. But Nokia has exposed and documented the phone’s networking and graphical features to developers in great detail, and developers can grab the tools and documentation online. The efficient Java run-time encourages the kind of small-scale casual and in-house development that leads to innovation, while the C++ tools hit the performance targets required by commercial software.

Looking at the preview of the 3650 and Nokia’s rapidly evolving tools and documentation, it’s impossible to rank Nokia’s approach against chief mobile platform rivals RIM, Palm, and Microsoft. It is clear that Nokia has the engineering skill to squeeze an incredible set of capabilities into a small device, and that Nokia is committed to supplying developers with the tools they need to target the Series 60 platform. If the broader U.S. consumer market doesn’t snatch up this phone (or one like it in a more businesslike form factor), businesses certainly will.