oh damn what?

perchance instead of a umpc i’ll just buy the nokia n96 in a few months, and a bluetooth keyboard. and bluetooth headphones. and a really freaking big micro-sd card. (by the time this comes out, they may well be in the terabytes…)

is it a smartphone running symbian os, with 16gb of internal flash memory, and a micro-sd slot for even further action, and a FIVE MEGAPIXEL CAMERA?!!! why yes! it is those things!

could i use it to run apps developed by the symbian open source community? i could! could i load it up with video and use the included kickstand to prop it up and watch tv shows and the like while i’m eating such as my lunch? i could do that as well! could i use the aforementioned bluetooth full-size keyboard and run this as a word processor? use the touchdial thing to easily navigate menus? do all kinds of ridiculous phone things? browse the internet at least via wifi, albeit without thumboard or touchscreen so it’d be tricky on the go? pick up mobile tv signals while travelling europe? download games via the restructured n-gage virtual gaming platform and utilize the built-in gaming controls? (probably usable for some kind of snes emulator?) very likely a twitter client and flickr uploads? indeed!

but mostly, it’s a hella smoove phone with a 5mp camera. five. five megapixels. on a phone. and with a high-end carl zeiss lens. nothing says casual snapshots like 5mp on a phone. here i spent the last couple days talking myself into an iphone because i want to have a nice easy camera of good quality on me at all times, and bam, nokia drops this into my consciousness.

i was already planning to pick up some kind of canon camera for carrying around with me, possibly in the elph line, so that’s $300 there. add the $500 i was plotting for an iphone or an ipod touch, this does everything those do via media playback, but with a more open development platform and a slightly less ascetic interface. so even at the likely $800 price tag, this is actually a good value for the functionality. throw in $50 for a bluetooth keyboard and i don’t need a laptop either. (this is the upgrade from the n95 which is what lord ellis used before he started eee-ing.)

all i have to do is jump-ship to att and plan on not taking advantage of the 3g broadband network (which i wasn’t already) due to non-us hdspa standards in-built. although even on wifi it doesn’t have a thumboard or a touchscreen, so i wouldn’t exactly be googling on this thing on the go anyways. (not that i’ve had much more luck with the iphone keyboard when i’ve tried it; very much something you get used to, not something that comes to you intuitively…)

oh wow, is att having a three day sale where i can get a free refurb treo online, right now? oh snap!