hello 5800

Tinned Luxury, Oh my WOMWORLD sent me a pair of these nokia BH-905 blue tooth (with wired option) noise canceling headphones to trial, and BOY they are good.  I had a pair of sony noise canceling headphones about 10 years ago, and the were a bit rubbish.  These are amazing, even without music playing a couple of seconds after you turn on the canceling - suddenly you get drawn into a silent place. apparently there’s 12 microphones built in to sample the surrounding sounds.

Music sounds great on them, I’m no audiophile but they sound really good to me, there are lots of specs that mean very little to me. Every bit of the product oozes luxury, the metal bit seem gold in some light and silver in others.  Theres leather, fabric, metal, and a twist in every direction to get the right fit. This is solid engineering, yet they are smaller than you expect, lightweight and comfortable.

There’s a range of adapters for using in ‘wired’ mode, but the freedom of bluetooth make me never want to grab them.  The carry case is quite large, and only really suitable for traveling.  I would of liked to have seen an additional soft pouch for slinging in any old bag.

I had some drop out and that weird bluetooth ‘catch up’ on the N900 when first connected, but no issues on the more mature firmware of the 5800. And of course on the 5800 they work with nokia music store purchase and spotify / last.fm mobbler.

The N900 had worse quality sound than the 5800, though I’ll need to test the same mp3 file on both to be sure.  But as the 5800 is a music focused phone it’s no surprise, as it has dedicated music decoding hardware.

They also worked a dream with my macbook pro.

My wife tried them out and I didn’t get them back for over an hour. Likewise in the office they got nabbed as soon as i put them down. Though we did have a tinny sound issue with a desktop mac pro, not sure why it was sounding very muffled, no problem with other connections so seems some sort of bluetooth compatibility issue with that mac hardware.

I made a couple of phone calls with excellent call quality. In fact it made a teleconference far less painful as i didn’t have to hold my phone for 20 minutes.

I’ve always avoided over the ear headsets before, but having tried these out i now want a pair, as they are so much better than the admittedly more convenient in-ear options.

They cost an eye popping £250, but you can get them a lot cheaper online, google shows £149 being best current price.

Click the main pic or HERE for lots of photos of the headsets.

I’d secretly love to try these baby’s with the all you can eat comes with music X6 and its capacitive screen.

Spotify has a nice audio player than the built in S60 app, nice big album at at last, with added notes.  last.fm mobbler is equally nice.  Come on nokia, its the express music - lets make the music player a bit more 2000’s and less last century.

Also spotity on S60 has two killers over the iPhone version:

• Syncing offline playlists on 3G
• it runs in the background

oh, new Ovi store….

I wonder if it will let me re-download the stuff in MY STUFF…. nope :(

Ovi store via bluetooth (or sms)

Big high profile push for OVI store in london train stations.

Comes with Spotify. Spotify hits S60, a little while after iPhone / Android.  And its quite sweet, the iPhone version suffers from no backgrounding/offline storage/the total lack of O2 data in central london.

Oddly the S60 5th edition one uses ONLY a t9 keypad for text entry, though I presume a physical keyboard (like the N97) will work ok. which makes the interface a bit clunky, but it works a treat with my t-mobile sim / web-n-walk.

Just go to http://m.spotify.com on your phone to get it, you need a premium spotify account.

Ok X6, get this: The X^ may be arriving next week, but as its Comes with music only, its not going to stop lots of 5800 shipping for the next year.  T-Mobile have a new variant, with a chrome trim, not sure if its metal or just painted plastic.  But is another variant to add to the blue, red, black and comewithmusic/maps versions.

Almost online as it happens: There was a interesting / infuriating N series promotion on yesterday as part of the online as it happens campaign of viral videos.  The furious fictional bride was selling off the wedding presents and a world trip (2 N900s, N97, N97 mini and N86) for a $1 a piece on ebay as buy it now auctions.  You could follow the brides twitters to see when the next one would be posted, but it still involved a lot of [F5].  As the N900 was about to go up I had to leave my desk and go out. So I fired up twitter and ebay on my 5800.  Just as I was getting off the bus, the notification tweet appeared, I frantically reloaded ebay, and there it was, another click and agonising 3G wait as the item popped up, hit [BUY IT NOW] only to get an item has ended screen, someone beat me too it.

Still a valiant effort.  I tried again this morning when another N900 went up with a round the world airplane ticket, but this time on a macbook, and on 16meg broad band I was still beaten to it in less than a second.  Bummed but it was quite a fun campaign.

There’s another change to win by making your own video, over on the site.

Anyone else keep hitting that Ovi Maps icon on their home screen, thinking it’s the internet. Its so similar to Safari on Mac OS X / iPhones. No? just me then :)