Nokia, sensing the lost opportunity, have now answered the chairman’s prayer.  With the launch of the Nokia 6310r (for retro) you can buy a Nokia handset in that car friendly form factor with all the latest superfast 3G goodness, color screen and even a camera.  Best of all it has a 1 year battery life.

How’s that?  Well by squeezing the innards of the Nokia 6700 into the 6310, and reducing the power consumption to the barest minimum by turning off all the power hungry features, the Nokia 6310r is one of the most long lived, but functionally rich non smartphone handsets available.

See for yourself at Data Select one of the biggest handset suppliers in the country.  http://www.dataselect.co.uk/newsletters/31032010/Nokia6310r.html

Available tomorrow morning, April 1st.

Sure it doesn’t come with a memory card for its MicroSD slot, the camera is a fixed focus 2mpx job, and the pink back is not to everyones taste!  But then it is a cheap, multitasking smartphone with some half decent apps on Ovi including push email using Nokia’s Mail for Exchange.  So highly recommended as a first touch screen smart phone.

Some unfavourable comparisons with recent Android and iPhone devices have been made, but then they are 100’s of dollars more expensive, and on a cripplingly long contract.  

In my opinion it’s a good pitch by Nokia at a really low end smartphone with unbeatable features at the price.

For a company renowned for music, it always seemed odd not to enable the iPhone for the best possible Bluetooth headphone connection, especially as it was just required some finessing in software. Yet now with OS 3, iPhone 3G owners can finally cut the cord.

Using an old Nokia HS-12W made for an easy connection to an upgraded iPhone, with reasonable sound quality, let down in this case by the poor speaker buds. Even the remote controls on the headset worked!

No doubt there will a plethora of new headsets coming to market in double quick time to fill the demand for this worthwhile iPhone upgrade.

Not knowing when iPhone 3.0 was going to be put on-line meant that many people were constantly polling Apple’s update service until it happened, 3.0 was released.

Problem was that O2 promised the 3.0 on the 17^th and owners had hoped that could be from 9am or earlier, in the US others thought that this could be from midnight, Eastern or West Coast time, no one could be quite sure. Whatever, when the download became available a million iPhone fans went for it.

Given the pressure on the servers, Apple did a reasonable job of getting 3.0 to the world, but not all systems seemed to be spec’d up for the event.

Having upgraded the firmware, the iPhone needed reactivation, a completely automated process, but with a few million rather than a few thousand, iTunes failed, utterly swamped by the traffic. Worse still was the error message making it seem that users’ connectivity was the issue!

With unusable handsets on desks it seems most came up with the same solution, keep on re-inserting the cable. Manically, some tried over 30 times making the swamp a flood of requests delaying activation further.

So if you are tired and frustrated, with an unusable handset, or worse, who are you going to blame? Apple did not have a good day.

Oh , and O2 have messed up MMS as well. Have a happy Thursday.