An iPod in a phone

Coming to you today from Amsterdam, where Nokia has just launched a trio of new handsets, called the N series. The most surprising among them was a music phone, with a 4GB hard drive and Wi-Fi built in.

The N91 (couldn't the big N ditch that unimaginative naming convention?) is hardly an iPod killer, given that it's slated to cost €700 without contract. But as a compromise device (phone, player and camera), I've seen worse. Looks slick, works well (bar the usual screwy Nokia keypad) but you'll have to wait until October to get your hands on it. Quite what the Wi-Fi will be useful for is another question. Voice over IP might be possible but there's no software for Nokias to implement that yet, nor is it likely the N91 has the horsepower for audio decoding/encoding.

The N90 wants to shatter the maxim that you'll never get a good photo from a cameraphone. Like all of the N series, it has a two-megapixel sensor but is augmented by a Carl Zeiss lens, which addresses a serious weakness in such devices.

The last of the trio, the N70, is merely an update of Nokia's high-end 3G phone, the 6680, lacking in any radical features but its small size.