HMD's new Nokia phone: Hidden Charger for included Earbuds

HMD's new Nokia phone: Hidden Charger for included Earbuds

HMD has revealed a trio of new Nokia feature phones, including the Nokia 5710 XpressAudio, which contains a built-in charging case for an included pair of wireless earbuds.

The enterprise is far from the first to keep this idea, but it's notable to see the form factor attempted by a more established company with global reach.

The Nokia 5710 XpressAudio darts like a regular candy bar-style feature phone from the facade, with a 2.4-inch display and a traditional T9 keypad. But around the back, there's a charging compartment, displayed with the slide of a plastic cover. The device will retail for £74.99 and be open in the UK in late July, though there's no word on a US release.

The wireless earbuds deliver up to four hours of music playback per charge, or 2.4 hours of talk time, and the phone itself has a long enough battery life that it doesn't sound like keeping the accessories charged will be much of a problem. HMD says the Nokia 5710 XpressAudio's removable 1,450mAh battery offers up to six hours of talk time over 4G and up to 20 days of standby with two 4G SIM cards inserted.

Since the Nokia 5710 XpressAudio is a feature phone, there's no mention of support for current music streaming assistance such as Spotify or Apple Music. Instead, it runs on the stripped-back Series 30 Plus operating system used in Nokia-branded phones for almost a decade. HMD is rightly not resurrecting the Nokia music services of old; they were terrible. Instead, the device's playback options are a bit more old-fashioned and include the ability to play MP3s or listen to a built-in FM radio.

From left to right: the T10 tablet; the Nokia 8210 4G; the Nokia 2660 Flip; and the Nokia 5710 XpressAudio. Image: HMD

Alongside the Nokia 5710 XpressAudio, HMD has also announced the Nokia 8210 4G feature phone, and a flip phone called the Nokia 2660 Flip. The 8210 4G will retail for £64.99, while the Nokia 2660 Flip will cost £64.99 and has an optional charging cradle that costs an extra £20. Both are available in late July.

Finally, the Nokia T10 is a smaller eight-inch Android tablet compared to the 10-inch T20 released last year. Prices start at £129 for a Wi-Fi-only model with 3GB of RAM and 32GB of storage available in August.

HMD, the head-mounted display, is a display device sported on the head or as a helmet component with a small display optic in front of one or each eye. An HMD has many uses, including aviation, engineering, gaming, and medicine. Virtual reality headsets are HMDs connected with IMUs. In addition, there is an optical head-mounted display (OHMD), a wearable display that can reflect projected images and allow a user to see through them.

A typical HMD owns one or two small displays, with lenses and semi-transparent mirrors embedded in eyeglasses, a visor, or a helmet. The display units are miniaturized and may contain:

  • Cathode ray tubes (CRT).
  • Liquid-crystal displays (LCDs).
  • Liquid crystal on silicon (LCos).
  • OLED Organic light-emitting diodes.

Some vendors utilize multiple micro-displays to improve total resolution and field of view.

HMDs differ in whether they can exhibit only computer-generated imagery (CGI), or only live imagery from the physical world, or a combination. The HMDs can display only a computer-generated image, sometimes called virtual. However, some HMDs can allow a CGI to be superimposed on a real-world view. It is sometimes referred to as augmented reality (AR) or mixed reality (MR).

Combining the real-world view with CGI can be done by projecting the CGI through a partially reflective mirror and viewing the natural world directly. This method is often called optical see-through. Combining real-world views with CGI can also be done electronically by accepting video from a camera and mixing it with CGI.

An optical head-mounted display uses a visual mixer made of partly silvered mirrors. It can reflect artificial images, let authentic images cross the lens, and let a user look through them. Various methods have existed for see-through HMDs, most of which can be summarized into two leading families based on curved mirrors or waveguides.

Curved mirrors have been utilized by Laster Technologies and by Vuzix in their Star 1200 product. Various waveguide methods have existed for years. These contain holographic, diffraction, polarized, and reflective optics. Major HMD applications include military, government, civilian-commercial, medicine, video gaming, sports, etc.