Four new Nokia phones - big fish at the shores of the US

Nokia have been holding out - they have four new devices headed to the US and they are not rebrandings of old devices. This is certainly uncommon, the US getting a GSM Nokia phone before Europe does. Well, we've seen stranger things happen in the past, so why not.

The all four spanking new Nokia phones are headed to AT&T and have quad-band GSM support with three-band HSDPA (except one, which is just dual-band HSDPA). They all have a QVGA display of 2 inches or more, GPS, as well as Bluetooth 2.1 with A2DP and microSD. And they're all named after fish.

First up is Nokia Thresher (threshers are some weird looking sharks if you must know). It's an S40 slider with a 2.4" display and a 3.15MP camera. It has a certain N-series feel to it, especially with the optical joystick. And if you squint, while looking at it, it does look a bit like a Nokia N85.

Nokia Thresher

The Nokia Mako (another shark), is the only Symbian device in the batch and also the only one with a hardware QWERTY keyboard. It's also the one that's missing the third 3G band. It has a 2.4" display, like its side-sliding QWERTY cousin the Nokia E75, but it's somewhat more compact at 96 x 54 x 15 mm, compared to E75's almost 112 millimeters in height.

Nokia Mako

The other two phones - the Snapper and the Grouper - are both named after big fish and are music-optimized flips. "Music-optimized" is perhaps a bit undeserved, as they have 2.5mm jacks, same as the others, which are rated in the leaked marketing materials only as "music-capable" despite having the same jacks and A2DP support as these fishes. What sets the two last handsets apart are the dedicated music keys, which doesn't say much about their audio reproduction quality.

Nokia Snapper

Nokia Grouper

The first to be available will be the Mako (5 June). After that a new phone will be coming out roughly each month with the Grouper coming at the end of July, the Snapper in early August and the Thresher in mid-September.

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