The good news, if you buy an unlocked Nokia N96 smartphone from Amazon through December 31, 2008 you not only save 47% off MSRP, but you’re eligible for $9.95 worth of free downloads from Amazon Video On Demand. The N96 is quite an impressive phone - Symbian S60 OS, 2.8-inch 320×240 screen, quad band GSM (850/900/1800/1900), dual-band 3G HSDPA (850/1900), WiFi, A-GPS, Bluetooth 2.0+EDR, a 5 megapixel camera with Carl Zeiss Optics (which can also capture 640×480 video), a second VGA camera on the front for use in video calls, 16GB on-board storage with a microSDHC slot for expansion, FM radio, N-Gage application support for games, and more. This is truly a loaded phone.

And now the bad news. Sure, you save 47%, but that’s 47% off the $1200 MSRP! Yes, one thousand two hundred dollars. You pay $639.99. For a phone. OK, sure, it is an uber-device that can replace your phone, camera, PMP, and perhaps more. But that’s still not impulse buy territory.

Dave Zatz over at Zatz Not Funny spent a little hands-on time with HAVA Mobile running on the Nokia N810 Internet Tablet. HAVA, a product of Monsoon Multimedia, is a placeshifting application similar to Sling Media’s Slingbox. And like SlingPlayer Mobile the HAVA Mobile client runs on various mobile devices such as Windows Mobile and Symbian S60 smartphones, and the Nokia Internet Tablet’s running Maemo, which is a platform not supported at this time by Sling. The tablets have a nice form factor for mobile viewing devices. See his post for more.

Disclaimer: I’m employed by Sling Media and HAVA is considered a competitor.

It has actually been openly available for a while as a public beta, but now Monsoon Multimedia is officially launching the HAVA Mobile Player for Nokia Internet Tablets. They issued a press release and everything. The free client runs on the Nokia N800 and N810 and allows you to stream content from your HAVA place-shifting device.

The press release:
Read the rest of this entry »

Monsoon Multimedia’s HAVA products are a lesser-known competitor to the Slingbox in the place-shifting market. One of the largest limitations to the HAVA product line has been the limited client platform compatibility, which has amounted to Windows or Windows Mobile (which is still in beta), while Sling Media supports Windows, Windows Mobile, Mac OS, Palm OS, and Symbian OS, with a client for BlackBerry in development. Instead of launching a client for one of these popular smartphone platforms, or even Mac OS, Monsoon has made the interesting choice of developing a client for Nokia Internet Tablets, such as the N810. While the Nokia tablets are certainly interesting gadgets, they’re not exactly a huge market. Internet Tablet Talk got a chance to play with the beta version of the player on a Nokia tablet, and they made a video of it.

I will warn you that the video is, well, slow paced. There isn’t a lot exciting there - it is a new version of the HAVA Mobile Player running on a Nokia tablet. The most interesting thing about that, to me, is that the Nokia tablets run Linux, so maybe this was an exercise to prepare for the growing number of Linux smartphones, etc. I just don’t see support for the N800/810 really selling any HAVA boxes, since the tablet market is fairly small. I’d think Monsoon would’ve gotten more return on investment by releasing a client for Mac OS or Symbian OS.

Picked up from EngadgetHD.