Huge Upcoming Month For Tech

I'm looking at the upcoming week and into October and I can't help but feel that this is going to be an extremely important month for some huge names in the industry. Lets start at the beginning of the month. According to reports Nokia could be releasing two big phones on the 1st and 2nd of October. The N96 due on October 1st is the phone i had been waiting on. So far I haven't bought an iPhone because I'm willing to wait to see what Nokia are going to do.

On October 2nd Nokia have a conference during which it is expected that they will launch their new music service. During the same conference I expect them to announce the new Nokia 5800. Now this is going to be an extremely important phone for Nok because it's their first touch screen phone. It looks excellent but with Sony producing their new Xperia running Windows Mobile, the HTC G1 running Android and obviously the Apple iPhone there is a lot of expectation hanging over this unit. I expect to see it released by the end of the month/start of November in time for Christmas.

On the console front XBox's new dashboard should be available on the 1st October hopefully. New features like the characters and new look could put off the older more hard core gamer that the XBox 360 currently has pulled in. They don't want to try to compete with the Wii when they don't have the same usability as Nintendo's baby.

The next big release is the much talked about Apple Macbook makeover and "The Brick". We have no idea what the Brick is but I'm going to make my guess now. I'm thinking along two lines. One is a phone with a keyboard. Announced now because Steve doesn't like it as much as the iPhone but still needs it out for Christmas and the brick tag is a reflection of this. My second though is that it's a base unit for the Macbook. A machine similar to the iMac except that the OS is on the Macbook. You plug the portable into the base unit and run it like an iMac with extra storage space on the unit to allow you to have smaller SSD drives on the portable. The third possibility is the eventual arrival of an Apple tablet/PDA. I doubt it's this. I think Steve's going to want this one for Macworld 2009.

Failures of the above devices and services could completely change the face of an industry that is struggling in the current environment. Apple need a big hit after the disappointing iPod announcement and if we don't see it this month we can watch the share price disappear. Nokia are in a similar boat. I've spent 3 months waiting for a decent phone to be released and I've yet to see one. Nok need to compete in the touch phone market and the N96 really needs to be more than an N95 with a new cover. If October ends with no 5800 and a disappointing N96 then Nok are going to lose their position in the market. 

Above images from: aurum3.com, symbian-freak.com and tuaw.com