This is happening at Nokia’s Remote Device Access website. It is actually a virtual lab. You don’t actually get physical access to the phones, but through a Java applet interface, you have real-time access to the phones in Nokia’s lab. The website includes a system for selecting and reserving phones. If a phone is available, you could access it immediately. If not, or if you prefer to book a later time slot, you can use the reservation system to book your access to the phones. It’s a pretty neat system.
Nokia doesn’t let you make outgoing phone calls, send SMS or send MMS, but you can receive phone calls (though I guess there wouldn’t be anyone to talk to), receive SMS and receive MMS. I’d have expected for such a big multinational corporation like Nokia they would absorb the cost of such outgoing calls/messaging.
They do provide Wifi and Bluetooth access in the lab too. In fact, for GPRS phones, you could discover (as I did) the location of the phone. Of course, I assume that Nokia didn’t muck around with the GPS data to mask the real location of the phones. Nokia Maps reported the phone to be in Finland, as I would expect where the lab would have been.
It is also from this website that I gleamed a little tidbit of the N97’s v12.0.023 firmware. Yes, there is a N97 in the Remote Device Access loaded with v12.0.023 firmware.
Cool, I hope that means a firmware fix is coming for my N97 soon, which I hope will fix a bunch of things that are still broken with the N97. The most important for me, I think, is to get SyncML and iSync working again so that I can sync with my Mac OS X without jumping hoops through Google.