Mobile Phones Blog

Yesterday Research in Motion unveiled the long awaited BlackBerry App World. We were still too busy reeling from the shock of Qualcomm’s avian breakthrough to have time to check it out ourselves, so first thing this morning we fired up our BlackBerry Storm and decided to have a look.

Downloading App World took less than couple of minutes on a 3G connection using a BlackBerry Storm. App World, like all downloaded stuff, ends up in your Downloads folder. When you launch App World, the most popular applications are listed on its home screen - unsurprisingly, most of these are free. As with buying apps on the iPhone, you can perform a search, browse by category, or view the top 25 downloads.

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The hottest smartphones could be coming to UK users at rockbottom prices from May, with O2 set to slash the cost of owning a 16Gb iPhone 3G, reportedly in advance of a new iPhone launch, and T-Mobile doing the same for the G1.

It looks increasingly likely that Apple will release an upgraded iPhone 3G this June or July in the UK, but it is still very unclear what this will look like. The pundits are split between those who expect a ’superphone’ to fend off the Palm Pre, LG Arena and others – with heavyweight memory, video, camera and other features where the iPhone has lagged behind the big hitters of the smartphone market; plus enhancements to the browser, widgets and multitouch experience.

After all, Apple’s place at the top of the multitouch pile, which has been proven to drive mobile web usage, is now threatened by Palm, LG and others, and even the lawsuits that Apple is said to be preparing won’t stop the challengers if users take to their upgrades.

But most major players, like the Android community and Nokia, are still lagging behind on multitouch and other important user interface features, and so other commentators think Apple will stick with its advantage at the high end and focus on a whole new format for the iPhone to increase its appeal to the midrange mobile web users and those feeling the credit crunch.

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Having already announced and released their 5800 XpressMusic, a phone which has already shifted over a million units across the globe, and already unveiled their forthcoming N97 ‘mobile computer’ this year’s Mobile World Congress has been something of a sleepy affair for Nokia.

And with everyone either picking up their dropped jaws or scratching their heads over the 12 Megapixel beasts being primed by Samsung and Sony Ericsson, news of a leading mobile manufacturer releasing an 8 Megapixel smartphone might understandably grab as much press attention.

However, this is Nokia, and the smartphone in question in an NSeries phone, the N86 which is the spiritual successor to the successful N85. The N86 - or N86 8MP, to use its full name - weighs in with a weighty 8GB of internal memory, and like the N85 comes with an ultra vibrant 2.6″ OLED 16 million colour screen.

The aforementioned 8 Megapixel camera, like all of those featured on the recent NSeries Nokia phones, comes with a dual-LED flash, autofocus and Carl Zeiss optics. Pictures taken on the N86 can be geotagged due to the built-in GPS, and the fast mechanical shutter should help reduce motion blur and other distortion effects.

The dual slider format popularised by the Nokia N95 returns, with a standard numeric keypad on the bottom half, and four dedicated media keys at the top. The four media keys hidden at the top of the phone now coming with what appears to be some secondary functions designed for web browsing. As you can see in the pic attached, the two Skip Forwards and Back keys appear to have shift functions for zooming in and out of pictures, and the Play/Pause and Stop buttons being used for Stop and Refresh, or perhaps Refresh and Home, or something.

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After being slightly baffled and bemused by the prospect of Samsung bringing out a 12 Megapixel cameraphone, we were glad to hear that the forthcoming Acme i8910 is a far more sensible proposition that is more likely to wow people’s faces.

The Samsung i8910 is a neat little touchscreen slabette which is essentially an update of the successful and thumb friendly Omnia handset. To whit, it will come in two versions - one 8GB and one 16GB - and boast GPS capabilities and Wi-Fi. Bluetooth and a 3.5mm socket mean audiophiles can listen to audio files either wirelessly or totally wired.

Perhaps the most distinguishing feature of this forthcoming phone is its camera - an 8 Megapixel affair which is capable of recording video footage in HD. DivX compatible, the Acme i8910 also comes with an HDMI output, meaning you can view your hi-res camera footage on your nice HD Ready 1080p Plasma.

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If you’re thinking of ordering a mobile phone in time for Christmas Day, then you’d better make sure to order before midday on the 22nd of December, and I’m telling you why; cos that’s when the networks are shutting up shop for the season.

So if you had set your sights on having an iPhone under your Christmas tree or wanted to get a T-Mobile G1, LG Renoir, INQ1, or Sony Ericsson C905 for your friend, partner, mum, dad, sibling, or you just fancied treating yourself, then place your order before next Monday lunchtime to avoid disappointment!

We’re also closing shop here at Mobile Phones for Christmas and the New Year – congratulations again to the winner of our Nokia N96 competition.

Have a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

- the Mobile Phones team

We’ve been hearing rumours about this phone for a while, but now that Nokia have taken the bubble wrap off of the specs, we can officially get excited. A post over on the Dial A Phone blog reveals that the Nokia N97 is due to be released in the middle of 2009, and that it comes loaded with a very impressive resume of features.

The first thing that you’ll have noticed from the above pic is that Nokia have decided to grace the N97 with a slide-out QWERTY keyboard and a backwards-tilting touchscreen display, a configuration that’s reminiscent of the T-Mobile MDA Vario III. The 3.5″ screen of the N97 has a 16:9 widescreen display ratio, meaning that video content is bound to look a treat. The attendant 3G and HSDPA means that you’ll be able to easily watch YouTube clips and stream video from the net. Wi-Fi support also comes included, and did we mention that the screen comes with haptic feedback?

Perhaps the most exciting feature of the new Nokia N97 is the sheer size of the available memory; 32GB of on-board internal memory comes as standard, along with the capacity to expand this up by a further 16GB to 48GB. Yes, 48GB – that’s a lot of storage.

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More details have emerged concerning the forthcoming ‘Facebook Phone’ developed by INQ, an offshoot of Hutchinson, owners of 3 Mobile.

Designed purely with social networking in mind, the INQ1 – pronounced ‘ink one’ – is a slim tablet slider phone that looks set to take the wind out of the sales of the high-falutin’ likes of Apple and T-Mobile with their fancy pants iPhones and G1s – the INQ1 will retail for the very credit-crunch friendly price of FREE on 3 contracts costing upwards of just £15 a month for 18 months.

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The highly anticipated BlackBerry Storm 9500, developed by Research In Motion in tandem with Vodafone is set to open up an almighty downpour on the smartphone/PDA market upon its release here in the UK tomorrow.

The Storm marks a new venture for RIM, being as it is the first BlackBerry PDA to come with a touchscreen UI, and a rather nice one at that. The interface features a unique brand of haptic feedback which is as of yet unseen on any other touchscreen handset. Whilst other touchscreens will give you a neat little conformational buzz whenever you tap in a command, tapping and typing away on the interface of the Storm is a different proposition – the actual screen itself depresses slightly into the main body of the handset and satisfyingly clicks back out. Keystrokes are accompanied by a slight feedback buzz which is similar to, but altogether different from the type of haptic feedback were used to from the LG Viewty et al.

The BlackBerry Storm is RIM’s most media-friendly handset so far, designed to, er, rein in the typical hardcore Blackberry buyer who might have been swayed by the push email support available on some of the newer smartphones on offer from rival makers. Among its features is a 3.2 Megapixel camera, 3G internet access and sat-nav functionality. Up to 16GB of storage is available, enough space to store plenty of choice tunes downloaded from the Vodafone Music Store, direct access to which, is a fully integrated feature.

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To say that Motorola’s fortune of late has been somewhat chequered would be as big an understatement as saying that the iPhone has done kind of alright; however, the announcement of the new AURA luxury handset from Motorola looks set to change this. Dubbed “The Return of Artistry”, by the Big M, the AURA is a very finely crafted luxury handset, rocking a never-seen-before design, which, according to the press release “breaks convention and re-establishes artistry in mobile device design and manufacturing”.

The AURA certainly has something of an art deco feel about it, with its chemically etched contour lines and unique circular display screen – the first to ever be used on a mobile – which kicks out images in 16 million colours.

Consisting of more than 700 individual components, the AURA is forged from some seriously high-grade materials, which not only contribute to the overall aesthetic of the handset, but also confer a level of durability – just as well, as the AURA is a rotate-open handset, which swings around the circular screen, revealing the numeric keypad and standard mobile phone menu and command keys, all done over in shiny, anodized aluminium.

The swing mechanism features highly robust hardened steel gears which are protected with a tungsten carbide coating, apparently the same level of protection afforded to the gears of high-performance racing cars.

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Video applications like YouTube are the fastest growing driver of smartphone use, and nearly everyone viewing the mobile clips will be relying on Adobe Flash or Flash Lite technology, which is installed in almost 90% of high end handsets. But other vendors want to seize the initiative in this valuable area, and especially on the iPhone, which is one of the most used devices for mobile video. But Apple has kept tight control of its platform, barring alternatives to its own technology from the phone – first Adobe and now Microsoft’s challenger to Flash, Silverlight.

As Microsoft readies release 2.0 of its Silverlight rich media technology, it will need to make a better showing on the mobile platform if it is to prove a credible challenger to Flash. Like Adobe, the Windows giant has been angling to get Silverlight on to the iPhone, but has been rebuffed by Apple; and is now evaluating Google Android.

This would be a significant step on Microsoft’s recent path to decouple some of its key software technologies from Windows, which has failed to gain the dominance in mobile that it has on the PC.

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