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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WikiPock, a French venture, has taken the entire contents of Wikipedia, and shrunk it down to a mere 4GB in size, small enough for mobile users to download and use.

WikiPock costs $9.99 (about £7) and allows you to search and read Wikipedia articles in your BlackBerry or iPhone (and iPod Touch), or any smartphone running Windows Mobile or Android. The pages are all stored in your phone’s memory, and doesn’t require a connection to use, although an extra $5 (£3.50-ish) sees you getting a year’s worth of updates which are periodically downloaded to your phone each time you connect to the interweb.

You can even order the complete package pre-loaded onto a microSD card of its own, meaning you can effectively hotswap Wikipedia on the move, viewing pages that have been specifically formatted for mobile displays.

Articles are available in eight languages, (English, French, German, Polish, Italian, Dutch, Portuguese and Spanish) with there currently being over 2.7 million articles in English. So, if you ever wanted to check up on a brief overview of the Battle of Austerlitz on the move, then WikiPock is the app for you.

Free, and available on BlackBerry, S60 and Windows Mobile handsets - with Android and Apple phones to get it “in the next few days,” and “very soon,” respectively - Google Latitude is a new mapplication feature from Google which allows you to keep tabs on your contacts from your smartphone or PC.

Whilst Latitude allows you to “see if your spouse is stuck in traffic on the way home from work,” or “notice that a buddy is in town for the weekend,” or “take comfort in knowing that a loved one’s flight landed safely,” it has also raised concerns from privacy rights campaigners.

Privacy International director Simon Davies said: “Many people will see this as a cool technology but the reality is it will be a privacy minefield. I would be concerned about any integrated use across Google services as their security is so poor and it’s becoming the world most pervasive system.”

Whilst it could be used to keep track of your friends and colleagues, it could also be used to track a potentially unfaithful spouse by a jealous partner or monitor the movements of a work rival, or it could be used by criminals or sexual predators to stalk potential victims.

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“You can have my BlackBerry when you pry it from my cold dead fingers…”

US President Elect Barack Obama didn’t say these words (he actually said “they’re going to pry it out of my hands” on CNBC) when he had to relinquish his favourite handheld email device in favour of a less well known model from General Dynamics, but you can well imagine his frustration.

The Sectera Edge is a Windows Mobile-based PDA, worth some $3,350 (roughly £2,400) which is, according to the NSA, secure enough for official communications and top secret email, despite it looks more like a fancy set of scales, one of those digital jobs you use to calculate body fat index and the like.

This is also bad news for Canadian handset makers Research in Motion, who have benefitted greatly from the ‘BarackBerry’ effect; RIM have estimated Obama’s endorsement of their product to be worth more than $25 million (£16million) in promotion for their company.

Obama has gone on record saying one of the reasons he loves his BlackBerry so much is that it keeps him tethered to terra firma and staying in touch with people.

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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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Stand aside Zune Guy, there’s someone out there willing to go to even greater lengths to publicly declare their love of a piece of hardware via the medium of Indian ink and public self-abasement.

One T.J. from Toledo, Ohio, who goes under the alias of ‘Stressed’ on the CrackBerry.com forums – ‘the #1 site for BlackBerry users and abusers’ – boldly stepped up to the plate when aforementioned website launched their ‘What Would You Do for a BlackBerry Storm?’ contest.

Of the 187 BlackBerry addicts who said that they would get the image of a BlackBerry handset or the CrackBerry logo indelibly etched into their flesh, it was T.J.’s life-sized representation of the BlackBerry Storm, that earned him his prize – the first of ten BlackBerry Storms to be given away by the guys at CrackBerry.

The tattoo comes complete with the circular ‘CB’ insignia, and the barely legible and heretical legend ‘iPhone Sucks’ scrawled underneath it, all permanently engraved on the back of his right leg, just below the calf muscles.

The tattoo was done by one Brian Krabach of Revelation Tattoos, who is seen in the video below sporting an iPhone t-shirt.

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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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Not since the days of Netscape versus Internet Explorer have we seen a genuine battle for power in the browser market. But on the mobile phone the market is still wide open, and no vendor has yet delivered a really killer product. The latest to try to ensure Microsoft does not rule the mobile browser is the open source Mozilla Foundation, which has released its mobile product, Fennec, to developers.

Perhaps tellingly, the product has been spotted first on Nokia’s N810 Internet Tablet, a mobile device without a cellular connection (just Wi-Fi).

This highlights that it is still a challenge to get a browser fully functioning on a traditional 3G cellphone, so a Linux/WLan product is a good first platform.

However, Mozilla – whose PC-based Firefox browser is the first since Netscape to provide a real challenge to Internet Explorer – will soon take the battle to Microsoft, with a Windows Mobile version of Fennec promised by year end.

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T-Mobile has confirmed that it will launch its G1 smartphone, based on the Android platform, on the 30th of October, a day earlier than expected and only a week after the device’s US debut.

The G1 will be available free to UK customers who sign up for T-Mobile’s ‘Combi’ and ‘Flext’ price plans, provided they commit to spending £40 a month a more for a year. Combi 35 offers 800 minutes and unlimited texts while Flext 40 gives up to 1,250 minutes or up to 2,500 texts or any mix of the two. The tariffs will also include unlimited internet browsing.

The operator, which has faced fears of running out of stock because of the level of pre-registration in the US, says that over 25,000 UK consumers have pre-registered interest in the G1 since it was unveiled in New York last month.

Not all reviewers are positive though. Common gripes include an “awkward” keyboard and short battery life; and lack of support for business applications such as virtual private networks and for corporate mobile email servers like Microsoft Exchange or BlackBerry Enterprise Server.

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Wow. Here at mobile phones, we thought that the flip phone/clamshell handset format was a dying breed, here in the UK at least. Turns out that the US-based branch of T-Mobile have been working closely with Canada’s Research In Motion (RIM), on the soon-to-be-released BlackBerry Pearl Flip 8220 smartphone.

The Pearl Flip is currently only available in America, which explains a lot – as Leslie Grandy, Vice President of Product Development for T-Mobile in the US says; “the flip phone remains the vastly dominant and preferred design for mobile phones in the United States. Being the first company in the US to offer the unique BlackBerry experience on a flip phone is a huge benefit for T-Mobile customers.”

That’s us told then. Despite the fact that this many never see the light of day in Europe (flip phones don’t tend to sell so well over here), it’s worth mentioning that the Quad-Band Pearl Flip comes with full Wi-Fi support, a 2 Megapixel camera with flash, digital zoom and video recording capabilities, and stereo Bluetooth. The 128MB of onboard memory is boosted by the 256MB microSD card which comes supplied as standard, although you can expand the performance of the Flip Pearl with cards up to a whopping 16GB in size.

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