Mobile Phones Blog

As if the choice of smartphones, tablets, netbooks and MIDs weren’t confusing enough, operators are trying to sub-divide the market into even smaller categories, including the emerging ‘tablet-netbook’. This is starting life at carriers like O2 and Orange as a ‘family organizer’ but will evolve into a quick-access wireless product for getting into household content stores or the internet, without booting up a PC or grappling with a smartphone interface.

The new breed of home tablet may turn out to be a white elephant, like many other product types with ‘tablet’ in the title over the years, but many companies are having a go, with Samsung and Apple both rumored to be developing such products for next year. This loosely defined category usually promises access to the internet and the user’s home media or PC servers, via a simple touchscreen interface and Wi-Fi or 3G. Such products may also integrate with the home phone and broadband line, to bring IP telephony and unified communications capabilities to the home – as Verizon’s new Hub does. Most support visual voicemail and a series of widgets for reaching content.

O2 recently announced its Joggler, which is marketed as a ‘virtual Post-it’ for the household, and is now being chased by Orange, whose Tabbee is launching in France but should come to the UK soon. The Tabbee currently only uses Wi-Fi but a future release will also have 3G. It is a seven-inch touchscreen tablet made by Sagem, and, says the operator, will be a useful alternative if someone else in the house is using the PC, or if the user cannot be bothered to boot up. It claims three hours of battery life with “intensive use” including media viewing and, unlike the deskbound Joggler, is portable. Photos, video and music can be played, either streamed or loaded from USB sticks or SD cards. Like the O2 gadget, Tabbee features a family message board/organizer, and widgets for updates such as weather or traffic reports. It also has a desktop charging dock.

The Tabbee, once it has 3G, could be an alternative to a netbook, since it has an on-screen keyboard, though its price tag of €299 is almost as high as the cost of a rapid-boot netbook with Wi-Fi, so may prevent mass uptake. At the moment it falls between two stools – similar to an iPod Touch but twice the size, not quite a netbook – but if well executed, could be in the vanguard of an emerging new breed of mobile internet devices.

The guys at Qualcomm, the company behind most phones’ 3G capabilities, have just taken the wraps off of something that will change the face of the mobile industry forever. We’ve seen this with our own eyes and we can’t state enough just how life-changing these developments are going to be.

A series of brand new initiatives will see mobile phone coverage extend to such a degree that you’ll never be disconnected from a call again, and you’ll be able to easily download over ten times more data over a mobile broadband connection than is currently possible. You’ll be able to effortlessly stream HD video content over the airwaves whilst downloading hundreds of high-quality audio tracks, whilst

The technological advances promised by Qualcomm’s breakthrough are so revolutionary that the UK’s domestic broadband infrastructure looks like it’s going to be made obsolete almost over night, pretty much making the Digital Britain roadmap irrelevant.

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Leading budget airline Ryanair yesterday took the controversial descion to launch an in-flight mobile services on selected flights across its fleet, allowing passengers travelling across Europe to make and receive calls as well as compose, send and receive emails and text messages.

Michael O’Leary, chief executive of Ryanair, believes that this development is the “first step” towards offering customers full mobile phone services.

“This service will allow passengers to keep in touch with the office, family or friends. We expect customer demand for this service to grow rapidly and hope that customers of all Irish mobile operators will soon be able to call or text home from 30,000 feet,” he said in a statement.

Once a Ryanair flight reaches 10,000 feet, an mini antenna on board the plane switches on, effectively creating a mini network aboard the plane that sends calls and message data via a satellite broadband link back down to earth.

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New Android handsets, 12 Megapixel cameraphones, phones with micro projectors - none of these compare to this latest story we’ve heard from MWC ‘09 so far.

Ever been out seeing friends in a different city for the weekend only to remember you’ve left your mobile charger at home, and neither your friends nor any of their flatmates have the same type of charger that fits your phone; even if they have the same make it’s one model up or down from the one you have, thus dooming you to a weekend of no battery, several missed calls and unheard voicemail messages.

However scenarios similar to the one described above are thankfully set to become Things of the Past: mobile phone makers are to standardise phone chargers, which in the future will all feature micro USB connections.

This means less waste, as you don’t have to chuck out old outmoded mains adapters that don’t fit the new model of phone, and you now don’t have to worry about taking your charger with you as wherever you go for the weekend.

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Sony Ericsson have taken the wraps off of their new ‘Idou’ handset - pronounced ‘I do’ - at this year’s Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, which packs among its features a 3.5″ touchscreen capable of displaying images and video in 16 million colours and 16:9 widescreen aspect ratio and a monstrous Xenon-flash assisted 12 Megapixel camera.

The widescreen dimensions of the display hint that the phone is geared towards video playback a la the Nokia 5800 XpressMusic and LG’s Arena; no hint or what video codecs are supported yet, but it has been confirmed that Wi-Fi and 3G (HSDPA?) connectivity are on board, so fast streaming of video content from the web is likely to be another prominent feature of the Idou.

The Sony Ericsson Idou also features a GPS receiver, which, coupled with the big and vibrant touchscreen = an excellent mobile sat nav solution.

This is the first of many news reports we’ve been expecting to hear from the MWC ‘09 ever since Samsung upped the ante with news of their own 12 Megapixel beast a good couple of weeks before the event.

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Fennec, the official name for what is better known as Firefox Mobile, is now available to download for HTC Touch Pro phones, and almost any Windows Mobile phone running with a VGA display (480×640).

This version of Fennec has been described as being ‘pre-Alpha’, i.e. it’s nowhere near finished, is incomplete and (very) slow, and it doesn’t allow for any plug-ins or add-ons to be installed - half the reason that Firefox has been such a hit with users.

However we must remember that this is by no means the end product, and just a hint of things to come. If you want to try it out, and you have an HTC Touch Pro, or a Windows Mobile based phone running at the requisite display level, then you can still test the waters with this little pre release; click here for more info.

We’re looking forwards to being able to roll with the Bauhaus style set, and installing the British English inline spell checker; i.e. one that doesn’t correct spellings of words such as ‘colour’, ‘centre’ and the like.

In the run up to the Mobile World Congress, more and more details and rumours emerge about the flagship phones of the major mobile manufacturers. Sony Ericsson’s leading phone for 2009 is a slim metal edged slider with a 2.6″ display; this phone, which is an addition to their Walkman series of mobile phones, and is currently called ‘Hikaru’.

The Hikaru, news of which was first leaked back in October last year, is rumoured to feature an 8 Megapixel camera, and a healthy 8GB of internal memory, stereo speakers and a 3.5mm jack - we can expect that usual Sony Ericsson Walkman phone features such as dedicated music keys, SensMe, Mega Bass and TrackID will feature, along with standard Bluetooth and USB connectivity options.

The phone has been talked about as replacing the Xperia X1 as Sony Ericsson’s most advanced handset to date, although in reality, it’s more of an upgrade of the W910i Walkman handset - the picture above, filched from the SEMC blog shows that the Hikaru features a similar key layout and design style. The blog post also says that the phone will be unveiled on the 15th of this month at MWC - even though that event isn’t due to start til the day after.

Sony Ericsson apparently will be launching the Hikaru in the second quarter of 2009. Despite its manga namesake, there’s no word yet that the Sony Ericsson Hikaru features a ‘Go’ application.

[Link: SEMC Blog]

A similar application to the one which saw thousands of iPhone owners worldwide accidently throw their expensive touchscreen phones into a wall in the manner of an unsecured Nintendo Wii controller is now available for download to the Storm - now BlackBerry owners can have hours of fun swinging their pricey handsets around the place until they go flying into a window or become permanently embedded in a TV set.

A link posted on the CrackBerry forum leads you to the app, where you can download the app, which is currently still in development. Prospective Jedi and Sith can delight in the ability to choose the colour of ones blade once the app has been installed:

“Open the app, click the screen to turn the lightsaber on. You can swipe the screen left and right for different colors. When you have a color of your choice just swing the phone left and right. Based on how hard you swing it different sounds will play. Click the screen again to turn it off.”

As the app is still an ‘in progress’ type thing, there are still some sound issues to be ironed out - if you’re running version .75 of the OS, then the lightsabre ‘noises’ (vwom, vwim, etc) are sometimes routed through the 3.5mm jack rather than the external speaker. This has been noted and is being ironed out.

[Link: CrackBerry]

This morning LG updated their blog with some news concerning their forthcoming “flagship mobile phone for 2009,” the KM900, better known as the LG Arena.

Not to be confused with its NEC Birmingham namesake, the LG Arena is a solid looking metal edged touch tablet that has a touch of the Bauhaus about it with its rounded corners and minimal fascia.

The most prominent feature of the KM900 Arena is undoubtedly its user interface - LG’s new ‘3D UI’ makes its debut here. As you can see from the attached pic, the Arena boasts a cube-based layout, which you thumb through left and right, giving you access to four customisable home screens, similar to the cube rotate SmackBook/AMS Tracker thing seen on Macbooks.

Whilst a full spec lowdown won’t be made available until the Mobile World Congress 2009 at Barcelona next week, LG have confirmed that the phone is DivX compatible and will include “features enhanced by Dolby”, which suggests that videos played on the Arena touchscreen will both look and sound the business. Also confirmed is Assisted GPS and Wi-Fi, and HSDPA up to 7.2Mbps, and, judging by the picture, support for videocalls.

[Source: here]

In a bid to stop lags smuggling contraband such as knifes, drugs, and mobile phones into chokey via an imaginative use of that last stage of the digestive system, prison officials have introduced an ingenious new scanning device.

According to today’s Telegraph, the £6,500 scanners, called Body Orifice Security Scanners (which, rather cutely, abbreviates to ‘Boss’) are being installed in 102 jails across Britain aimed to tackle a surge in phone smuggling.
The Boss scanners, which resemble electric chairs, scan prisoners in a “non-intrusive manner” and emit a bleeping noise if a prisoner has a phone “hidden inside them”.

The chairs feature a metal detector on the seat, and audio and visual alarms are activated when metal is carried into the magnetic field, like in an airport scanner. So far, two ‘Bosses’ have been deployed at Woodhill prison in Milton Keynes, and have helped officials recover 21 mobile devices.

Prisons Minister David Hanson said: “This is a valuable tool towards identifying mobile phones. We want to prevent mobile phones coming in, prevent contact with drug runners on the outside, prevent intimidation and prevent individuals running criminal activities from inside.”

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