Mobile Phones Blog

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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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.

Ever since the iPhone was released, every handset maker and their dog was quick to bust out a touchscreen phone with specs that were slightly better than those found on the iPhone. All and sundry were quick to claim Phone X as being the next ‘iPhone killer’. Months later, the iPhone 3G comes out, does pretty well for itself and Apple, and pics of what could be the next iPhone, leaked to the web days before the 2009’s Mobile World Congress, sends half the internet into apoplexy. However, development of what could be the first real iPhone killer - or iTunes killer at least - has come from a somewhat unexpected quarter.

Spotify has really taken off here in the UK. Today sees music writer Neil McCormick singing Spotify’s praises to the high heavens in the pages of The Telegraph, going so far as calling the cloud based music streaming service “the future of the music business,” harkening to the development of Spotify “or something very like it” for mobile devices as the final death knell of CDs, vinyls, and even iTunes.

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1997: some game called Metal Gear Solid debuted on the Sony PlayStation, a game which quickly became a firm favourite and some would say single-handedly popularised and revolutionised the stealth genre on consoles.

In the same year, Nokia launched ‘Snake’ on its handsets, which quickly became a firm favourite, and some would say popularised gaming on mobile handsets and helped pave the way for the future of gaming on phones.

Now, in 2009 a different kind of Snake prepares to make his debut on mobile handsets; specifically the iPhone and iPod Touch. Appropriately titled Metal Gear Solid Touch, the game sees you adopting the guise of the legendary Solid Snake, taking out absent minded guards before confronting powerful adversaries in a series of tense boss battles.

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Images of what appear to be the back cover of a forthcoming iPhone have appeared across the web. The first of the two images here first appeared over on iPodObserver, the site responsible for publishing some of the first genuine pictures of the iPhone 3G, so we can be fairly certain of their authenticity.

Both of the pictures, (the second of which was posted over on MacRumours) purportedly show a 16GB edition of an iPhone complete with the familiar Apple logo, and the designation ‘Model No: A1303′.

Gone is the gleaming metal and plastic coverings of before; instead is a matt black finish, which appears to be rendered in kind of rubberised material for a better grip, if the pictures are anything to go by.

Days before the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona is due to begin, the timing of this release is impeccable.

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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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Along with Last.fm, another favoured music playing application routinely used here at Mobile Phones Towers is Spotify, one of the newest free music streaming program/application/things that has recently caught our attention.

Currently available in beta form, Spotify allows for free streaming of practically everybody out there, from Stravinsky to Snoop Dogg. You can either hook up to Spotify for free - which requires an invite and means you having to put up with the occasional radio advert - or pay £1 for 24 hours of unrestricted access or £9.99 for a whole month.

There are some notable exceptions; certain ‘big name’ bands like Led Zeppelin and the Beatles aren’t on there (save for ‘A Tribute to…’ albums). It’s perhaps unsurprising that there’s no Metallica - AKA the most internet-phobic band on the planet - on there at all. That said, the blog is regularly updated with news of new bands and artists being added all the time, with over 10,000 albums added this week alone.

The audio quality is excellent, and there is virtually no delay between tracks - no long waits for buffering or anything like that, it’s as if you’re playing tracks straight from your own media player. Like Last.fm, it also gives you the opportunity to hear artists and tracks that you’ve never heard of or had the opportunity to hear before - I came across a cover of ‘Custard Pie’ by Helmet with David Yow on vocals (I thought that was cool anyway).

Perhaps the best thing about it is that, after setting up an account, you can use it on any computer that has Spotify installed. Spotify runs on Windows PCs and Macs (XP or OS X 10.4 at the very least) and it is also possible for Linux users to get Spotified under Wine.

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Japanese black goods powerhouse Toshiba have recently raised eyebrows and grabbed blog headlines with the announcement of the TG01 - their most impressive looking smartphone handset to date.

The TG01 - not to be confused with the similarly named T-Mobile G1 - is a wafer-thin smartphone which is a mere 9.9mm thick, and boasts a huge WVGA (480 x 800 pixels) resistive touchscreen which measures a huge 4.1″ across. The Toshiba TG01 also has the distinction of being the first device in the world to run on Qualcomm’s forthcoming Snapdragon chip.

Snapdragon has been developed specifically for smartphones running PC functions, and features a processor that runs at speeds of 1GHz, which means that the phone should be, er, snappy. Qualcomm have also tweaked the ‘Dragon to be as energy efficient as possible, to the point that the TG01 can reportedly run all applications confidently for a whole day on a single battery charge.

This is no mean feat considering the size of the screen, and the size of the phone - we need to remind you again that it’s less than 10mm thick - and the other features and functions available to the user.

You get HSDPA and HSUPA connectivity, which, along with the large touchscreen, promises a pretty special web browsing experience. Similarly, the large display ought to benefit those who would want to make use of the sat nav system; a GPS receiver is included, and the all important Assisted-GPS functionality is also present.

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We know that this story went live on our news section earlier today, but we thought it worth another mention all the same, given the fairly recent news about the Sony / Sony Ericsson PSP brand-off, the forthcoming Nintendo DSi, (which, bar the last-gen VGA camera could port quite nicely into a smartphone mobile all on its own) and Apple’s bullish (bulls**t?) assertion last November that Sony and Nintendo’s portable devices are “in the past.”

Sure there’s always been Snake, along with various primitive rip offs of Asteroids, Space Invaders and the like, but apart from Nokia, with their N-Gage platform, nobody’s made any major inroads into mobile gaming just yet.

Apple look set to change all this. In an interview with gaming news website Kikizo published this Wednesday, Joswiak casually mentioned how “Everyone from the big developers is excited,” about developing high quality titles for both the iPhone and the iPod Touch. And when he says ‘everyone’ he means “the EAs, the Gamelofts, Hudsons and Segas” as well as smaller games developers.

Joswiak also cites the fact that games delivered via AppStore will benefit from being cheaper, as there’s no physical manufacturing or distribution costs:

“What we typically see is people buying more titles, because it’s a lot easier - it’s a much smaller investment, and it’s a much smaller decision to try a new title that only costs you £5,” he said.

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Apple seemingly file patents with the US Patent and Trademark Office every five minutes, so new of a new application from the Church of Jobs doesn’t really spark much interest, unless it’s a new generation of iPod, iMac or Macbook, or it’s something downright weird.

Apple’s most recent application most certainly falls into the latter catergory. ‘Patent #20090000010′ is for a ‘a glove system for operating an electronic device’, that has been quickly, if unofficially christened the ‘iGlove’.

The patent details how the glove is designed to allow you to use a touchscreen device, like an iPhone in cold weather, without losing any tacitility, by way of tiny apertures cut into the middle finger, index finger and thumb.

The patent application says, “When users, in cold weather, wear thick or bulky gloves … the loss of tactile feedback to the user may prevent the user from properly operating the electronic device, and may lead to frustration. Alternatively, if the user has to remove his gloves … the user’s hand may become cold and uncomfortable, which may also lead to user frustration.”

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