Mobile Phones Blog

A slew of forthcoming music phones from Motorola’s MOTOROKR range will come fully loaded with digital copies of U2’s new album No Line on the Horizon, in a bid to drive sales of the new handset and to tap in to the increasingly lucrative mobile music market, which according to recent figures from Portico Research, accounted for a cool $11.7 billion of revenue in 2008.

As well as having all the tracks from No Line, the handsets will also come with a video for the lead single “Get On Your Boots” - currently not being enjoyed by YouTube viewers in the UK - wallpapers, ringtones, and an as of yet unnamed bonus track exclusive to the phones.

The phones in question are MOTOROKR EM25, EM28, EM30 and EM35 (pictured), and will only be available to customers in Latin America - for the time being at least.

Motorola have previously had success in the Latin market with their W388 and W231 handsets which came pre-loaded with music from Brazilian rockers NXZero, and with No Line already racking up 500,000 sales in the US alone within its first week, Motorola are probably on to a nice little earner here.

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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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First, it was phones such as the contra-rotating Motorola AURA and handsets from Nokia’s Vertu range which brought levels of precision usually associated with high quality watch making to the mobile world. Then, luxury timepiece manufactures such as Tag Heuer responded with mobile handsets of their own. Now, the movement has come full circle with the announcement of LG’s forthcoming GD910 ‘watch phone’ handset, which, given that its worn around the wrist like a traditional watch, really ought to be called a wrist set.

The GD910 is a tiny touchscreen phone which doubles as a keypad for dialling numbers and tapping out texts and emails, and, allegedly, high speed internet navigation.

It will also boast a front facing camera allowing for videocalling, MP3 playback, and – thankfully – comes with Bluetooth, meaning that you don’t have to hold the watch phone up to your mouth when you want to talk to someone.

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High-end audio manufacturers Bang & Olufsen, who teamed up with Samsung to make the celebrated Serenata handset (and the not-so-celebrated Serene) and contribute audio components to the U600 and F400 handsets have bowed out of the mobile sector.

The Danish audio kings have ended their relationship with the Korean electronics powerhouse, meaning that no more Samsung phones or DVD players will come equipped with B&O-branded components.

Bang & Olufsen big wig Karl Kristian Hvidt Nielsen said that the decision was purely a financial one, based on the dastardly credit crunch meaning that folks no longer had as much cash to throw around for their infamously expensive equipment as they did before.

The news comes as Motorola unveiled their über-pricey AURA fashion phone, a handset which boasts an attention to detail of which the boys at B&O would be proud of. But as the world tightens its collective purse string, perhaps launching a rather expensive item isn’t such as good idea right now, especially when you plan to give thousands of your own workers the boot…

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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The autumn traditionally sees the smartphone makers going on a marketing blitz ahead of the holiday buying season, but this year there is the hint of desperation, as vendors unleash their most sophisticated devices yet, but to a market that is likely to be significantly tougher than they envisaged during the development stage. Hard on the heels of Nokia Tube, Sony Ericsson Xperia X1 and HTC/T-Mobile G1 comes LG’s latest effort, the Renoir, and like many of the Korean supplier's high end products, it blows away most of the competition in its features and innovations, but will still have to struggle to make as much noise as Apple, Google or Nokia.

The Renoir, more officially known as the KC910, will debut in the UK and other European countries this month through multiple operators. It is a slim (under 14mm) touchscreen handset that matches the much vaunted eight megapixel camera in Samsung’s recently launched i850. The camera, and therefore imaging and video applications, are the key focus on the Renoir (the name chosen because of the famous painter's skill with light). Like Nokia with the N95/96, LG is surrounding its megapixels with fine photo features, putting clear water between its handset and the iPhone, which has only managed a mediocre camera. The Renoir will sport Schneider-Kreuznach certified optics, a Xenon flash, auto and manual focus, sensitivity up to ISO 1600 and geotagging. It also boasts a first in phones, the Touch Shot feature, which allows the user to focus on any object simply by touching it on the screen, with the shutter firing automatically once the finger is removed, reducing shake.

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Americans are crazy for both the iPhone and the G1, the T-Mobile Android phone, basically because they love American products. They are also in love with Motorola handsets, which even after the worst two quarters in that company’s history remain the leading US brand. Which is why analysts there are gung-ho about the idea that Motorola will introduce an Android handset soon, evidenced by unconcealed recruitment campaigns, picked up by US papers, searching for Android developers.

In all honesty, Motorola might just as well advertise its products roadmap, given that there is no such thing yet as an Android developer (the SDK is barely stable and any handset developer worth his salt would pick it up in an afternoon). But this is pretty much what Motorola is doing, and the significance to the UK and Europe, is that Motorola may well try to rescue its plummeting global market share (under 5% in Europe) left by its over-long love affair with the RAZR, by racing HTC, and its operator partner T-Mobile, to introduce Android handsets here.

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The 23rd of September, New York City - Google is all set to make its mobile handset debut in the Big Apple tomorrow night, with the whole world watching, and Taiwanese TouchDiamond manufacturers HTC on board along with exclusive network partner T-Mobile, who have secured carriage rights of the phone here in the UK, the US and in Deutsche Telekom’s homeland of Germany.

Dubbed the G1, the first ever ‘G-phone’ to come with Google’s Linux-based Android operating system built in, the handset is rumoured to feature an iPhone-esque touchscreen interface as well as a full QWERTY keyboard, located underneath the slide-out display. Also included onboard is a 3.2 Megapixel camera, a memory card slot and HSDPA support for fast mobile browsing.

Whilst there’s been absolutely nothing official on a release, we’ve heard from multiple sources that T-Mobile are planning on taking pre-orders from its online store from the 17th of October, putting an end to persisting rumours that tomorrow’s big day also sees the commercial launch of the G1 product.

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Having lived through the PC religious wars in the 80s, when Windows suddenly came to power in one of the most aggressive pieces of marketing ever seen, we are constantly alert to similar moves that might put the handset world in the same kind of icy grip.

As much as anyone loves Google and its Android initiative, surely no-one wants to see Windows happen all over again, a move which ended up deifying a single individual (Bill Gates) and producing the richest man in the world, while simultaneously destroying most of the companies that gave us the PC revolution and stultifying initiative and innovation on the PC.

What if a single company had ending up controlling the development of the Internet in the same way? It would have been a disaster of biblical proportions. The only alternative to a de facto standard and monopoly is the rise of an open source foundation that controls standards. In the case of the Internet it was the IETF and the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), and that's the model and role that Symbian is chasing, but in order to be successful it needs virtually everyone behind it.

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You may have wondered just what has been the problem with handset companies like Nokia getting their hands on quality music and video for their handsets and portals such as its Ovi portal. If Apple can do it for the iPhone, why can’t other handset companies or operators like Vodafone, do it for themselves. They seem to be managing with music, but not quite so much with video.

Well one of the issues that it always comes down to is something called Digital Rights Management software, something that consumers have come to hate, because it usually means not being able to do what you want with the content that you’ve paid for.

Studios won’t release legal TV and film content, and record labels won’t release music unless a company like Nokia can complete a security audit, showing that it is looking after the content properly and that the device won’t be another place for content to leak onto the internet (okay, so most of it has already leaked there, but that’s content owners for you).

One of the most DRM celebrated efforts, driven by Nokia and Vodafone, but backed by almost everyone in wireless who matters, was the Open Mobile Alliance DRM completed in 2004, written to be royalty free, so that phone companies and operators would have to pay nothing.

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