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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Businessman Andrew Cheatle thought he’d lost his Nokia mobile phone forever after it had slipped out of his pocket during a stroll on a beach - he’d assumed it had been swept away by the tide and consigned to the deep for good.

However a week later, his girlfriend Rita Smith got a call from fisherman Glen Kerley, who said that he’d found the phone inside the belly of a 25lb cod, according to a report in The Sun. The couple were shopping for a new phone when Rita got the call, who then handed her phone over.

“She said some guy was going on about my phone and a cod so she handed it over to me and he told me where he had found it… I didn’t believe him but went to meet him and found it was my phone - a bit smelly and battered - but incredibly it still worked after I let it dry out.”

Fisherman Glen had apparently tried to use the phone first, but as it was too wet, he instead took out the SIM card and put it in his own phone to trace the owner.

Cod are apparently notoriously greedy - “They’ll eat anything,” says fisherman Glen.

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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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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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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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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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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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We’ve seen more than a few news stories and posts on blogs this week about the findings of a trans-Atlantic survey which has found that many of us find that getting the most out of our mobile phones is something of a Herculean task, due to the perceived complexity of user interfaces and layouts.

Of the 4,000 people canvassed here in the UK and in the States, 85% of users said they were frustrated by the difficulty of getting a new phone up and working and 61% said setting up a new handset was comparable to changing bank accounts in terms of hassle and stress.

Compiled by mobile firm Mformation, the survey also showed that 95% said they would try more new services if phones were easier to set up and get going.

Here at Mobile Phones, we’ve certainly had our fair share of frustrating set up experiences with new handsets. It took one of our reviewers a frustrating 20 minutes to just to get the interface of the Sony Ericsson Xperia X1 up and running (this is before you are taken through a brief demo of the phone’s diary entry system which you can’t skip) and we remember well what a pain it was switching networks before the PAC codes and porting regulations were brought in.

Obviously people primarily buy mobile phones to talk and send texts to people, and for a good majority of mobile customers, that’s enough. My mum has had the Nokia 5310 for ages now, and it was only recently, around Christmas time, that I showed her how to Bluetooth ringtones and the like to other phones.

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