Mobile Phones Blog

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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It has just been announced that Vodafone have inked a deal conferring exclusive carriage rights of the forthcoming ‘G2′ phone - the successor to the T-Mobile G1 - for a limited period.

This morning Vittorio Colao, the Vodafone chief executive, confirmed that the network operator had secured the rights to supply the new smartphone, which like its predecessor is manufactured by HTC and runs on Google’s Android operating system.

The G2 - aka the HTC Magic - is due to be unveiled by the Vodafone chief executive at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona later today. Negotiations between Vodafone and HTC continued right up to the last minute, with the reports of the two parties talking about the deal as late as yesterday.

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Samsung have been talking about incorporating projectors into mobile handsets for a while now - almost a year in fact - and so we were expecting them to unveil something along the lines of this, the Samsung i7410, at the Mobile World Congress, taking place in Barcelona this week.

As the Megapixel arms race reaches its sadly inevitable conclusion with the unveiling of 12 Megapixel cameraphones at the MWC, it’s clear that the next front in the battle for consumer’s attentions will be focused on other things such as mobile TV, HD video playback and the like, and so being first multimedia handset manufacturer out of the gates with an embedded projector is something of a coup for Samsung.

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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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Word on the street is that Samsung are all set to unveil a 12 Megapixel camera phone to the world at this year’s Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, bringing the current Smartphone Megapixel arms race to its sadly predictable conclusion.

With current mobile chipsets only theoretically being able to handle a maximum of around 12 Megapixels, it was only a matter of time before one of the big players announced the development of a cameraphone touting this kind of firepower.

Given than both Samsung and LG brought out the 8 Megapixel big guns last year – the Innov8 and Pixon from Samsung and the Renoir from LG – we had money on it being either one of the Korean tigers to be the first to raise the bar to the next level.

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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…

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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Last month, Sony Ericsson was vocally denying reports that its flagship launch this year, the Xperia X1 Windows handset, was delayed. Now, however, it admits that the product will be released as promised on September 30, but only through restricted channels in key markets like the UK. Nonetheless, the phonemaker is planning a major marketing initiative around the smartphone, as it fights for attention in the pre-Christmas buying period among other high profile new arrivals like the Nokia N96 and Samsung i850 Innov8 - even if some of its tactics look like copycats of Nokia’s N96 drive.

In the UK, O2 and Vodafone will offer the Xperia X1, which has been hotly anticipated since it was unveiled back in February, from the end of this month. Orange will also have the phone, but only through indirect channels, mainly Phones4U. T-Mobile and 3 will not have the product in Q4. Dave Hilton, marketing director for SE in the UK and Ireland, said in an interview: “As part of a plan to launch the Xperia X1 this year we had to limit the release. Come Q1, there will be resources to range it elsewhere. As it was a fairly late project, only limited networks could be involved, but it will be available to the large retailers and a small amount will go through distribution for other retailers.”

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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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Nokia’s new smartphone, the N96, may be an upgrade to the N95 rather than a whole new range, but it will still play a vital role in the fight to dominate high end handset sales in the holiday season. So O2 UK’s decision not to carry the product, in a market where the N95 was very successful, does not bode well for Nokia’s attempt to stay at the forefront of the European smartphone sector, amid growing competition and the threat of consumer spending slowdown. It’ll still be available SIM-free of course, so technically, it will be available on O2… just not at a very competitive price.

The N95 was Nokia’s UK bestseller last year, shifting over a million units, and the Finnish vendor has achieved the most difficult of tricks, sustaining high sales of the N95 almost right up to the launch of the replacement model - even though this has been detailed and anticipated since its was unveiled in February. The 8GB version of the N95, which shipped six months ago in Europe, provided a useful fillip to uptake, but the N96’s future nevertheless looks uncertain.

The main change is that there are just so many handsets that now offer the complete set of smartphone features including a large amount of memory, top-of-the-range camera, usable mobile web interface and applications, GPS for location services, and decent music player. The N95 was the first mainstream phone to provide this combination at a price that was affordable by midmarket customers as well as the elite of smartphone enthusiasts.

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