Mobile Phones Blog

Yesterday Research in Motion unveiled the long awaited BlackBerry App World. We were still too busy reeling from the shock of Qualcomm’s avian breakthrough to have time to check it out ourselves, so first thing this morning we fired up our BlackBerry Storm and decided to have a look.

Downloading App World took less than couple of minutes on a 3G connection using a BlackBerry Storm. App World, like all downloaded stuff, ends up in your Downloads folder. When you launch App World, the most popular applications are listed on its home screen - unsurprisingly, most of these are free. As with buying apps on the iPhone, you can perform a search, browse by category, or view the top 25 downloads.

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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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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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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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The recently announced Nintendo DSi comes with a lot of spec and features that don’t sound at all out of place on any of the just released smartphones; 3.25″ touchscreen, Wi-Fi support, built in web browser, music player, camera, and the ability to download games; it’s only the lack of any calling or texting features which stop it from being sold on contract in the local Carphone Warehouse or something.

The new handset, which goes on sale in its native Japan on the 1^st of November (followed by an early 2009 worldwide release), follows on from the DS Lite, and incorporates two VGA cameras, which will be integral to some game titles, and can be used to take pics of mates’ faces and the like.

As the pictures here show, the DSi also comes with a microSD card slot, yet another feature synonymous with mobile phones. Naturally, the entire internet has been busy pondering about when or even if Nintendo will (hopefully) follow this leap forward with a DS phone.

It would make sense, seeing as the iPhone can handle titles such as Star Wars: The Force Unleashed, Sony (apparently) will be releasing a PSP Phone, Nokia are still surging ahead with their N-Gage series, and, well, who knows what might crop up on the G1 and future Android handsets?

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Most people wouldn’t think that their mobile phone could ever be sensitive enough to receive signals from space, specifically from a geostationary satellite some 22,000 miles from the earth, but in a year or two these services will be all the rage in Europe.

And they are so popular that the European Commission has received its first law suit from one of the companies that wants to provide such services, claiming that the process by which the Europe wide licenses will be allocated is not legal, and favours European companies.

Effectively the Mobile Satellite Services idea has come about from improvements in how satellites work, specifically the way they can now unravel huge 25 meter antennas, and move them around for best reception so that tiny internal antennas in handsets using the 2.1 GHz range of radio signals, can pick up the signal from space. It is the radio equivalent of hearing a pin drop on earth from space.

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T-Mobile have just dispatched a series of electronic press kits, which contain some revealing information on the forthcoming T-Mobile G1 phone, aka the HTC Dream, aka the Google Android phone, aka this thing.

As well as detailing information about the G1 which we already know about - it has a 3.2 Megapixel camera, three points of interface (the touchscreen, the tracker ball and the QWERTY keyboard) fast HSDPA access - the press kit, actually more of a training package for sales teams, reveals the following information:

• The G1 will be available on any of the T-Mobile Flext or Combi plans.

• Unlimited internet browsing is made available by signing up to T-Mobile Web ‘n’ Walk Plus for an additional £10 a month on top of your tariff.

• A GoogleMail account is required to use the G1.

• The G1 comes with the following Google applications out of the box: Google Talk (IM) GoogleMail, Google Calendar, Google Search and Google Maps.

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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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As Nokia unleashes its key weapon in the pre-holiday barrage of super-handsets, the N96, it is betraying signs of vulnerability to the recession for the first time (in public at least). It issued a shock warning of loss of market share, indicating a squeeze by lower cost vendors as consumers tighten their belts.

The N96 will reach Europeans in this quarter, with a price of $550 (£447) before subsidies, but the US will wait until the fourth quarter for a version adapted to US bands, and this will come at a slightly higher price tag of $895.

The N96 is an upgrade of the existing N95. It has a 2.8-inch display, five megapixel camera and support for navigation Assisted GPS. There is 16GB of internal memory or a microSD card, and connectivity via HSDPA or Wi-Fi. The star quality of the phone lies in its video capabilities - it supports the most common video formats including MPEG4, Windows Media Video and Flash Video. However, in video, the N96 has already been overshadowed, notably by the Samsung Innov8 with its eight-megapixel camera.

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