Mobile Phones Blog

The HTC Magic - the second HTC handset to feature the Android OS - will be touching down in April, according to a recent update on the Vodafone site. Vodafone, who have exclusive carriage rights of the phone for a limited time, have not yet given a specific date for the release, although you can sign up at their site to receive more details as and when they become available.

This aside, no further details have been made available, although curiously, the Coming Soon section of the Vodafone site (pictured) lists the camera as being ‘3.0 - 4.0 megapixel’ - we’re not really sure what that means.

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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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The highly anticipated BlackBerry Storm 9500, developed by Research In Motion in tandem with Vodafone is set to open up an almighty downpour on the smartphone/PDA market upon its release here in the UK tomorrow.

The Storm marks a new venture for RIM, being as it is the first BlackBerry PDA to come with a touchscreen UI, and a rather nice one at that. The interface features a unique brand of haptic feedback which is as of yet unseen on any other touchscreen handset. Whilst other touchscreens will give you a neat little conformational buzz whenever you tap in a command, tapping and typing away on the interface of the Storm is a different proposition – the actual screen itself depresses slightly into the main body of the handset and satisfyingly clicks back out. Keystrokes are accompanied by a slight feedback buzz which is similar to, but altogether different from the type of haptic feedback were used to from the LG Viewty et al.

The BlackBerry Storm is RIM’s most media-friendly handset so far, designed to, er, rein in the typical hardcore Blackberry buyer who might have been swayed by the push email support available on some of the newer smartphones on offer from rival makers. Among its features is a 3.2 Megapixel camera, 3G internet access and sat-nav functionality. Up to 16GB of storage is available, enough space to store plenty of choice tunes downloaded from the Vodafone Music Store, direct access to which, is a fully integrated feature.

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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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Canadian vendor RIM, best known for its BlackBerry business email phones, is making a major push into the consumer smartphone market. It wants to break out of its strongholds in north America and enterprise accounts, but its shareholders are nervous about the amount of marketing and R&D cash it will have to spend to draw attention away from phones from Apple, Nokia and the others. A new close alliance with Vodafone may help solve RIM’s problem and get its attractive new touchscreen handset, the Storm, into the hearts as well as the hands of European phone connoisseurs.

Vodafone is always keen to find handset partners that are willing to create phones largely to the carrier’s specifications, which means working with phonemakers that are smaller and more malleable than Nokia or Samsung. It has mainly succeeded at the low end, but now RIM may prove the tame vendor Vodafone needs to create a superphone to its own requirements.

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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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The GSM Association which represents the interests of hundreds of cellular operators around the world, has cleverly positioned mobile broadband initiatives as a replacement for Wi-Fi and convinced all the leading laptop suppliers to move one step beyond broadband dongles in one concerted leap, to putting a chip on the PC motherboard for devices delivered across 91 countries. They will also the devices have broadband capability with a “Mobile Broadband” badge. The move has echoes of the “Intel Inside” and the “Centrino” campaign which triggered mass take up of Wi-Fi.

PC makers, operators and chip providers all lined up to back the move, this week including 3 Group, Asus, Dell, ECS, Ericsson, Gemalto, Lenovo, Microsoft, Orange, Qualcomm, Telefonica Europe, Telecom Italia, TeliaSonera, T-Mobile, Toshiba and Vodafone - which includes operators serving 760 million customers, around a quarter of the global cellular market.

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O2 have officially announced that the current free/discounted MacBook/O2 Mobile Broadband rumour is just that. An O2 spokeswoman yesterday confirmed that there are “no such plans to launch an Apple MacBook laptop offer,” and that the rumours are “untrue”.

As we all know, O2, who along with Carphone Warehouse, hold exclusive carriage rights to the iPhone, were thought to have worked out a deal with Apple which would see them match the current slew of free laptop offers available from mobile broadband providers and network rivals T-Mobile, Vodafone, 3 Mobile and Orange.

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Mobile phone companies are joining with chipset and laptop manufacturers to promote integrated mobile broadband support on laptop computers.

The united front of industry giants will build wireless modules into laptops designed to provide fast access to mobile broadband. A “Mobile Broadband” logo (see image) will mark out computers that will accelerate current third generation speeds and are compatible with future fourth generation technology. It is expected that the new laptops will be on the market in 91 different nations before Christmas.

Companies that have joined the alliance include laptop manufacturers Dell, Toshiba and Lenovo as well as 3, Microsoft, T-Mobile, Ericsson, Orange, Qualcomm and Vodafone. The coalition of companies has said it will spend about £554m ($1bn) altogether on promoting the logo and informing customers about laptops fitted with the new technology. The agreement to produce the modules, build them in to laptops and to campaign around the Mobile Broadband logo has been brokered by the GSM Association (GSMA) - a trade body that represents 80% of the world's mobile phone companies.

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There is talk abroad of a deal brewing between Apple and O2 that could see customers who sign up for either of O2’s mobile and home broadband offerings getting MacBook or MacBook Pro laptop throw into the bargain.

The two companies, apparently still cosy in their iPhone relationship will be offering free hardware to subscribers in a bid to match the current free laptop offers available to Carphone Warehouse customers who sign up with Orange, 3 Mobile, Vodafone, and T-Mobile.

It is as of yet unknown whether the Macs will be available free, we presume, given that Apple stuff generally costs a pretty penny that the MacBook will either be available as a free gift, or at a lower cost that the Pro version.