Official confirmation of the successor to LG’s Prada phone, the Prada II, came a while back, but LG has finally got into gear in the promotion stakes and launched a typically flashy teaser site.
Less expected is the announcement of a matching Bluetooth Prada watch that can display your incoming calls and texts. Very clever, and seeing as it is being branded by Prada, we’re guessing it’s going to be very expensive too. Still, as phone watches go (or any interoperable hybrid thereof), this little baby has to be one of the least fugly we have ever seen.
Not that that’s any great accolade but at least it’s a step in the right direction. Assuming the Prada II generates it’s own Viewty like the first one did (Viewty II anyone), maybe the watch will arrive in more cost effective form too. Fingers crossed.
(Via Engadget Mobile)
A few months ago, every home entertainment gadget seemed to come with an iPod dock, but that trend’s fast been updated to include iPhone. Put simply, if you’re selling something that’s gadgety and sits in a living room (or kitchen, bedroom, scullery…), it’s got to have something your iPhone can plug into.
The i-Station Rotate is certainly one of the most desirable examples so far. It’s actually a speaker dock that fits the iPhone, iPod Touch AND the latest iPod Nano. But its schtick is that the dock bit lets you turn them sideways so you can watch videos in widescreen mode.
Other stuff? It’s got tech to avoid those horrible static sounds when using your iPhone for calls or web surfing, there’s a video-out port, and a dedicated remote control. You can power it with four AA batteries if you want to take it down the park/beach, and a 3.5mm line-in port means you can connect non-Apple MP3 players too.
The price? A Christmas-present-worthy £79 when it goes on sale next month here in the UK.
We are living in strange times indeed when even pohoto frames have their own mobile numbers.
The T-Mobile Cameo is a fairly ordinary-looking digital photo frame, but hidden inside that faux-leather frame lurks the guts of a mobile phone. Stick a SIM card in the back and you will be able to send pics directly to the frame using MMS or email.
The 130 x 87 mm screen can do up to 720 x 480 pixels in 262,144 colours and it can store around 500 images in GIF of JPG format. No idea if it can do animated GIFS, although that could lead to some amusing Harry Potter-esque japes. Hopefully in a couple of years we can have one that will do realtime video streaming too.
T-Mobile will be selling the Cameo via their stores and website for around £50, any day now.
While the iPhone’s camera is pretty decent, it is not so great for close-up, or ‘macro’, photography.
The Clarifi is a protective case for the iPhone 3G that comes with a lens cover that the manufacturer’s claim can reduce the focal distance of the camera - allowing you to take clear photos from around 4 inches rather than the from 18 inches of a regular iPhone lens.
The focusing lens can be slid aside to restore your phone’s usual focal distance, and the case itself is tough polycarbonate shell with a removable base so as not to obstruct a Universa Dock.
The case will retail for around $34.99 from Griffin Technology.
Mobile broadband continues to go from strength to strength - a year ago, people would give me strange looks when I whipped out my dongle on the train (so to speak), but now the carriage is full of laptops with 3G USB sticks poking out of them.
Vodafone has just announced a new dongle, the USB Stick Pro, which it says is for “high performance use”. That means you get a theoretical top speed of 7.2Mbps (which in practise means up to 5Mbps), and a built-in 4GB microSD memory card. A memory card? Well, yes - presumably the idea is to double up as a USB memory stick, thus ensuring you don’t need to carry round two losable gizmos in your pockets.
The new modem will be available for free on certain data tariffs, and to celebrate, Vodafone is offering its 3GB mobile broadband plan for £10 a month - although only for three months, and you have to sign up for a 24-month contract to get it. There’s a similar offer for the 5GB plan, which will be £15 for three months.
Softbank - the lucky Japanese mobile carrier that landed the iPhone gig over there - has announced a new peripheral designed to make up for one of the iPhone’s perceived shortcomings in the Japanese market.
In Japan, it seems, integrated TV tuners are de rigueur at the moment and the iPhone has taken a fair amount of stick for leaving out such a crucial feature.
To help boost the handset’s chances, Softbank are rolling out a portable TV tuner that can be used with the iPhone. Interestingly, the tuner is an entirely seprate unit that uses a local wifi network to communicate with the iPhone.
Users install a TV app which displays streamed video sent from the tuner which can be kept in a pocket or handbag so as not to impact the sleek lines of Apple’s design classic.
iPhone owners worried that not enough people on the bus are staring at them.. make some noise!
Those MyVu video glasses - the ones that exist in a strange quantum state somewhere between ridiculous and fantastic - are now fully compatible with the iPhone.
“With a focus on innovation, functionality and design, Myvu is thrilled to announce that Myvu Crystal is now fully compatible with the Apple iPhone,” said MyVu president Kip Kokinakis.
The Star Trek-esque goggles beam video images directly into your eyes, creating a ‘floating screen’ that appears subjectively to be in front of your face.
People talk about the fashion industry being obsessed with thinness, but it’s got nothing on the consumer tech industry. From TVs to mobile phones to Bluetooth headsets, companies fall over themselves to proclaim their new products the thinnest in the world. Does it really matter whether one model is 1mm slimmer than another? The marketeers certainly think so.
So, to the Bluetrek Metal, which at 4.2mm thick is apparently the latest ‘thinnest Bluetooth headset in the world’, at least until someone launches a 4.1mm one next week. Still, the Metal is about more than svelteness - it’s made “almost entirely” from aluminium, and has a “unisex” design. In comparison to all those other macho and girly headsets, presumably.
Other stats: the Metal weighs in at just 5.5g, comes with a mini-USB adapter to charge from your PC, and promises a talktime of up to five hours, and a standby time of up to seven days. Oh, and it comes in a choice of silver or black. The Metal is due on sale this month with a price tag of just under £30.
Some days it seems like the whole world has gone iPhone mad. It’s only a bloody phone, for goodness’ sake - you don’t need to actually genuflect in its presence, no matter how many stories you might hear of people having minor ailments cured just by having someone wave one over their gammy leg or dicky tum.
Despite this, companies are still falling over themselves to offer goodies to iPhone owners. Next up is Dublin-based wifi mongers Free-Hotspot.com.
For the next three months, Free-Hotspot are offering all iPhone and iPod touch users free access to their network of wireless hotspots. The network comprises about 3,500 access points worldwide, with that number expected to hit 5,000 in the nexyear.
In return, users are expected to watch a short advertisement.
Luckily for Free-Hotspot, there is absolutely no way a non-iPhone user could attempt to get around their terms and conditions by - for example - manually changing the user agent string in their web browser.
Noise-cancelling headphones are the greatest invention since sliced bread: once you’ve tried them, you can’t go back. Especially if you spend a lot of time on tubes, trains or planes. Sony Ericsson knows this: it’s why they’ve launched the HPM-88 noise-cancelling headphones.
It’s apparently the first noise-cancelling headset that’s powered by your phone itself, rather than separate batteries, and promises to shut out up to 75% of external noise. What this means for your handset’s battery life remains to be seen, of course. The HPM-88 is due on sale in the fourth quarter of this year in “selected markets”, although hopefully that includes the UK.
Meanwhile, Sony Ericsson has also unveiled its HBH-IS800 wireless stereo headphones, for those of you who prefer a bit of Bluetooth streaming. It’s small, rests on your neck, and is apparently pretty nifty on the audio quality score. It’s due on sale by Christmas.
