The coolest things for the coolest phones
Mobile Music has come a long way this year. A good quality music player is now standard on any halfway decent mobile phone and manufacturers are making headway in practical handset designs that making listening a more enjoyable experience.
Enough of my yakkin’, let’s rock:
As your Christmas dinner settles in your belly and you contemplate if that 15th mince pie would make you feel ill or actually cause you to explode, what better time to reflect on the year’s best Windows Mobile picks?
These are the 5 apps filling the pocketpicks stocking for 2007.
The non-free, windows mobile-native version of the popular mobile web browser produced a great new version this year, adding Flash support, stability fixes
and a host of subtle enhancements to the mobile browsing experience that put Opera so far ahead of the mobile version of Internet Explorer that it is almost embarrassing.
Continue reading ‘The 5 best Windows Mobile apps of 2007′
Merry Christmas! Hang on while I open this gold envelope..
In no particular order, the 5 best Symbian apps of the year are:
Essentialy a showcase for the GPS and accelerometer combo that is finding its way into all of Nokia’s high-end mobiles, Sports Tracker sits in your tracksuit pocket and quietly logs your progress during a run into a personal training diary, taking into account your pace and how far you have travelled.
Mobile phones with some high-profile, non-mobile branding seems to be all the rage with manufacturers and retailers at the moment, what with Samsung’s Armani phone, and Carphone’s Ted Baker and phones. Now Motorola’s got in on the act with its new Ferrari phone.
While most deals like this feature new or original handsets, Motorola’s gone for the easy option and basically slapped a Ferrari badge on a reasonably-old handset, the Z8 RIZR.
To be fair, the Z8 isn’t actually that bad a phone but this new limited edition isn’t exactly going to set the world alight. As well as a Ferrari logo plastered on the side, the Moto Z8 Ferrari Limited Edition, comes with two pre-loaded Ferrari videos, registration to the official Ferrari website, custom Ferrari wallpapers and ringtones and direct internet links to magazines like Top Gear, Auto Express, GQ, Esquire and Autosport. And like the standard Z8 release, you also get a bundled copy of The Bourne Identity movie.
Sadly, this won’t even be out in time for Christmas either, as it’s not going to be out until early next year from Ferrari and Motorola’s main retailers. Oh well…
The official N-Gage blog has announced that the new N-Gage service launches next week (Yay!) Unfortunately it’s only on the N81 for the time being (Boo!).
While Nokia’s keeping to its promise of a pre-Christmas launch, the restriction to N81 and N81 8GB will surely disappoint N82 and N95 8GB owners hoping for some gaming action this Crimbo.
There’ll only be a few games available at launch and won’t be the full version of the service, but it’s a start. Those who want to leave feedback (i.e. complain) about the lack of support can do so on the First Access forums, which will also be opened for business.
Looks like we’ll all have to wait until 2008 for a full service on the rest of Nokia’s Nseries handsets.
Just after claiming it had sold 15 million KG800 (Chocolate) handsets around the world, LG has unveiled two new colours of the massive-selling handset as xmas gifts – in lilac and silver.
LG claimed last week that the Chocolate had sold 15 million units since it was launched way back in November 2005 in Korea, then in May 2006 in 100 countries around the World. It reckons five million were sold since April alone.
This isn’t bad for a handset that features a 1.3MP camera, a 176×220 pixel screen, and a mere 128MB of storage (and no memory card slot!).
Obviously the Chocolate’s appeal is in the stylish casing and glowing front buttons. Oh, and the range of colours it’s available in, definitely not targeted in a cynical way at getting people to buy different colours to suit their outfits?
If you want one of the new Chocolates, the silver one’s available on prepay from Phones 4u (£49.95), while Carphone’s selling the lilac one on both contract and prepay (£39.95), alongside pink, black and white versions.
So, some new handset from a little-known company named Apple went on sale at 6.02pm on Friday, here in the UK. Earlier that day, it also hit the shelves in Germany. You might’ve noticed a slight hubbub leading up to the big day.
Anyway, there aren’t any official iPhone sales figures for the UK yet, which has given every journalist and his dog a chance to speculate wildly. The figure that’s being quoted most widely is 70,000 iPhone sales during Friday, Saturday and Sunday, which includes O2, Apple and Carphone Warehouse stores. Apparently this could rise to 400,000 by Christmas though. If you remember the inaccurate sales reports after its first weekend on sale in the US, you’ll probably take these with a pinch of salt.
In Germany, it’s a different story, with T-Mobile claiming it sold 10,000 iPhones on Friday alone. It’s a strong start, although the figures aren’t quite as barnstorming as the hype. Why? I wouldn’t be surprised if early adopters have learned the lesson of the US launch, where people queued around the block for days, only to find iPhones in plentiful supply for weeks afterwards. In other words, us Europeans have realised we can probably saunter into a shop sometime this week and pick up a handset, rather than getting het up for Friday’s launch.
The iPhone’s being hyped beyond belief in feverish anticipation ahead of its release this Friday - now O2 and Carphone Warehouse are both claiming it’ll smash mobile sales records.
A bullish Carphone’s expecting to sell up to 10,000 on the day it goes on sale, according to head of wireless UK Darren Gardner. Meanwhile, O2 has put it’s two-pennies worth in, claiming it hopes to sell 200,000 of the devices by Christmas.
Considering the phone goes on sale at 6.02pm (see what they’ve done there) on a Friday night, and even allowing for the Carphone stores staying open until 10pm, that’ll be no mean feet. Presumably he means by the close of business on Saturday.
By our reckoning 200,000 would account for about a fifth of all phone connections in the quarter leading up to Christmas (Judging by the operators’ financial result), and it works out at about 5263 iPhones per day on each of the 38 shopping days between launch and Christmas day. You know, they might just do it.
Budget phone maker Fly Mobile has released its second cheap prepay handset in as many weeks, this time in Argos on Virgin Mobile.
A couple of weeks ago, Fly Mobile announced the £100 touchscreen SLT 100. The new one is called the SL399e and is a pink clamshell, so presumably it’s aimed at women.
It has a 1.3-megapixel camera, Bluetooth, a MP3 player, memory card support and a colour screen inside.
It doesn’t sound particularly exciting, but that’s because you haven’t heard the price yet- £39.99. Yes, that’s right, a sub-£40 prepay handset just in time for Christmas.
Sony Ericsson’s going to unveil three new handsets tomorrow, and in the best tradition of the blogosphere, details on them have already been leaked.
Sony Ericsson W890i
Perhaps the biggest news is the launch of the W890i, a slimline 3G Walkman phone. It’s an upgrade of the W880i, and has the latest version of PlayNow (4.0) and a 3.2-megapixel camera.
Sony Ericsson W380i
A second Walkman phone is also going to be announced - the low-end W380i. Again, this is another upgrade, this time of the W300i. It will apparently feature something called ‘gesture control’, although what this involves isn’t clear at time of writing.
Sony Ericsson K660i
Finally, the third handset is the 3G web-browsing phone, the K660i. Its selling point is that it will let users browse the mobile web in portrait/landscape modes and is controlled by a pointer cursor. Presumably this will be the latest Opera mobile web browser (Mini 4).
So there you have it, details of Sony Ericsson’s Christmas releases - two updates and a 3G web browsing handset. The three phones are almost certainly going to be well-made and popular handsets, but surely Sony Ericsson’s going to unveil more than this tomorrow?
Update: All three were announced as predicted, and all should be in stores before Christmas.
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