Posts filed under

2005 is clearly the year of the music mobile phone. SonyEricsson has branded its new W800i with the legendary Walkman brand; Motorola is teaming up with Apple to bring an iPod phone; and Nokia, musically brandless but with its finger on the jugular, let alone the pulse, is offering the N91, with a hard-disk, and the ability to share music files using Bluetooth, Email, EDGE, GPRS, 3G, and even WLAN.

These devices, and the path they’re leading mobile phones down, have an unprecedented opportunity to reshape not just the MP3 device industry, but the music industry and even the high street shopping experience. Forget Flash-Mobs, forget filesharing: brace yourself for the new concept of MobSharing – it’s only a matter of time before it’ll be coming to a Starbucks near you.

As well as the forthcoming Walkman-inspired W800i, SonyEricsson have released their new K750i, an update on their old K700i and S700i models. Those old models were the first to feature SonyEricsson’s phone-on-one-side, camera-on-the-other design, and the K750i continues this theme, but obviously with udpated features. In particular, the K750i contains a 2 megapixel phone, compared with the VGA phone of the old K700, and 1.3 megapixel resolution of the S700i. Disappointingly, though (at least for me), the phone doesn’t fold out like the S700i, but is a simple candy-bar design, with no great folds and twists.

Panasonic have a new phone coming out in the shape of the VS3. And it’s a nice shape, too, looking rather classy in its besilvered-metallic shiney covering, and it comes equipped with a 16 million colour screen. But that seems to be about all. It has a 1.3 megapixel camera, which was great last summer; you can change its covers….oooh! And it has ‘Messaging illlumination’, whereby the phone illuminates according to the emotion it detects in the message. Sounds clever, but it simply parses emoticons and flashes according to whether it sees smileys or anti-smileys. So, a phone that would have been cool last year then!

Ah Java – a once massively hyped future-of-the-web-technology, now a ubiquitous, its-everywhere-but-you-never-see-it kind of thing. Everything these days seems to be ‘Java-enabled’ – in fact, if you have a device that seems to have at least some computational ability, you no doubt simply assume that it has Java, and don’t even bother to look.

That’s certainly the case with mobile phones. If you look at the long list of features of the new mobile phones, you’ll probably not even bother looking at whether it’s Java-enabled or not, in the same way you never bother to look whether it’s SMS-enabled – you’ll just assume that it is. But it wasn’t always thus. I remember back in the heady days of 2001, attending an Orange Wireless Developer’s seminar, when the talk was on how “every new mobile would have Java installed by Christmas 2001″, which would be a major advance for mobile phones. And it was – but do you ever use it? Really? Apart from the preinstalled Java apps? Be honest now! Do you want find out how to use it?…

So now we have the situation where everyone has Java on their phones, but very few people actually make any real use of it. This HowTo should solve that by telling you how ridiculously easy Java midlets are to install, and how to make the most out of the Java features on your phone.

If it’s Java downloads you’re after for your mobile, then you might want to spend some time at the www.getjar.com web site. Be warned though – you could very easily find yourself spending hours here, as the site makes it so easy to pick from an endless variety of mostly free Java J2ME midlets. These apps will run on most phones, but just to be sure, you can even filter the huge list according to your phone.

I tried some of these gems out on my SonyEricsson S700i, and most worked without a hitch (though some didn’t, principally those that needed to connect to a server. This may be because a specific server was down, though, as most of the midlets needing Internet connection worked fine). Downloading onto the phone was simplicity itself, as the site provides the Java .JAR and .JAD files for downloading onto your PC (and then, of course, subsequent uploading onto your mobile), or lets you download directly onto your handset via WAP.

Sony Ericsson have announced that their forthcoming new W800i Walkman phone will go on sale on Friday 12 August. Like many of their recent phones, the design features a mobile phone handset look on one side, and digital camera on the other. Where the W800i stands out from existing phones, though, is its emphasis on music – this is SonyEricsson’s first phone to use Sony’s famous Walkman brand.

The phone comes with 34MB internal memory plus 512MB Memory Stick PRO Duo�, enough, claim SonyEricsson, for up to 10 CDs’ worth of tuneage. Which leads nicely to a rather nice feature of this phone – not only can you download tunes (a presumably rather expensive affair, considering the cost per tune plus the cost of the download), you can also rip individual tracks from CDs on your PC via included CD-ripping software and USB cable. Instant tunes, no extra outlay – nice! That’s not all though – the phone also comes with FM radio, a 2 megapixel camera, video recorder facility, and the usual array of what you’d hope for in a phone (SMS, MMS, GSM – you know, the usual!).

OK, I could be accused of being cynical, but this amazing looking phone looks too good to be true. It’s a 2 megapixel camera plus video recording phone with ‘Carl Zeiss lens’ (oooh!) – so far so good, what we’d expect for the next gen phones, and a nice step up from the current crop of 1 megapixellers. Not quite as good as some of the camera resolutions available elsewhere, but good all the same, and Nokia are noted for decent quality images from their phones. The real seller, of course, is the amazing looks of the thing!

I mean, look at it – see it twist, see it flip, imagine your mates’ faces when you get it out casually, and before their very eyes start making little origami shapes out of your phone! Forget the quality of the gadgets, look at the thing twist!