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More details after the link…

Nokia have gone all conceptual on us, showing off a variety of new prototype form factors designed to show us how imaginative the company’s designers are. Think of them as the mobile equivalent of car prototypes.

The Acibo is a ‘buddy device’, one of those market-speak terms designed to inspire nothing but horror in the average human. Apparently, “the coveted Nokia Acibo concept has taken surpassed conventional wisdom and created a new buddy device that not only understands and delivers on your communication needs, but offers a unique level of personalization.” Which means it’s a mobile phone in the shape of a ball (wow, I’m getting cynical these days!).

The Aki wristphone is a bracelet phone (or according to Nokia-speak, a ‘wrist-wrap device’!). Apparently, it’s designed to respond to a user’s wrist actions. You move in a particular way, and it’ll perform some function that you’ve programmed into it. So, call your boss by making an interesting but vigorous shake of the wrist – nice one, Nokia!

Nokia have provided an irritating flash site to show off these designs, but to be honest, the navigation is so poor and the usability of the site so irritating, I gave up, and simply read the PhoneMag’s coverage of it! See and be amused!

Samsung has released pictures of its new phone developed in collaboration with Bang and Olufsen. Called the ‘Serene’ (yes, ‘cos that’s exactly how mobile phones make you feel!), it’s designed to compete with Nokia’s Vertue: that is, very expensive, style heavy, feature light. Apparently it does have ‘perhaps the best sound quality in the mobile phone market’ which you can try out for yourself at serenemobile.com, but to be honest, you can’t really tell all that much from the chime of a single bell (though it did annoy the hell out of my cat – not sure if that’s a feature though!)

The phone will be out in November, but there’s already a comprehensive review at mobile-review.com. They conclude much as I suspected:

“This device is extremely uninteresting for people using other functions besides calls. Principally Java support is absent….Some times the phone looks extremely archaic – the manufacturer cut everything they could. In the end we have a device that will be interesting to people who got used to showing their status with such devices not bothering about their functionality and any application to real use.”

In other words: avoid!

LG Electronics have announced the launch of the CL400 mobile phone. Not content with the usual connectivity options (you know – bluetooth, GSM, 3G, email, SMS, IrDA, etc., etc.), LG have added on WiFi connectivity as well. Better still, it’s UMA-compliant (Unlicensed Mobile Access), a technology that had until now slipped under my acronym-radar.

UMA is an access technology that allows a seamless handoff of mobile voice and data from a wide area cellular network to a wireless local area network (WLAN). The UMA standard defines how mobile operators can turn home, office, and public wireless LANs into seamless extensions of their cellular networks. In English, this means that the LG CL400 can communicate over the mobile phone network or a WiFi network, with the phone switching between the two (“handoff”) mid-call without the user noticing (“seamless”).

This is a very interesting development for a number of reasons:

• it enables the user to use the phone even in places where there’s no mobile network signal;
• the phone can replace existing landline phones, as UMA relies on Mobile Voice over IP (VoIP), a variant of Internet telephony used by Skype, and now available by the UK’s B ;
• it’s a standard that can act as the enabling technology for MobSharing to become a reality;
• it’s difficult to see how mobile networks can charge for calls made on a mobile phone that are routed over a user’s own Wireless LAN

These issues, and more, explored after the link….

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