Pantech have released a new multimedia mobile phone, called the Pantech IM-U100. According to Pantech, the new Korean phone is designed to provide users with a “world class Portable Multimedia Player (PMP) phone, incorporating MP3 player, camera and movie functions.” So what makes it world class, when every other phone out there offers similar features? Screen size, that’s what. The IM-U100 boasts a 2.6 inch wide TFT screen, with an aspect ratio of 15:9 (normal phones have an aspect ratio of 4:3).
Pantech are pitching the phone firmly at the PMP market, and its features clearly reflect that. Better still, although only available in Korea at the moment, Pantech man Ji-Bong Ryoo has said “We are confident that users in Korea and, eventually, overseas will appreciate the world class PMP functionality of the new IM-U100”. So for a change, this new Korean phone will find its way outside of Korea - hurrah for Pantech!
Posted on Thursday, January 26th, 2006 at 1:46 am by Mike Evans
Filed under
Articles,
Prototypes
If you thought BenQ were a lower-tier mobile phone manufacturer, these new BenQ concept phones show they’ve got big ideas. And fresh from merging with Siemens’ mobile phone business, the plucky Taiwanese phone company now also has the facilities to actually implement them, too. In fact, according to BenQ man Adrian Chang, they plan to follow the Sony Ericsson route and rebrand as BenQ-Siemens for the next few years, emphasizing “a kind of German heritage in terms of engineering strength.” Better still, through their Siemens partnership, 60% of their mobile phone revenue comes from Europe, so they’ll definitely be rolling out their new releases world-wide, rather than locking them up in the Asia-Pacific markets.
Hitachi have released the new Hitachi W41H mobile TV phone. This tasty piece of mobile mentalism (forgive the pun!) is, as you can see, a mobile TV phone. Better yet, you can watch nearly four hours of TV on its 2.7 inch screen, and even record 30 minutes’ worth for later viewing. Music’s catered for with a built-in MP3 player, as well as support for Japanese network operator au’s LISMO service (a mobile iTunes-type service). Naturally, it’s a cameraphone too, and being Japanese, it sports a nifty 2 megapixel camera. Best of all, though, is the twisty form factor. It may look like an oversized candy-bar, but read on to see the shapes the
Hitachi W41H mobile TV phone can pull.
[Source: Gizmodo, PhoneyWorld]
Posted on Wednesday, January 25th, 2006 at 9:46 pm by Mike Evans
Filed under
News
A mobile phone made completely from soap? Not even the mighty Samsung can offer that!
And nor, it would seem, can the two con artists in India, who, for four months, sold mobile phones that were in fact bars of soap sculpted to look like mobiles. The mobile soap phones came in the original boxes, thus adding to the illusion. When confronted by the police in Mumbai, the pair ran off, but were unable to make a clean getaway (oh god, did I just write that?!)
This is the soon-to-be-announced Samsung SCH-B500 camera TV phone. Yes that’s right: not digital camera, but a camera TV phone. All 7.7 megapixels of it. This stunning piece of technological gadgetry knocks most digital cameras out of the water, let alone cameraphones. What’s even more impressive is its range of other features. You want mobile TV on your gigantic cameraphone? You got it. MP3 player and TV-Out? Why not. Super huge screen for watching mobile TV? Oh go on then! This leviathan of a phone is simply staggering, and lays down the technology gauntlet to all other mobile phone manufacturers. Is says quite simply (but also quite loudly): “call that a cameraphone?”
Samsung have announced the launch of their new SCH-B330 mobile TV phone. They originally announced the new mobile phone just before Christmas, together with two other mobile TV phones, the
Samsung SCH-B300 and SCH-B360. It was the B300 that got all the press at the time, though, because of its interesting ‘crossbar’ design.
However, the new B330 has the better specs:
- CDMA2000
- 3MP camera
- video recording
- DMB TV reception
- TV-output
- TFT LCD display (QVGA)
- landscape view
- MP3 audio playback
- EV-DO
- Bluetooth
- IrDA
- PictBridge wireless printing
- microSD memory card storage.
Unfortunately, it’s a new Korean phone only, and is unlikely to be released outside of Korea any time soon (damn!). It’ll cost the equivalent of $700 or so - or about $300 less than my S700i cost (without contract) in the UK a year ago. Gotta love progress!
Mobile phones have longed to be full members of the Internet ever since the advent of WAP. As the computing horsepower, memory, display capabilities and browser software of mobile phones has improved, so has the browsing experience for users. But mobile phones have always been web clients: that is, the mobile user always requests information from the Internet. You can never serve it directly form your mobile phone.
All that’s about to change, though, as Nokia’s latest research project has developed a full fledged web server for a mobile phone. Not just any web server, either: they’ve ported Apache, the web’s most popular web server, onto their Series 60 phones. They’ve also implemented a custom gateway to circumvent operators’ firewalls, so anyone across the web can access the phone’s web content as if it were a traditional web server.
Geeks amongst you will be hanging your tongues out with drooling anticipation. Read on to see what exactly you can do with a
web server on a mobile phone.
As mobile phone cameras become increasingly sophisticated, the images you store on them will soon start to challenge the quality of stand-alone digital cameras. Samsung already have an 8 megapixel camera for the Korean market, NTT have auto-stabilization software for their Japanese phones, and even Europeans can expect 3 megapixels this year with the new Nokias and Sony Ericssons (not sure about you guys in the US, as your phones seem to be dependent on a mobile operator picking them up). But what do you do with these super-sharp new images? Keep them in your mobile phone, displaying them on a tiny 2.4 inch QVGA screen? Is that any way to treat an 8 megapixel image!? The people behind the
Project-a-Phone clearly think not.
They want you to strap your innocent mobile phone into the Project-a-Phone Borg-assimilating torture frame, connect the frame to your PC, and you too can
carry out gruesome mobile phone torture experiments project your phone’s display onto your PC monitor. Readers across Europe familiar with
The Carphone Warehouse’s (and their affilliates’) cute Mowbli character (left), just picture him here, sat in this contraption. Resistance is indeed futile!
You may have been impressed with
Motorola’s ROKR E2 mobile music phone and iRadio music service when both were announced at
CES 2006 earlier this month. But you wouldn’t have been if you live in Japan. This, you see, is the Japanese equivalent from Japanese phone operator AU. The service is called AU LISMO (”Listen Mobile Service”), and like iRadio and many similar offerings from network operators and mobile phone manufacturers alike, it lets you download music, either using PC software, or directly over the air.
The killer difference, though, lies with the features of the accompanying AU W41T mobile phone:
- 4GB of memory
- 3.23 megapixel camera
- 2.4 inch QVGA screen
- Bluetooth
- FM radio
- GPS
- CDMA-EVDO
Now compare these specs with
Motorola’s ROKR E2, and try to work out whether these new phones were announced two weeks apart or two
years apart! If you want to see the future of mobile phones, just look to the Asian markets. Japanese and Korean phones truly rock!
[Source: Akihabara News]
NTT have just launched the amazing new NTT N902i camera phone in Japan. It’s amazing, not because of the enormous megapixellage of the phone (leave that to Samsung, who are up to 8 megapixels and counting!), but the way in which it actively prevents shaken photo syndrome.
Anyone who’s ever used a camrea-phone knows how absolutely still you must be to avoid blurring the picture. What NTT’s N902i does it to take a series of photos in quick succession, and then produce a composite photo with all the blurriness computed out. The result, apparently, is an ultra-clear image. Expect to see this technology on many future camera phones, real soon.
