Sony Ericsson have announced the new Sony Ericsson P1 smartphone, which has surprised the world, largely because we all thought it was going to be called the P700i! In a break with previous numbering formats, the P1 replaces the existing Sony Ericsson P900i and P990i smartphones, and offers much better features in a smartphone that's 25% smaller than a P990.
Read on for all the details and pictures of the new Sony Ericsson P1 smartphone.
Ericsson may be about to bid for Motorola in a giant mega-merger, according to rumours. Details are extremely sketchy, so this should be taken with a pinch of salt at the moment, but there's huge internal discord within Motorola at the moment, and its recent poor financial performance makes it a real target for its blood-thirsty competitors.
Sticking with the Nokia N95 for a moment, it seems Nokia have made a few tweaks to the phone's firmware. The majority of tweaks make the phone much more stable and faster to use, but one or two of the tweaks should be of real benefit, providing enhanced photos and sharper videos with less noise.
The new firmware is version 11.0.0.26, and details on what it offers and how to get it can be found after the jump.
Having recently released two mobile phones with built-in GPS receivers (the glorious Nokia N95 and cheaper Nokia 6110), Nokia have thrown down the gauntlet to Sat-Nav manufacturers by claiming that GPS will feature throughout its entire range in the not-too distant future.
Talking about GPS, Kai Oistamo, head of Nokia's Mobile Phones unit, said at a recent news conference "I believe it will quickly go through almost the whole of our portfolio."
According to Berg Insight, the Sat-Nav market is set to grow from 1 million units in 2005 to 12 million in 2009, and so it's no surprise that mobile phone manufacturers want a piece of the action.
With digital cameras already pervasive throughout all manufacturers' mobile phone portfolios, a new feature is needed to keep the mobile momentum going.
The LG Shine has been a huge success for the company since its release. Now LG have updated it a bit, giving it enhanced new features.
Rather than simply painting the thing a different colour, though, a la Motorola, LG have squeezed in HSDPA into the new Shine (called the LG-KU970), enabling it to transfer data at 3.5Mbps.
More details of the enhanced 3G LG Shine after the jump.
The PMN Mobile User Experience (MEX) conference is currently underway in London, and one of the themes of yesterday was Understanding Context, in which Christian Lindholm, apparently the 'godfather of mobile experience' according to PMN, for his pioneering interface work at Nokia and more recently Yahoo, talked about his vision for a new, contextually aware operating platform.
His central idea is that the environment, the user's community and their own behaviour could be translated into a form of 'contextual RSS' allowing the operating system to adapt the interface to suit particular conditions.
I like the idea of contextual RSS, but the central theme of his vision has inadvertently led to a rant! Read on for more...
Take one flashlight, one set of mobile phone innards, and gently blend the two together. The result? One flashlight with a built-in mobile phone...er! Quite why you'd want a mobile phone in your flashlight is anyone's guess, but Japanese phone company Willcom have obviously decided there's a gap in the market that their new PHS phone will occupy all to itself (can't really see any competitors in the flashlight/phone market rushing forward, can you?!). It even runs on two flashlight batteries - just like the real thing (gasp!).
Willcom have also announced the completely customizable (and gloriously-titled) Plamo-Phone, pics of which appear after the jump (with a Tamiya radio control car, no less)
