Sony Ericsson Xperia superphones on their way

LG gives up on low end phones

Despite a relatively weak CES 2008 showing, LG has announced that it's giving up on the low end mobile phone market, leaving it entirely to Nokia and Samsung to slug it out.

LG will be focusing on the mid-range market instead (around the $300 mark), which, not coincidentally, is the price range of its phenomenally high-selling LG Shine and Chocolate phones. These phones have sold a whopping 5 million and 15 million units, respectively, so LG obviously knows which side its bread is buttered.

This could explain why LG's recent phones (with the exception of the LG Viewty) have all been pretty average. Mid-range phones tend to have mid-range features, making them good enough, but unlikely to set the world on fire.

Let's hope they also throw in a few high end phones as well, and not concentrate solely on the mid-range.
[Source: Korean Times]

New Sony Ericsson phones for 2008

Sony Ericsson had a strong 2007, selling over 100 million mobile phones, and both their sales and profits all up, despite a range of phones that were largely based either on music (the Walkman phones) or photos (the Cybershot phones). No all-in-wonder phones for Sony Ericsson - just phones that offer a limited feature set, but implement each feature exceptionally well.

So what can we expect for 2008? Time to get the crystal ball out again, as we round-up all the rumours surrounding Sony Ericsson's 2008 mobile phones.

CES 2008: Samsung shows off its new phones

Samsung were showing off a few new mobile phones at CES 2008 this year (and yes, I know this post is a bit late, but I've just moved house...give me a break!).

Among their offerings were a "truly innovative" music phone (the Samsung SGH-i450), a camera phone (the Samsung SGH-G800, which has actually been on sale in the UK for a few weeks now), a smartphone (Samsung SGH-i620) and a Sat-Nav smartphone (the Samsung SGH-i780).

More details and pics of these new Samsung phones after the jump.

Nokia “no longer just a device company”

Now here's some interesting news. In a fascinating interview with MobileToday, Nokia's UK MD Simon Ainslie has been talking about the company's long term strategy, and explaining its purchase of seemingly non-mobile phone related companies such as Navteq.

In the interview, Ainslie talks of Nokia becoming "a Web 2.0 company, and no longer just a device company," and effectively doing what Nintendo did with the video game market with the Wii: completely changing the rules of the game on its own terms.

More info after the jump.

CES 2008: iRiver shows off a prototype GPS phone

Everyone and his dog seems to be showing off GPS phones at CES this year. Now iRiver has jumped on the bandwagon by showing off a prototype of a new iRiver GPS phone that they expect to release by the end of 2008.

This will be the first mobile phone that iRiver have released, and they're an unexpected entrant in what must be the most competitive of all hi-tech markets. However, having had great success in the MP3 and Personal Media Player markets, they clearly know what they're doing, both from a technological perspective, and, just as importantly, a design and marketing perspective.

They've got a tough fight on their hands, but they should be able to build a niche for themselves.

More details of the iRiver GPS phone after the jump.

Nokia’s new emotional phone technology

Nokia is busily working on its next generation touchscreen interface designed to beat the iPhone (which, naturally, every other company is also trying to do!). Called, unsurprisingly, the Nokia S60 Touch, it's a brand new user interface that will be offered to any manufacturer using the Symbian S60 platform.

This is Nokia's approach to thwarting the iPhone hype machine: they're not just releasing their own phone with a similar user interface, they're releasing a user interface separate from the phone so that every other phone can look like an iPhone too. The idea is to make the iPhone's interface common to all phones, thereby reducing its impact, and removing its current unique selling point at a stroke.

Interestingly, this is also the approach being adopted by Microsoft with its forthcoming Windows Mobile 7 platform.

We've already seen a video of the new Nokia S60 Touch in action, but it seems that Nokia aren't content with just developing an iPhone clone - they're actually working on developing emotional phone technology.

More details and pics after the jump.

CES 2008: LG underwhelms with product lineup

Conspicuous by the lack of any substantial new coming from this year's CES were the two South Korean behemoths LG and Samsung. Actually, that's not quite true: both of these electronics giants were busy showing off hundreds of hi-tech products, with HDTVs in particular occupying pride of place in the line-ups.

As far as mobile phones were concerned, though, CES 2008 was a decidedly low-key affair, with LG in particular showing off a range of phones that were decidedly underwhelming.

More details after the jump.

The Microsoft Zune phone is dead, world shrugs

Well, it was never actually alive, really, more just speculation and rumour. Now Microsoft have gone all official and announced that they're not working on a Zune phone, nor do they intend on creating a phone that will challenge the iPhone.

Speaking in an interview with Germany's Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Bill Gates said: "No, we won't do that. In the so-called smart phone business we will concentrate solely on software with our Windows Mobile program."

"We have partnerships with a lot of device manufacturers from Samsung to Motorola and this variety brings us significantly more than if we would make our own mobile phone," he added.

More info after the jump.

CES 2008: World’s fastest GPS phone on show

It wasn't just the big 5 mobile phone makers who were showing off their wares at CES this year. Completely unheard of Much smaller companies were also showing off their technology. Companies such as dMedia, or as they're better known: "who?!"

OK, so you may not have heard of them, but what they had to show was pretty nifty: not just the world's fastest GPS phone, but the world's fastest GPS phone with dual screens!