What better time for a Nokia N85 review than the day before its release? Yes, the latest all singing all dancing N-Series phone from the Finns is about to hit our shores (and our stores!), as the Nokia N85 is launching in the UK on Hallowe'en of all days (second only to April 1st in auspicious release dates!), so right in the nick of time, let's check it out and see what it offers.
In an intriguing article, long-time technology pundit Bob Cringely has made a compelling case for the death of Windows Mobile. He is, as he admits, no expert on mobile phones, but this counts in his favour as he has no bias towards one platform or another.
Analyzing the current mobile phone market and some of the announcements that have been made this year, he predicts that Apple's iPhone will become the dominant smartphone platform, Google's Android will be second, and Symbian and RIM fighting each other for third place. Windows Mobile, meanwhile, will simply wither on the vine and eventually be killed off by Microsoft.
I thought it was about time I did a Samsung Pixon review, as I missed the initial announcement of this monster 8 megapixel cameraphone, and the Pixon looks like it could become the most advanced camera phone on the market. As you'd expect from a top-end Samsung cameraphone, the Samsung Pixon has a huge range of features, some of them straight from a dedicated digital camera.
Samsung are serious about the Pixon. They see it as a genuine challenger to Sony Ericsson's CyberShot brand of camera phones, and so are using all their digital camera experience to create a new range of high end camera phones based on the Pixon brand.
But enough of the background. What about the phone? Read on for initial Samsung Pixon M8800 review.
When I first picked up my Samsung Tocco review unit, I was a little skeptical about it. The Tocco is a touchscreen phone, you see, and I couldn’t help but think that it was yet another touchscreen phone that was launched in response to the iPhone, but which didn’t actually work all that well.
A poorly implemented touchscreen phone is little short of a disaster. They’re so slow an inaccurate, they make the entire phone almost unusable.
Fortunately, my misgivings with the Tocco proved entirely unfounded. It’s a super-slim feature-packed touchscreen designer phone from Samsung that’s well put together and a lot of fun to use.
With the T-Mobile G1 Android phone just days away from launch (22nd October in the US, 30th October in the UK), opinions are already been expressed among the blogosphere.
Overall reviews seem to be favourable, particularly given the G1 is the first of the first generation of Android phones, but there are two key weaknesses that might effectively limit the G1's appeal: lack of video features, and, ironically, over-reliance on Google.
So should you buy a T-Mobile G1? Read on after the jump...
LG has officially announced its new LG Prada II designer phone. LG hopes the Prada II will build on the success of the original LG Prada phone, which was touted by many as an iPhone killer when it was first launched. In fact, as the first touchscreen phones to be released on the market, the original Prada looked so similar to the iPhone, that many people wondered if they were developed by the same team!
They weren't of course, and although the Prada sold over a million units, it never matched the success of the iPhone.
The LG Prada II, in contrast, is being released into a world that's nopw grown accustomed to touchscreen phones, and so won't have the direct iPhone comparisons to struggle against. This has give LG the freedom to be a bit more experimental with its design.
Samsung have been showing off their new Samsung Style Report phone at this year's Korea Electronics Show (KES 2008). The oddly-named Style Report is a dual screen phone with a difference. Rather than having a full-sized internal screen and a smaller external one, the Style Report has two equally sized screens.
Samsung have done this as they've recognized that some of a phone's features work better on an external screen, while others are more suitable for the internal screen, but that both screens should be of equal size to get the most out of these features.
Samsung have announced the new Samsung W600, a new touchscreen mobile phone that uses new HSUPA technology that enables it to upload data at speeds of up to 5.76Mbps. HSUPA is part of the HSDPA family of protocols, but whereas HSDPA focuses on optimizing download speeds, HSUPA focuses more on upload speeds.
Obviously, downloading is seen as more of a priority than uploading, and so HSDPA phones have been around for over a year now, whereas HSUPA has seen little attention. The Samsung W600 changes all that, offering upload speeds faster than the majority of broadband connections.
The first Google Android phone, the T-Mobile G1, may be only days away from launch (October 30th for the UK), but in Japan, Yahoo! is making waves, at least as far as Sharp is concerned. What you see here is the new Sharp 9225H smartphone, which, as you can see, features a full QWERTY keyboard that snaps open in a similar way to the Nokia E90.
This gorgeous new concept phone design adds a new twist to the touchscreen craze that's been sweeping the mobile phone world ever since the launch of the iPhone last year. Touchscreens are great when using gestures to control your user interface, but one of the key problems is, well, the lack of keys when entering text.
Unless there's some kind of tactile feedback (such as that provided by Samsung's haptic touchscreen phones), it's difficult to determine whether you've selected a virtual key or not, thus slowing down text entry.
