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The Apple iPhone has finally been announced, and it emphatically marks a watershed in mobile phone design. In his keynote speech, Steve Jobs claimed the iPhone was 5 years ahead of all other mobile phones, and poured scorn on existing state of the art smartphones, such as the Motorola Q, RIM’s Blackberry and the Nokia E65.

And he’s right. The iPhone is like nothing on the market. But it’s still not going to worry Nokia – here’s why…

Happy New Year all! Yes, MobileMentalism is back after a glorious Christmas and New Year break. And back in style, too, with news that no other mobile phone site can give you. The latest CES2007 scoops? More new Sony Ericsson leaked phones? No, news on my Dad’s Christmas pressie!

If you thought 2006 saw some amazing new phones released, from 6.9mm super-thin devices to 10 megapixel mobile TV leviathans, just wait until you see what 2007 will bring! Using a combination of my trusty sources, technological intuition, and even a bit of speculating, I’ve compiled in-depth list of the ten hottest technologies that will be coming to mobile phones in 2007.

And these technologies aren’t just more of the same. Mobile phones have reached a technological tipping point, and the new features are services coming next year will change not just the phones themselves, but the way we use them and everything in our lives, from our household gadgets to the Internet.

Brace yourselves, then, for a look forward to the 10 hottest technologies coming to mobile phones in 2007:

• Part 1: Sony Ericsson
• Part 2: Nokia and Samsung
• Part 3: LG and Motorola
• Part 4: The Mobile Internet
• Part 5: Connectivity, Control and DLNA
• Part 6: Mobsharing and Location-aware services
• Part 7: Apple iPhone

(Note: if you want to see other predictions for 2007 in a wide variety of different topics, check out ProBlogger’s Reviews and Predictions project, which this post is taking part in).

My old man’s a dustman…actually, he’s not, but he used to be! Anyway, this year, I asked him what he wanted for Christmas, and he said “a new mobile phone”. Obviously, I’m the guy who knows what phone to get someone right? Well, you’d think, but with such a huge variety of phones on the market, some more details on exactly what type of phone he’d like really wouldn’t hurt!

So I asked him: “what type of phone are you looking for?” “A slider” he says. No more details were forthcoming!

So, with just this to go on, and a budget of about £120, it was my job to play Santa and get my Dad the phone he wants (even if he doesn’t know what type of phone he wants!)

See which phone I got my Dad for Christmas after the jump.

Mobile TV as a technology has been the buzz word of 2006, with most handset manufacturers introducing mobile TV phones of some form (with the exception of Sony Ericsson, although a Sony Ericsson Wega phone may be on its way for 2007).

Mobile phone operators across Europe are readying their networks for the provision of mobile TV, Virgin has released its ungainly looking Lobster mobile TV phone in the UK, the US market looks on eagerly, but will probably have to wait till 2010, while the Koreans are now probably watching holographic mobile TV!

But there’s one question that no-one’s asked yet – what will we all actually be watching? And will we bother with the traditional TV channels when we’ll have free access to a Mobile YouTube?

Camera phones have come on in leaps and bounds this year, evolving from the poor quality VGA resolution of two years ago to the 10 megapixel monsters of today. But which camera phone manufacturer’s phones consistently produce the best photos?

Of course, each manufacturer produces camera phones of different quality, and so some phones will be better than others. But each manufacturer tends to build its camera phones using a common set of technologies, and so some manufacturers will be consistently better than others. We check out the reviews across the web to determine whose cameraphones regularly come out on top – will it be Nokia, Sony Ericsson, LG, Samsung or Motorola?

Motorola is currently the number 2 mobile phone manufacturer – and how that title must hurt!

Despite record quarterly sales announced yesterday of $10.9 billion, and some 52 million handsets sold in the same period, it just can’t overtake Nokia.

That’s not to say it isn’t trying, though, as an interesting article in BusinessWeek shows.

Motorola are gunning for Nokia’s lofty perch – question is, have they got the necesary ammunition? Read on to find out more.

Nokia have taken to calling their latest N-Series mobile phones “multimedia computers”, and have reportedly forbidden their employees from using the word ‘phone’ at all.

Rather than just being a marketing gimmick though, it underlines how Nokia sees the future of its mobile phones (sorry, multimedia computers) developing.

Specifically, they see the mobile phone as the single gadget you’ll need for every form of communication, information and entertainment. They want the mobile phone (and more importantly, their mobile phones) to be your one and only access to the Internet, relegating the computer to a behind the scenes role that may only exist in servers in years to come.

After the latest Apple iPhone hype, Apple seems to have thrown everyone off guard with a new patent that focuses on a wireless iPod that could take on the carriers in the music download market. The patent discusses a “portable wireless device”, which would be used “…to identify a digital media item on an online media store and mark it for download. The digital media item may then be downloaded at a later time when the user is able to connect to the online media store with a transfer device, typically a personal computer.”

The UK’s home broadband market is being shaken up at the moment, with Carphone Warehouse (our leading mobile phone retailer) offering free broadband bundled with its TalkTalk landline phone service. Now, T-Mobile has waded in by threatening to replace the landline altogether – both for voice calls and broadband data services.