Posts filed under News

Amid sighs of disapointment by mobile phone fans, Sony Ericsson’s senior marketing manager, Richard Dorman, has ruled out any PSP gaming phone or Bravia mobile TV phone for the UK, at least for the next twelve months.

“It is not a focus for us with the UK and western European market at the moment,” he said. “I’ve seen our road map for the next 12 months and neither of those two handsets will feature in it.”

However, this is not necessarily unexpected, and doesn’t rule out either of those phones for 2009. Read on to find out why…

After months of speculation, the news is out that O2 has won the rights to use the iPhone over its network in the UK – but at a hefty price. According to The Guardian, O2 will give Apple 40% of all revenue it makes from customers using the iPhone.

That’s 40% of all call charges, data charges and content downloads that would normally go straight into O2’s pocket. No wonder Vodafone walked away from the deal.

More details after the jump…

The S168 is a new Chinese phone that’s just been released with an innovative feature that renders it utterly useless for the UK – a solar panel charger! Fitting a solar panel to a phone is a great idea in theory, as it means your phone is pretty much constantly charged.

However, for this to happen, you do rather need sun once in a while, and so for us poor Brits, the phone would remain as resolutely depressed and unsunny as the rest of us!

[Source: JustAMP]

2007 has seen the emergence of a new breed of mobile phone – the Sat-Nav phone. The trend was begun in earnest by Nokia with the launch of their stunning Nokia N95 and the Nokia 6110 Navigator, and they’ve also state that all their future high end phones will have GPS Sat-Nav functionality built-in.

This, of course, is a huge threat to traditional Sat-Nav manufacturers, who naturally fear that the mobile phone will do to their market what it did to the low end digital camera market (i.e. destroy it!)

To counter this threat, both Tom Tom and Garmin are working on their own Sat-Nav mobile phones.

Last week, we had the glorious-looking, if slightly bonkers, Transformer phone. Today comes news of a new Chinese rocket phone, which, as you can see, is literally a phone in a rocket! The Shenzhou VII (or “God-Boat 7″, as Babel-fish unhelpfully translates it!) must be the least ergonomic mobile phone ever developed (if we exclude the huge brick-like things of the first generation 80’s phones), but it’s not completely devoid of features.

Surprisingly, it comes with a 2 megapixel camera, USB slot and MP3 player! Not really the type of phone you want to show off to your mates though!

More pics after the jump.

In a bid to turn around their ailing fortunes, Motorola execs have promised some “innovative” new phones that will be announced next month. Motorola, once the world’s number one mobile phone manufacturer, have now slipped to number behind Nokia and Samsung, with their market share sliding from 21.9 per cent a year ago to just 14.6 today.

Most of this can be attributed to the company’s reliance on just one product – the Motorola RAZR, which, despite being a phenomenally good-selling phone in its day, is now well past its prime, and its sales have slid drastically this past year as new models from its rivals have overtaken it both in terms of styling and features.

Kudos to Steve Jobs for realizing the negative PR that was being generated by Apple’s $200 price reduction of its iPhone. Reacting quickly to events, he’s announced he’s giving a $100 rebate to all existing iPhone owners.

It’s in the form of an Apple rebate rather than cash, but at least this should soften the blow of seeing your pricey new toy that you queued days to get suddenly dropping in price like a stone. You can always use the voucher on a shiny new Apple iPod Touch, which, let’s face it, is just an iPhone without the phone anyway!

When Apple announced it was reducing the price of the iPhone by $200, Nokia seized the opportunity to throw sand in its face by taking out a Google ad for the search term “iphone price drop”. As you can see from the pic, Nokia’s ad commiserates with the early adopters who shelled out $600 for the now $400 phone, and pushes their Mosh collaborative mobile media site as a way of salvaging their lost cash with free content.

Not to be outdone, Apple have fought back with their own Google ad, congratulating late adopters (see pic after the jump).

Strong rumours have emerged of the spec for the European iPhone. The US version, if you recall, looks fantastic, but the deal breaker is the lack of 3G. Now this might not be too much of a problem in the US, where 3G isn’t exactly ubiquitous, but in Europe, it’s a serious flaw, as we have smartphones that really are smart, as opposed to Motorola Qs.

Using a Web browser over a crawling GPRS or EDGE connection is not a pleasant experience, no matter how fancy the user interface.

All this might change for the European version, though, with rumours predicting a 16GB iPhone being released onto an unsuspecting public, with HSDPA connectivity.

More details after the jump.

LG have been outlining what they see as the new technologies that will shape the screens we use on our mobile phones.

Speaking at the 7th International Meeting on Information Display (IMID 2007), President and Chief Technology Officer Hee-Gook Lee stated that LED- and laser-based mobile projectors will be integrated into mobile phones by 2010, and will become established quickly.