Posts filed under News

Mobile pones have increasingly taken on the appearance of Transformers over the years, with all manner of origami-like form factors performing all kinds of gymnastics in an effort to squeeze as much functionality into the device and still be usable.

Now Motorola (or at least a Motorola fan-boy anyway) have taken this to its logical conclusion and designer a mobile phone that really is a Transformer! Tying in with this year’s best movie (I’ve got simple tastes, what can I say?!), the Motorola Transformer phone looks like a standard Motorola E6, until you open it out and get – yup – a robot in disguise!

More pics of the Motorola Transformer phone after the jump.

At last, the new look MobileMentalism is finally ready, and is rendered here in all its glory. Of course, there’ll still be a few tweaks that are needed, but hopefully nothing too drastic.

The new design brings with it a few changes to help make finding some of the posts much easier. The first difference you’ll note is the new menu bar, which should make digging through the main categories much easier. The way the posts in the categories are displayed has also been improved.

Before, there was only ten posts per page rendered, but now that there’s over 1,000 posts in MobileMentalism, a better way was needed to help you, the reader, to find the post you want. As such, each category now lists 50 posts per page with just the post’s title being listed rather than title and excerpt.

There’s also a new footer, which again should help with navigating through the site.

Finally, I’m delighted to say that comments have now been switched on again, and not before time!

Normal posting will resume tomorrow, when we can get back to the fun of talking about what we love most – mobile phones! Just in time for Nokia’s new announcement, too.

You might have noticed this past week or so that MobileMentalism has been looking a bit, well…shabby! Believe me, it wasn’t intentional, and I won’t bore you with the details of the reasons behind the unexpected tweaking of the site, but it does mean that the look and feel is now well past its best.

So in the grand tradition of the perfectionist, there was only one thing for it…redesign the site from scratch! Regular readers should now understand why posting has been a bit slow lately, as I’ve been slaving away over the site redesign.

The plan is to get the new site up and running by next Tuesday (28th August), though this may slip slightly if Internet Explorer starts choking over CSS again. There’ll be a few new features to the site that I’ll announce when the new design is finally ready.

In the meantime, apologies for the inconvenience – but hey, it’s August, why are you reading a blog on mobile phones rather than lounging on a beach?!

Here’s an ugly-looking brute of a phone for those of you looking for a phone to replace your ageing Nokia N-Gage – the oddly named GIONEE S20 Game phone.

The GIONEE S20 is a slider phone that looks on first inspection more like a PSP than a phone – well, ok, maybe not that much like a PSP, but it certainly looks more like a handheld games console than a phone. When turned on its side, there’s a console-like D-Pad on the left, and A and B buttons on the right, given you no illusions as to the purpose of this ungainly beast. It’s only when you slide open the keypad that you think “oooh, maybe it really is a phone!”

More details and pics after the jump.

OK, bit of an offbeat story this, but it shows the level of devotion certain fan-boys will go to to show their love for their favourite gadget. Still, it looks better than Motorola’s attempt to integrate their mobile phones into a pair of Oakley sunglasses!

[Source: Techeblog]

South Korean mobile phone company SK Telecom have released a nifty new use for your mobile phone – use it to remotely control your vacuum cleaner! The vacuum cleaner in question is one of those nifty robotic ones that trundle around your home vacuuming while you sit on your arse watching the footie.

Not strictly a mobile phone article, but I just saw a TV ad from Orange offering a free laptop to people who sign up for their broadband package in a PC World store in the UK. There’s also massive savings on other, higher-specced laptops as well as the free offer.

This is a great offer for students who will be packing their bags to go to Uni in a few months’ time (don’t remind me, I have to teach the buggers!). Sign up for broadband at your parents’ address, get your dad to pay for it, then go to Uni with your free laptop, safe in the knowledge that you’ve got guaranteed broadband when you go home for the hols.

You can check out Orange’s offer at PCWorld’s site (and look, it’s not even an affiliate link…really, I’m too kind!)

Having announced that 270,000 iPhones were sold during its first 30 hours on sale, Apple have also announced when it will becoming to Europe. They aim to get it over her by Quarter 4 2007, which Engadget take to mean September 30th.

Although not specifying exactly which countries it will be launched in initially, Apple did state the “major” countries will get it by this date, with the rest following in early 2008. In the mobile phone world, the “major” countries of Europe are the UK, Germany and France, which are the biggest markets.

So, only two months to go before we get our hands on one. It’ll be interesting to see the thing in the flesh, finally.

[Source: Engadget]

Now that the iPhone has at last been launched, its success can be judged from its sales figures – and it’s not all good news. Despite the huge queues that developed in the rush to be the first with Apple’s new uber-phone, demand for the device has tailed off significantly since the hype died down.

According to figures from AT&T (currently the iPhone’s only carrier), 146,000 connections were made to new iPhone devices over the weekend that it was sold, which can be extrapolated to approximately 200,000 iPhones sold in its first weekend (not everyone who bought one could connect to the network, hence the discrepancy in the figures).

Although these seem like impressive numbers, analysts were expecting the iPhone to sell over 500,000 units in the same period. And there’s more bad news on the horizon…

Nokia have announced a software update for its GPS phones that improves the time it takes for the phone to lock onto the GPS satellites. The new service is called A-GPS (Assisted GPS), and fixes the biggest (and probably only) complaint with Nokia’s GPS phones. Although the phones have great mapping features, the time it takes to find the satellite and actually be usable as a Sat-Nav is quite slow, but all that’s changed now.

All new sat-nav phones will have the new service already installed, while owners of existing sat-nav phones (Noia 6110, N95 and the new E90 communicator) can upgrade their phone using Nokia’s Software Updater.