What kind of crazy tech industry do we have where companies make work for themselves at the same time as making customers unhappy? And you can bet that the mobile industry is the worst offender of all. Read on for a few experiences, thoughts and links.
Nokia has announced that its 'pioneering' UK Flagship Store on London's Regent Street has opened its doors to the public, today, 8th February 2008. Also mentioned is that another flagship store will open at Heathrow airport in March 2008. The full press release follows...
You'll remember James Burland from his Nokia Creative blog? He's also the guy behind the Nokia N95 User Group on Flickr and he picks the very best photos to highlight in the blog. Some of January's award winners are absolutely jaw-dropping and a good testament to what the N95's camera can do.
Ah yes, I always leap upon new official figures from Canalys - kind of like tuning into radio chart shows to find out which song is 'number 1'. 118 million smartphones were sold across the world in 2007, but who were the winners and losers? Read on to find out.
Stefan's got the scoop on this one: the Nokia N82 is being released in black - over in the USA, at least. If the shiny silver had been putting you off, then here's an option if you're in the States.
Fring, the free VoIP and chat tool, just added a file transfer function to its portfolio, reports Ricky. So far it's just Fring-to-Fring transfers, plus MSN, but we're sure the full range of Fring IM systems will also be opened up soon to file sending (e.g. Skype, which we often use at AAS to send files across our virtual office!).
Twango the media sharing / community site that Nokia acquired last year has now been Ovi-fied. Its been rebranded as Share on Ovi and has a new look and feel to go with the new name. There are also user experience improvements in navigating, sharing and searching for media on the site and a restructured back end to allow it to scale to millions of users. Read on for more.
A pre-release version of Nokia's new N-Gage gaming platform is now available for Nokia N81 users. N-Gage First Access lets N81 owners download the pre-release version of the N-Gage application (through which all N-Gage activity takes place) and try and buy select N-Gage games. Other N-Gage compatible devices will be added to the service in due course. Read on for more.
A video has appeared on YouTube offering a sneak preview from Motorola in regards to the Mobile World Congress. There are no specific details on devices, but the video does show various people lugging around a TV set and DVD player. Might this suggest another video focused phone from Moto, perhaps with an accomapnying video download or purchase service? Read on for more.
Mobil.cz is reporting that next week, at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Samsung will announce the G810, a new S60-powered phone. The rumoured G810 specifications are dimensions of 104x52x18mm, with a 2.6 inch QVGA screen, 5 megapixel camera with a 3x optical zoom, built in GPS, 150MB of internal memory and microSD card slot, GSM and UTMS (with HSDPA) cellular connectivity, Bluetooth 2.0, USB, and WiFi. These specifications would suggest it will look to compete with Nokia's high end Nseries devices such as the N95. Read on for more.
First shots of the proto hardware Google is using for the Android project are available at Gizmodo, and it looks remarkably like a Nokia E61 (or a Blackjack or Blackberry, depending where your loyalties lie). Given this will probably not be the final hardware, a functional design, with qwerty keyboard, was to be expected.
More good news for prospective Vodafone users, as they drop their 3GB/month data plan to £15 (reports SMS Text News). It's a long contract (18 or 24 months) but it does come with a USB 3G modem. No word if this will be available to existing users with data enabled handsets, but it's a sign that data pricing is definitely on its way to becoming a commodity, rather than a luxury, on people's monthly bills.
Always interesting to read good third party face-offs. Here, SMS Text News' Ben has been trialling both DataViz's RoadSync and Nokia's free Mail for Exchange for a staggering nine months. Here's his verdict, although personally the latter's price can't really be beaten(!)
OK, I give in. After numerous complaints about the video formats used in my Smartphones Show video podcast, I've reverted to plain old H.263-encoded MP4, which should mean that the show now plays again on everything from a lowly Nokia N70 to a Sony Ericsson P900 and upwards - so virtually everything. Show 52 is out today and includes my run down of the top S60 apps, plus reviews of the Palm Treo 500 and the Blackberry 8310. Here's the RSS feed, if you wanted to start grabbing the MP4s again...
