Proporta's range of mobile charger/battery packs has been perennially popular, every single winner on my Phones Show accessory giveaways has so far chosen the Proporta accessory. And with good reason. This, the latest in the line, is bigger and better in every way, with a whopping 5000mAh of charge ready to be transferred into any smartphones of your choice while out and about. Here's my illustrated review of the USB TurboCharger 5000.
EchoEcho is a new cross-platform "where are you?" application and service, using SMS as its communications medium, to ensure compatibility with most phones. Reviewing it seemed like a job for Ewan Spence and he dived into with glee. Although he reckons it's "an answer in search of a question", both of us reckon it has potential. Comments welcome, no matter if you think it's a slice of genius or a complete dud!
Ewan takes a look at 'a new Internet experience' on his smartphone, in this case Webwag Mobile, from the Nokia Ovi Store. A service aggregator, this experience may well be a new one, but the clunkiness of the user interface and poor use of the information entered means that it's not an experience anyone's likely to enjoy or come back to...
Here's a common scenario. You've acquired a spare battery for your smartphone, either by buying one on purpose or by inheriting one from another device. Yet, in order to charge each, you've got to power the device down and swap cells, effectively using the phone itself as the charger. If, like me, you juggle more than one phone and more than one battery for each, this can get very tiresome. Enter this latest mains battery charger from Mobile Fun, compatible with nearly every Nokia smartphone battery from the last few years and reviewed right here. Summary? It's a slam dunk.
Ewan Spence takes a look at Locago. A location based mapping application, built in Java. Locago overlays points of interest from sources like Wikipedia, Flickr, and Yahoo!, to help travellers find out more about their surroundings. Despite the quirky interface, Ewan recommends all travellers take a look and show it off to their friends.
A few weeks ago, David Gilson wrote up his thoughts on the N97 classic. While there was an awful lot to like about it, he found it to be undermined by an unstable OS, due to insufficient RAM & C: drive space. He was also curious to see if the N97 mini was really everything the N97 classic could have been, so he borrowed one and got to grips with it. What follows is a discussion of the differences between these two phones, and how each one lends itself to different usage scenarios. Hopefully this will help the with the venerable question "which should I buy?"
It's true that the accessory title rather gives the game away and isn't inspiring, but this is an accessory that's much needed in the smartphone (and general camera phone) world. Steve Litchfield muses on a predecessor and and reviews the latest product that claims to be able to hold your phone while it snaps or videos away.
On the road on his USA gaming and new media trip, Ewan's been power-trialling a couple of accessories. The word 'power' is important here because that's what the Proporta USB TurboCharger 3400 and Powertraveller powermonkey-eXplorer provide - stored power for your smartphone and other electronics. Here are Ewan's on-the-road experiences with the two gadgets.
Launched in the Ovi Store (as freeware) is 'Friends Birthday', a small app with a heart of gold - in that it will endear itself to you and you to your friends, as you seemingly remember (and do something about) all their birthdays. Using your Facebook information, Ewan has taken a look at Friends birthday below - it's well worth a download.
