I’ve seen screenshots of a facelift version of Windows Mobile 6.5 before, which itself is a facelift version of an aging OS. Now, the Internet rumor mill strikes again and delivers screenshots of a newer version WinMo version – v6.5.3.
They actually show a UI that seem better suited for thumb operation, not just larger versions of the old controls.
Let’s face it, phones are getting big….over the last six months we’ve had the release of a series of touchscreen phones that have pushed the boundaries of the term ‘mobile’. Samsung have released the Omnia 2 and the Omnia HD, both of which sported 3.7” screens. Toshiba unleashed the TG01 with its massive 4.1” screen, Acer the NeoTouch with a 3.8” screen and lately HTC have topped them all with the HD2 and its massive 4.3” screen.
But I think soon we are going to reach a tipping point. Those 4.3” are probably the limit of what people are going to be willing to carry around all day. I mean, people are going to start looking a bit silly holding these huge slabs of plastic up to their ears.
So it was with interest that I read on Akihabara News about a new handset released in Japan by Fujitsu whose various parts – screen, QWERTY and alphanumeric keyboard, mini-projector – can all be detached from each other and used separately. The screen can be used by itself to watch TV or films, surf the internet or you can connect it up to the keyboard for gaming action or messaging.
Look what we have here, folks. The long awaited Nokia E72 landed in our office a few hours ago. It looks quite stylish and it walks and talks business. This is what the Nokia E71 should have been in the first place – perhaps the numerous E71 users will find some reason to upgrade.
Nokia E72
We’ve prepared a quick unboxing video for you just as a teaser of our upcoming review. The video itself is just after the break.
There are several good reasons why Wi-Fi 802.11n hasn’t made its way into mobile phones hardware just yet. Increased power consumption is just not worth it if the speed will be limited by other factors such as under-powered CPU or slow-memory anyway.
But when you have a 1GHz Snapdraggon CPU and 448 MB of RAM at your disposal the temptation to include it might just be too big to resist. And HTC obviously succumbed to it when designing the HD2 monster-of-a-handset. Unfortunately they disabled the feature via a software method.
They didn’t do a very good job of hiding it though and it was really a matter of time before someone enabled it. Read more »
Let’s face it, battery tests are long and tedious. They’re also quite hard to time correctly as mobile phone usage varies quite a lot. But that’s not the reason why over at GSMArena we rarely have something specific to say about battery life in our otherwise detailed reviews.
Enter time constraints. The thing is, we rarely have the test units at our disposal long enough to properly test the battery life without interfering with our reviewing routine. In those cases the reviewers try to evaluate the battery performance based on their subjective feeling and experience rather than anything else. Not that can’t be correct. And we don’t pretend it is.
With the HTC HD2 we are using a retail version (unlike all the many pre-production units that come our way) and we had the opportunity to take our time and test the battery life properly.
It’s now official, folks. A few days ago a spokesman of Sony Ericsson confirmed the XPERIA X1 will not receive any official upgrade to Windows Mobile 6.5.
Well it was expected, as the X1 wasn’t included into the WinMo 6.5 upgrade list long before the release of the OS update. Still hope dies last.
Read more »
The LG BL40 New Chocolate is the latest fashionable GSM handset by LG. You may be interested to know that it’s got a beefier, meaner twin made exclusively for Korea. It comes in three falvors depending on the internal storage – LG LG KU6300, LU6300 and SU630.
The main difference between the worldwide BL40 and those siblings here is the 8 megapixel camera onboard. All characteristic traits of the New Chocolate are present in the trio – the unique design, the 4-inch capacitive 21:9 display, the 3D S-Class UI, DivX support plus Dolby Mobile and microSD slot. It’s still unclear whether the Korean New Chocolate will sport Wi-Fi and GPS or will trade them for the T-DMB tuner as usually happens.
Some of our readers have been recently noticing a worrying lack of Sony Ericsson Satio units throughout some major UK retailers. It became even more obvious when Carphone Warehouse removed all Satio offerings.
Today an anonymous tipster sent us an internal memo, which states that Carphone Warehouse are withdrawing the Satio due to some undisclosed software issues. You can see the memo text for yourselves.
I’ve been hearing those rumors lately that Apple have a cheaper 8GB version of the latest 3GS ready in the oven. The sources are nothing in particular, but they add up, you know – and they come from various places. Now there’s not anything specific about market availability, but we sure hope that there will be some of those in stores around our parts on time for Christmas.
Obviously, there are one too many things to consider here. For one, Christmas coincides with the 6-month cycle that Apple usually uses for lowering their current models pricing. Introducing a new lower-spec’d model of the same generation actually sounds credible when you look at it this way. But you can bet there’s more to it. Read more »
It’s finally here folks – the Nokia N900 in all its Maemo-powered shine finally arrived at the office. It is certainly one of the hottest names of the season and the hype generated by the new OS is huge. So now that we have the actual device on our hands we can see what this fuss is all about.
Nokia N900 at ours
Now we cannot tell you too much about the phone itself just yet but we can show you how it looks (and behaves). Judging a book by its cover is never a smart idea but starting off at the wrong foot is not what a new platform pioneer would like to do.
Handling the beast
Oh yeah, we almost forgot – there’s also a short demo video after the break, demonstrating a part of the Nokia N900 UI and performance.
Perhaps you’d be happy to hear that we have a little treat for you ready to be published tomorrow. After the successful HTC HD2 preview we did last week, we are now ready to push out the full-featured N900, oops… HTC HD2 review tomorrow. Sorry about that lapsus over there, my mind was off to a different thing altogether. Just forget I mentioned N900 up there, alright?
The HTC HD2 next to Apple’s iPhone
So anyway, I thought you guys (our avid blog readers) deserve a little taster of what’s coming, so here you go. Oblige yourself with a new HTC HD2 UI video. It will be up here at the blog exclusively – it’s the little things that count. We’re really impressed by how snappy this thing is. Check out the clip after the break and stay tuned for our full featured review tomorrow evening (CET).
The Sony Ericsson XPERIA X10 is one of the hottest names of the season and understandably none of its public appearances can go unnoticed. We just stumbled upon a new video demo of the handset, showing a much better side of it.
The XPERIA X10 unit that the guys over at Wayerless took for a spin has much improved performance compared to the one we saw at the official announcement event in London. It now looks more like a 1GHz CPU-powered device, and less like one that has a hamster running inside to power the whole thing. Check out the video after the break. It’s in Spanish but the handset does most of the talking you need anyway.
We all knew this was going to happen eventually but we are a bit surprised by that kind of speed. Only 5 months after the 720p videos started rolling on YouTube, here comes the 1080p support.
Obviously the rapid growth of Full HD devices available has sped up the upgrade process. So, starting next week, if you have a fast enough computer and a large enough monitor you can switch to 1080p for the best video streaming experience available online.
HTML5 might be gearing up hopes to dethrone Flash as the online streaming video technology of choice, but Flash is here to stay for a while longer, and is now even gaining ground on mobile devices. The Palm Pre is going to be one of the first devices to get the new Flash Player 10.1, which was announced in October.
Our audio quality test points out the iPhone 3GS as the contemporary audio quality reference. But that was until we had the chance to test a now elderly Nokia N91, which I accidentally sourced brand new from a local mobile shop. I came upon it by chance as part of a strange series of events that deserve their own blog post altogether. But I digress.
Ever since Day One, the Nokia N91 has been praised with impeccable reputation of the best sounding mobile phone ever produced (the majority of stand alone portable music players can hardly compete with it either). It has nothing to do with loudness (though boy, that thing IS loud!), but it’s the audio reproduction that draws audiophiles (and me as well).
I know, it’s too big a phone to lug around all day and it’s even not that likeable by today’s standards of thin profiles and touchscreens. But I still find it as attractive as I fancied it years ago on all those billboards and magazine ads. Heck, it doesn’t even have a QVGA resolution screen, but who cares about the screen. It’s the music soul that sets it apart.
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