Touchscreen Mobile Phone Watch

Touchscreen gadgets are certainly becoming more common, and we have the iPhone to thank for that, the latest offering from the guys over at Chinavasion is a Touchscreen Mobile Phone Watch.



This tri-band mobile phone watch features a built in touchscreen as well as a full numeric keypad.



It also has built in Bluetooth, and a Mic, and will work with GSM 900 / 1800 / 1900 networks, as well as that there is a built in camera, which can take photos and video.



Here’s the specs.

Main function: Digital Cell Phone Watch

    * Additional functions: Portable Media Player
    * Display: 1.4 inch polarized TFT LCD Touchscreen, 160 x 128 pixels with 65K colors
    * Memory: 512MB TF/microSD Card included (expandable to 2GB)
    * Color: Black band and face
    * GSM Compatibility: Tri-band 900 / 1800 / 1900
    * GPRS Support: YES
    * Bluetooth: YES - version 1.2
    * Bluetooth Profiles: A2DP, AVRCP, Handsfree, Headset, SPP, DUN, OPP, FTP, SAP, FAX, HID
    * Trans-Flash Card Slot: YES - 1
    * SIM Card Slot: YES - 1
    * Call Settings: call waiting, call divert, call barring (if supported by your network carrier)
    * Built-In MIC: YES
    * Messaging: SMS, MMS, Voicemail
    * Mobile internet: Yes - WAP (if supported by your network carrier)
    * Languages: English, Russian, French, Arabic, Thai, Turkish, Malaysian, Indonesian, Vietnamese
    * System: Windows 98SE / ME / 2000 / XP / Vista, Mac OS 9.x and later, Linux 2.4 and up
    * Power Source: Built in Rechargeable Li-ion Battery
    * Battery Life:
    * - Talk Time: Up to 2.5 hours
    * - Stand By: Up to 150 hours
    * Dimensions: Watch Face Only - 47mm x 60mm x 21mm (L x W x D); Strap - Adjustable one-size-fits-all

The Touchscreen Mobile Phone Watch is available to buy online from Chinavasion, although there are no pricing details available at the moment.

izvor

Compatibility: Touchscreen UI and S60 3rd Ed Applications?

17 October 2008

Nokia 5800 - S60 5th Ed
Full Backward Compatibility!?

S60 5th Edition, recently introduced by Nokia, brings new benefits to users and developers, including a touch-screen UI. The new platform is based on Symbian OS v9.4, which includes enhancements to offer faster boot-up and application starts and reduce the likelihood of the annoying out-of-memory problems known from the 3rd edition phones, Nokia N95-1 especially.

S60 5th Edition also adds support for a new Widescreen 640 x 360 nHD displays to deliver a touch-screen capability with full support for tactile feedback using the device's vibrate function.

The touch capability uses a select-activate paradigm and offers gesture features such as tap, touch, drag, and stroke that can be used for tasks like panning within an image.

To support touch interaction, S60 5th Edition supports wide range of input methods, various different on-screen keyboards and handwriting recognition. Also, for the first time, the platform includes a framework for the use of advanced sensor technology.

The sensor framework in S60 5th Edition provides easy integration for wide range of sensors into vendor's devices, and enables them and developers to take advantage of sensor data to create new exiting and intuitive applications and features!

However, the most importantly, Nokia’s S60 dev team have managed to increases the UI speed and implement all mentioned improvements without code break and loosing the backward compatibility which is exceptionally important for an average end user of the S60 platform.

So if you are curious how touch UI devices impacts the old S60 applications optimized for lower resolutions screens there is a nice video, it’s mobile review video in Russian but I tweak it a little bit
Nokia 5800 - S60 5th Ed - Backward compatibility



In addition, to provide a level of compatibility for existing applications, Nokia has implemented an on-screen keypad which allows users to use existing applications and games especially designed for keypad interactions. Handy on-screen keypad smoothes transition to touch-driven UI design and allows user to create key events pressing the navigation/select buttons on touch screen. User can also remove the keypad from application's settings via Control Panel.

By keeping the familiar UI environment and keeping the backward compatibility migrating from the non-touch S60 phones to 5th edition will be easy and seamless for millions S60 users! The early adopters should be comfortable with adaptation and will find it easy to learn the new features in the 5th edition of the S60 UI!

That's all for now, hopefully I'll manage to get Tube soon and than I'll be able to give you more info and answer to all of your questions regariding the first S60 touch device and 5th edition of the S60 platform.


Izvor: Symbian-Freak

Esoteric Friday: Mobile Phone Art

It’s odd what you find on the InterWeb - especially since the juggernaut “Web 2.0 mashup” (whatever that is) hit us, we’ve been inundated with images and vids of anything and EVERYTHING.

On the “kewl” front, check out these examples of Mobile Phone Art - dialaphone has the full list of 12 pieces, but I’m only listing a couple below to whet your appetite. For the full selection go here.

7. New Work by Rob Pettit.


Mobile Phone Art by Rob Pettit

This artist is one of the most well-known cell phone sculptural artists in history. He has created numerous spiral sculptures using recycled mobile phones and continues to elaborate on his original designs with new works of art.

8. Sand Art.


iPhone sand art created last summer by an innovative artist on the beach of North Carolina

Some of the most amazing art in the world are the sculptures and castles made of sand that are constructed so carefully but last for such a short period of time. This one is of the infamous iPhone. This one was created last summer by an innovative artist on the beach of North Carolina.

I highly recommend checking out both the dialaphone website, and Rob Pettit’s site!

izvor

LG KP500 pet-named LG Cookie, priced

For those of you looking into getting your first touchscreen handset, the LG KP500 would be a good bet. It hasn’t been officially announced by LG, but word on the street is that it will be known as the LG Cookie once it’s finally released, and comes with a touchscreen among other interesting features.

There are a mere three buttons on its face, positioned below the 3-inch TFT touchscreen display, while around back there’s a 3-megapixel fixed focus camera to take care of your snaps. There’s supposedly no support for 3G networks on-board, but at least it gets EDGE on top of being quadband GSM.



Other features of the LG Cookie include:

Built-in accelerometer with auto-screen rotate for images, videos and documents
Landscape virtual QWERTY keyboard
Support for widgets
11.9mm thick
Records QVGA video at 12 FPS while playback is up to 24 FPS

You can see more of the LG KP500’s featureslg, on one of our earlier reports. As for its price, it’s rumored to be somewhere around 170 Euro, before taxes and subsidies. In that case, it should be one of the most affordable touchscreen handsets out there, and no doubt a lot of people are going to spring for it at the first chance they get. Once it gets released on its still unknown release date, that is.

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OLED-equipped Samsung I7110 gets official

Announced first for Russia and then the rest of the world, Samsung have launched the I7110, with an OLED screen, similar to that in the Nokia N85, but is in a candy bar form factor and with familiar 5mp/GPS/Wi-Fi specs. More details below.



Samsung Electronics today announced the I7110, the latest Samsung smartphone based on S60 and Symbian OS. It will be showcased for the first time at the Symbian Smartphone Show tomorrow in London.

The Samsung I7110 is a candybar type smartphone at only 12.9mm thickness, with specs:

 

    * Symbian OS v9.3
    * S60 3rd Edition, Feature Pack 2
    * 2.6” AMOLED (Active Matrix Organic Light Emitting Diode) screen
    * GPS, plus photo geo-tagging
    * Pedestrian navigator software, available in 10 cities in Western Europe including Amsterdam, Barcelona, Berlin, Helsinki, London, Madrid, Milan, Munich, Paris, and Rome.
    * FM transmitter
    * 5 megapixel camera featuring auto focus and LED flash
    * Video playback supports multi-codec formats including DivX
    * 50MB of internal memory and a SDHC-supported micro SD slot
    * 1200 mAh
    * Wi-Fi
    * 8-way optical mouse (as on the i8510)

 

The Samsung I7110 will be available in Russia from November 2008 and will soon be introduced in other markets.

izvor

8MP shootout: LG KC910 Renoir vs. the Samsung Pixon M8800



Want an 8MP shooter but cant decide which one?  With four sweet phones currently filling this category we feel your pain. The folks over at “Mobile@Mail.Ru” also understand your dilemma and have done a very detailed comparison of two of the latest 8MP phones, the LG Renoir and the Samsung Pixon . Besides the awesome 8MP capability which they have in common, what features differentiate these two camera phones and which one is the best for the shutterbugs among us? We will start off with the LG Renoir. The Renoir offers a Schneider-Kreuznach Lens and a Xenon flash which on paper (and in practice) outperforms the cheap plastic lens and dual LED flash of the Pixon. The Renoir also has an active autofocus which the reviewer deems superior to the Pixon’s passive autofocus. Mark that as two in the column for the LG Renoir. You can score a few for the Samsung Pixon as the reviewer notes that the speed of the Pixon camera is higher than the Renoir and the Pixon’s UI is easier to use. One caveat, the reviewer does not clarify (or our Russian is a little rusty and we missed it) what is meant by the “speed” of the camera; whether it is the time to first picture, the number of frames per second or the ISO. We will have to take his word for it that the “speed” is better on the Pixon.





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Ericsson and Intel team up for HSPA on MIDs

Intel’s got a new mobile device platform as a follow up to Atom in the works, called Moorestown, and it should be getting a boost from Ericsson’s HSPA data solutions once it launches some time between 2009 and 2010. Intel and Ericsson will go hand in hand in bringing HSPA mobile data to mobile Internet devices, or MIDs, according to an announcement made by Ericsson.

Also, aside from HSPA, Intel’s Moorestowm platform will also support a variety of other wireless technologies including Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, mobile TV, GPS, and WiMAX.



A report from DigiTimes reveals that the upcoming 3G modules involved in this project will be optimized for Moorestown power requirements, and measure 25×30×2.x mm. As for the Moorestown platform itself, it will feature a so-called system-on-a-chip called “Lincroft” with a 45nm processor, graphics core, video decoder and DDR 3-friendly memory controller.

izvor

A Look Back At Nokia History!

Nokia, the Finnish mobile telecommunications giant, is today known as the largest mobile phone manufacturers in the world.

Nokia is absolute world leader in mobility, with an impressing 40 percent global market share and huge global customer base that now numbers more than two billions of Nokia users!

Nokia Corporation is also recognized in the world today as the fifth most valued brand! Nokia plays a very large role in the economy of Finland, it is by far the largest Finnish company, accounting for about a third of the market capitalization of the Helsinki Stock Exchange.

Nokia has sites for research and development, manufacturing and sales in many continents throughout the world. As of March 2008, Nokia had R&D centers in 10 countries and employed 30,415 people in research and development, representing approximately 27% of Nokia’s total workforce. The Nokia Research Center, founded in 1986, is Nokia's industrial research unit of about 800 researchers, engineers and scientists!

Nokia's first century
1865- 1967

The history of Nokia goes back to 1865 with a truly humble beginning! From roots in paper, rubber, and cables, in just over 100 years Nokia becomes a powerful industrial conglomerate. What is known today as Nokia Corporations was established in 1865 when Fredrik Idestam built a wood pulp mill on the banks of the Tammerkoski rapids, in southern Finland. A few years later, he built a second mill by the Nokianvirta river!

That is where the company got the name that it still uses today. The name Nokia originated from the river which flowed through the town. The river itself, Nokianvirta, was named after the old Finnish word originally meaning a dark, furry animal that was locally known as the nokia, or sable, or later pine marten.

Between 1865 and 1967, the company would become a major industrial force; but it took a merger with a cable company and a rubber firm to set the new Nokia Corporation on the path to electronics.

At the beginning of the 20th century, Finnish Rubber Works began establishing its factories. This company acquired the Nokia Wood Mills and also acquired a company producing telegraph and telephone cables, the Finish Cable Works. The merging of these three companies in 1967 led to the creation of the Nokia Corporation.

The new company tried producing many products like papers, bicycle, car tires, personal computers, footwear, communication cables, electricity generation machineries, televisions, aluminium, capacitors, and a lot more.

The Journey into mobile communication equipment:
1968-1991

The newly formed Nokia Corporation was ideally positioned for a pioneering role in the early evolution of mobile communications. As European telecommunications markets were deregulated and mobile networks became global, Nokia led the way with some iconic products.

Nokia started producing military as well as commercial mobile radio communications technology in the 1960s. It was in 1964 when the company started to create VHF-radio with Salora Oy. The two companies started to develop mobile phones for the NMT network standard. In 1982, they introduced their first car phone called the Mobira Senator, which weighted 9.8 kg.

In the beginning of 1970, the telephone exchanges consisted of electro-mechanical analog switches. Soon Nokia successfully developed the digital switch (Nokia DX 200) thereby replacing the prior electro mechanical analog switch. The Nokia DX 200 was embedded with high-level computer language as well as Intel microprocessors which in turn allowed computer-controlled telephone exchanges to be on the top and which is till date the basis for Nokia's network infrastructure.

In 1984, the merging with Salora Oy made the company to create its telecommunication branch named Nokia-Mobira Oy. In the same year, the company also launched the Mobira Talkman, the world's first transportable phone.

Nokia introduced one of the world's first handheld phones in 1987 and this was called Mobira Cityman 900. During those days, the Cityman is one of the most light-weight phones having only about 800 g. But its tag price is approximately 4,500 Euros. Although that was very expensive, Cityman was still considered a success.

Driving The Mobile Revolution:
1992-1999

In 1992, Nokia decided to focus on its telecommunications business. This was probably the most important strategic decision in its history. As adoption of the GSM standard grew, new CEO Jorma Ollila put Nokia at the head of the mobile telephone industry’s global boom – and made it the world leader before the end of the decade

In the same year, Nokia launched its first GSM handset, which is the Nokia 1011. It was in 1994 that the Nokia tune was launched. It was the Nokia 2100 that featured this famous classic phone tune.


The success of Nokia continued until the world's first satellite call was made in 1994 using a Nokia mobile phone. And in 1997, Nokia introduced a classic game highly associated with the company-Snake.

Finally, in 1998, Nokia mobile phones became the world's leader. After a year, the company moved to further innovation with its launching of the first WAP handset in the world, the Nokia 7110.

Nokia Now!
2000 -today

Nokia’s story continues with Nokia 6650, company’s first 3G mobile phone and the start of new era in mobile gaming with the first N-gage device in the 2003! In the year 2005 Nokia introduces the next generation of multimedia devices, the famous Nokia Nseries and sells its billionth phone in the same year, a Nokia 1100, somwhere in Nigeria!

The year 2006 is an important year, Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo becomes Nokia’s new President and CEO; Jorma Ollila becomes Chairman of Nokia’s board and Nokia and Siemens announced plans for Nokia Siemens Networks


Izvor

The New Nokia Email Service (Beta 3) - mobile email done right... and Free for now!      


Nokia has rolled out a new Beta mobile email service, enabling users to quickly and easily setup mobile email (a free service) on your mobile.   Simply register for the service online, enter your email account setup parameters, download... enjoy!

Beta3 brings with it wider support for devices, more localization options, better mailbox management, true synchronization, support for multiple email addresses and more. Additionally, we're told by Nokia that no more randomly re-appearing emails you’re sure you deleted. The beta stage of trialling Nokia Email Service is totally free and users will be notified when the free period ends!

Available for most E series devices and high-end N series units (like the N95, N82 etc...) Simply run through the email setup screens, enter your email account parameters (mail server, port, username etc...) you may need help from your ISP to get this if you aren't familiar with how to do this, then voilla... you're ready to receive your email while on the road... best of all it works and its free!

I ran this service (the initial Beta email) on the Nokia E71 while on a recent trip to Finland and it was a breeze and enabled me to easily stay in the know about what was happening at the office while I was away... see http://email.nokia.com
Note: as always, be aware of data charges if you are roaming or don't have all u can eat data plan!

Izvor

Motorola AURA swivels onto the scene

Motorola announced the AURA today, a throwback design to its V70 cell phone from many years ago. The unique swivel design of the Motorola AURA is facilitated by 130 precision ball bearings, with a central Swiss-made main bearing that offers a supposed smooth-as-butter swivel motion.

The Motorola AURA also features a 2 megapixel camera and 2GB of internal storage to store your photos in. The 1.5" diameter circular display is also an industry first, capable of displaying 16 million colors with 300 DPI resolution. Bluetooth 2.0 is on board, with A2DP support for stereo headsets, as well.

The Motorola AURA is set to be available in Q4 2008, though pricing details were not announced.

izvor