Today is National Inventor’s Day, in honour of Thomas Edison, and Giz is going to celebrate it with some designs from the Work In Progress show by students at London’s Royal College of Art. There are no less than four concept radios in the show, including this one by Mikael Silvanto, which melds a slide rule with an iPod-esque analog radio. The other three, including one which uses QR codes to hook up graffiti artists with pirate radio stations, are below.
A new sand-grain-sized chip by Audience being demoed at MWC kills extraneous noise (better than current software-based suppression) so they can, even if it sounds like you’re skydiving at the time.
Basically, this speck of silicon wonderment chills in between the mic and the phone’s circuitry, where it maps sound as a 3-D matrix, scraping away up to 25 decibels of garbage, leaving just your deep baritones or whiny squeal. Besides letting your singing voice come through the way it was meant to be heard, dumping the excess baggage saves bandwidth, giving stingy-ass network providers a reason to push for this thing as well. [NYT]
In addition to the chipmaker ARM, everybody and their mother is showing off their own flavour of the first official prototype Google Android phones at MWC today: ARM, Texas Instruments, Marvell, Qualcomm, NEC and ST Microelectronics, to name a few. Definitely expect some first gropes of Android on real hardware later today—hopefully these are the droids we’re looking for. [Yahoo!/AP]
Arne from the::unwired got a glimpse of Samsung’s SGH-i200 smartphone on display at the Microsoft booth. Rumored to be unveiled today, it has 3G connectivity with Windows Mobile 6.0 Standard, and is supposedly aiming at the cheap-ish smartphone market by costing around $320. Nicely grabbed photo there, Arne. Expect more details soon. [the::unwired, Mobile review]
Behold the latest offering from Samsung and B&O: the 3G, dual-slider F400. Slide the front upwards and you get your keypad, slide it down and your B&O speakers heave into view. As well as the 2.2-inch QVGA display, there’s an RDS-enabled FM radio and MicroSD card slot. Price is expected to be around the 380€ mark, which is around 600 of your buckeroonies, when it launches in March. [Tech Digest]
The new G400 gets its “Dual-Touch Chic” surname thanks to a touchscreen on the inside and outside of its skinny metal frame. We do, however, wonder what what the hell it’s for—controlling its music-playing functions perhaps? Measuring in at 4.1 x 2.0 x 0.6 inches, this is Samsung’s first go at an all-metal flip-phone but, other than shiny looks and those “chic” touchscreens, it’s pretty similar to other top-of-the-line Samsung cells. The G400 has a 5-megapixel autofocus camera, 2.2-inch inner display, RDS FM radio, 100MB of memory and expansion via microSD. Available in April/May for around $490. [Mobile review]
Mobile Review is reporting that Samsung has as many as 17 new mobiles to drop at MWC 2008, including the G810. We’ll bring you the best and most interesting here on the Giz.
Dear Readers, Well, two out of three ain’t bad, I guess. I was meant to be joining Blam and the guy in the red hat, Captain Zissou oh yeah, Jesus, I think his name is, for a couple of days in Barcelona, but I have been struck down by a nasty, virulent, ectoplasm-producing cold, so I’m staying home. Never mind, while they go out and fondle sexy new phones in Spain’s second city and keep you informed about the hottest mobiles and smartphones on offer this year, I shall see if I can break the world record for continuous sneezing. UPDATE: Oh, and to anyone who is speculating that J will play fast and loose with booth babes, I can categorically say that it won’t happen—unless the booths are furnished with chicks who look like this.
The N96 is pretty similar to the Symbian 60-powered N95 we’ve all come to recognize as Nokia’s 5MP GPS finest, but with 16GB of internal memory and a 2.8-inch screen. This model also has a built-in DVB-H receiver for digital TV signals in Europe and Asia, and a kickstand for desktop viewing. Also new are the backlit touchbuttons on the face, dialpad and top slider section of the phone. When playing media, they show the typical play/pause/ff/rr functions; when gaming on the N-Gage gaming platform, they show control pad buttons. Approx $900.
