newVideoPlayer("nokia6210_gizmodo.flv", 463, 387,"");
We tried the Nokia 6210 Navigator assisted GPS for pedestrians at Nokia’s World Mobile Congress booth today. The device itself feels very good and is extremely compact, but the best of all is that it really works great, using its built-in compass and accelerometers to know exactly where you are facing exactly, changing the orientation of the map in real time. You know, like Ultima Underworld, but with finnish blonde valkyries around instead of fugly monsters drooling around. Or better said, both.
newVideoPlayer("nokiatouchui.flv", 463, 280,"");When we first saw the Nokia Symbian Touch UI over the familiar S60/Symbian OS, we were stoked. Then we found out it was not a working proto but a rendering, and we wondered how far along they really were in their touchscreen UI. Turns out, not as far as we would like.
newVideoPlayer("androidhandson_gizmodo.flv", 463, 387,"");
We have been playing with the Android prototypes scattered through the Mobile World Congress here in Barcelona. ARM had theirs running on one of their lower-end processors. No fancy graphics demos, no iPhone-style multimedia fizzbang, just a humble ARM9 processor in a plain white prototype “to demonstrate the scalability of Android” and serve as a “development platform.” Our verdict: it works, it’s fluid, but it’s boring. Qualcomm’s Android prototype, however, is a real beast.
newVideoPlayer("xperiahands.flv", 464, 280,""); Playing with Xperia, Sony’s Windows Mobile phone with a hiptop QWERTY, revealed a few interesting things:
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]
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.
