RSS Feeds
|
BR DE ES FR IT JP NL UK US
Babblebaby
|
Defamer
|
Gizmodo
|
Kotaku
|
Lifehacker
The keyboard? It rocks. The screen? Beautiful. The trackball is just the right amount of gritty, so your finger sticks to it and doesn't slide off onto the keyboard.
After playing with a prototype of Intel's Convertible Classmate, it more or less confirmed what I had suspected: there are some neat ideas at play, but there's a reason why it's aimed at schools.
It's been a long time coming, but after dabbling with touch on the midrange 5800, Nokia has finally brought a touchscreen to an S60 "N-Series" smartphone, the N97. Take a look at our hands-on impressions and the complete rundown on Nokia's new flagship.
It didn't take long for Android's built-in WebKit browser (that performed well in our recent mobile browser Battlemodo) to see a little competion in the form of Opera Mini 4.2--the ubiquitous and lightweight software that's installable in some form on just about every mobile platform that can run Java apps. A beta version was released for Android today, and we put it through a quick test.
The new iPhone 2.2 is here and we've been playing with it all night and morning. Like Apple says in their documentation, the stability and performance seems to have improved, but the spotlight falls on the new and improved Maps application, which has been polished up thanks to its public transportation and walking directions, as well as the smooth, fast Street View, and many other interface details. There are a lot of unexpected new features--no, no cut and paste--and fixes as well, and we've tried them all here:
Posted by Nick Broughall at 3:30 PM on November 20, 2008
I've been playing with the Chumby Internode sent me to review for about an hour now and despite some early reservations, I'm now completely head over heels in love with the plush Wi-Fi widget.
It's like some kind of high-tech cake, with layer upon layer of fantastic widgets and clever implementations of simple Web 2.0 things like RSS feeds and social networking. After working through the simple setup process and waiting for a relatively quick firmware update, it was a process of discovering just what the Chumby can do. And while I've only scratched the surface in the short time I've been playing with it, my Chumby (affectionately named Chunk) has already become my new alarm clock, internet radio device and de facto Twitter feed reader.
There is a lack of local widgets at the moment - Internode's own offering is a bit disappointing, showcasing only Internode-specific news and their internet radio channels (but you can use Pandora, which is much more comprehensive in its versatility). I'm desperately hoping we can get a Giz AU widget available soon, although at the moment I'm just using the Chumby feed reader to do the job for me.
I'll have a more comprehensive review next week, but as it stands, I'm loving every inch of the Chumby so far...
Think of Newber as sort of a location-aware GrandCentral call directing service that lives on your iPhone and can forward calls automatically to whatever landline is closest to your location. Other features, like being able to swap phones in the middle of a conversation, making and receiving calls from a "Newber" number and automatically sending all incoming calls to voicemail are super neat, but it's missing a few features that the older and free-er GrandCentral service provides.
Samsung's Behold for T-Mobile—which we peeked a couple of days ago—just plunked down at our doorstep with its five-megapixel Korea-power camera and TouchWiz UI. Off the bat, really like the easy-open battery door. It's the least trouble my clumsy fingers have ever had popping off the back of a phone. Don't like that the microSD card is buried behind it though—isn't this supposed to be a real deal camera phone?
Only yesterday we learned of Olympus's entry to the mid-range DSLR game with the E-30 and now the camera's had its first hands-on over at DPReview. And it seems ok: the team liked the fact that it had many of the features of the pro E-3—like the 2.7-inch 230,000-pixel viewscreen and 1/8000th seconds shutter speed—while being a little smaller and having those "art filters" for real-time image manipulation. The pitch/roll correction system got a thumbs up too, as did its nine aspect ratio options. We'll have to wait for a bigger hands-on to get the full skinny, but it looks promising for now. [DPReview]
RIM excels at many things, but keeping secrets ain't one of 'em, so we'd eyeballed the BlackBerry Curve 8900 (nee Javelin) quite a bit before this AT&T-branded one dropped in our laps. It's a Bolder version of the current Curve that improves it in basically every way: Lighter, tighter, but more powerful—and it feels like a phone that was produced in 2008, not when you were still keeping your 2006 resolutions.
