Articles tagged with: smartphones

Nokia announced the N97 smartphone earlier today at Nokia World 2008 in Barcelona. The N97 is a Symbian-powered smartpone with a similar sliding/tilting keyboard design as the HTC TyTN II , a 16:9 widescreen display and 32Gb of onboard storage.

We don't know much more about the N97 at the moment, but it's clear that the N97 is Nokia's answer to the Apple iPhone – and it pretty much renders the current N96 obsolete. Read more about the N97's specifications, price, a handful of photos and a video demo after the cut.

RIM has never had a problem selling BlackBerries to people more interested in the serious business of mobile messaging than messing around with multimedia, but times are changing. It’s no secret that the consumer-friendly iPhone is also starting to catch the eye of business users, which is perhaps why Apple’s share of the ever-expanding smartphone market recently surpassed RIM’s for the first time.

Not that RIM is taking this licking lying down, of course, and the BlackBerry Storm is its attempt to beat Apple at its own game. And it really means business. Not only is the Storm unashamedly influenced by the iPhone’s design, it even does away with the one thing that made the BlackBerry famous in the first place – the keyboard.

Good news everyone! Nearly two months after its long awaited announcement Nokia's touchscreen 5800 XpressMusic is finally here! Well, when we say "here", technically we mean "Russia, Spain, India, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Finland", but, hey, at least it's somewhere.

No doubt an eBay importer is hastilly buying up stock for those willing to shell out an arm and a leg to get one SIM-free before Christmas. For the rest of us, though, it's a waiting game until it gets launched in the UK - possibly on Orange .

We've spoken to Nokia this afternoon who are "getting back" to us on a UK release date - but we wouldn't hold our breath on any advance on the "early 2009" response we got last time due to those UK networks and their infernal"optimisation" and product testing. Still - a blogger can dream...

Click on for the full press release and any updates we get.

The T-Mobile G1 has the same capacitive touch-screen as the iPhone and BlackBerry Storm, but it’s lack of multi-touch features is keenly felt. Zooming in and out of a web page is particularly painful, since it involves repeated taps on two zoom buttons, but they only appear after tapping the screen to begin with.

Google Android (the operating system used on the G1) developer Ryan Gardner clearly feels similarly dissatisfied with the arrangement, but rather than just moan about it on a web site, he’s done something about it – and here’s a YouTube video that shows the result of all his hard work.

Typical – you wait months for one long-anticipated smartphone, and then two turn up at once. We’ve just seen the Sony Ericsson Xperia X1 and now here’s the RIM BlackBerry Storm.

After all the speculation about what form RIM’s answer to the iPhone might take, it’s good to actually see the Storm in the flesh – or at least plastic and brushed aluminium. The good news is that despite dropping the keyboard in favour of a huge capacitive touch-screen, the Storm works as well as any other BlackBerry smartphone – as our hands-on video shows.

We’ve had to wait a while for the Sony Ericsson Xperia X1 – despite being announced way back in February, this Windows Mobile 6.1 smartphone only recently went on sale. And then promptly sold out.

We’ve finally managed to get our hands on one though, so if you were holding off your next smartphone purchase until you could learn more about eh Xperia X1, this is what you’ve been waiting for. Or not, as you’ll see from our hands-on video…

We just synched one of our office iPhones and got the above message, which says it all – the 2.2 firmware update has arrived. Does it have cut and paste? Of course not. But Apple has added plenty of new stuff, some of which is very good indeed.

The biggest new additions are the inclusion of Street View to the Google Maps application and the ability to download podcasts wirelessly (we think there’s a 10MB limit on this, but we have had time to check yet).

We’re still working through the new update to find out all we can about it but for a bit more on what we know already, click after the cut.

Given the runaway success of the iPhone with consumers and the entrenched position of both Windows Mobile and the BlackBerry with business users, you might wonder why anyone would want to launch another new smartphone platform. Of course Google isn’t just anyone, but there were still some doubtful mutterings when it announced its open source Android operating system and the Open Handset Alliance (OHA) in November 2007.

Well, one year later and the first ‘Googlephone’ is here and although there are a number of handset manufacturers and mobile operators in the OHA, the first Android-powered device to go on sale is from T-Mobile. Here’s our review.

It may have been on sale since the end of October, but a “limited supply of review units” (always an interesting concept when applied to a mass-market consumer product that’s launched worldwide) has meant that we’ve had to wait a few weeks to get a T-Mobile G1 for review. Still, it’s here now, so in the time-honoured tradition, here’s a first-impressions video prior to our full review.

Smartphones are nudging ever closer to that 1GHz threshold predicted by Ericsson for the handsets if 2012. Doing it's bit to reach that target, Asus has just announced the world's current fastest "business" smartphone, the P565.

Powering the phone is an 800MHz processor that Asus claims offers, "graphics and system performance beyond anything else on the market at present." By way of raw comparison, the iPhone has a 620MHz processor, while the HTC Touch HD is 528Mhz.