September 2005 – Page 2 – Digital-Lifestyles

Blackberry 8700 Details Emerge As RIM Announce Intel Deal

Blackberry 8700 Details Emerge As RIM Announce Intel Deal We’re still waiting for the official announcement, but Blackberry enthusiast site Pimstack has managed to unearth some photos and specs of the forthcoming Blackberry 8700.

Expected to be released around December/January, the matt-black and silver smartphone looks sure to appeal to blokes who like their technology beefy, manly and without a girly curve in sight.

Thinner and narrower than the 7200 series, the Darth Vader-esque case sports “high-end ornamental accents” (huh?) with a large 320 x 240 (1/4 VGA) colour LCD screen and a light sensor to automatically adjust brightness.

Below the screen is a full QWERTY keypad with dedicated Send & End Keys, a mute key and two User-Definable Keys.

Blackberry 8700 Details Emerge As RIM Announce Intel Deal Connectivity is taken care of via quadband GSM/GPRS/EDGE connectivity with onboard support for Bluetooth 2.0. There’s also a hands-free speaker phone built in.

Powering up the Blackberry is a 312 MHz processor, with 16MB RAM and 64MB ROM built in.

Research in Motion (RIM) are claiming that their updated OS will offer an improved user interface and better performance across the board, so users can look forward to nippier navigation, faster web browsing and speedier programs.

The new phone (codenamed Electron) will also provide contact-specific ring tones, better support for viewing attachments and Enhanced Power Point slide viewing.

Blackberry 8700 Details Emerge As RIM Announce Intel Deal RIM Announce Intel Partnership

Elsewhere, RIM have announced that they will be using Intel’s XScale PXA9xx mobile phone processors in upcoming BlackBerry devices.

The Intel processor, with the strange codename of “Hermon”, will run on Enhanced Data Rates for Global Evolution networks (EDGE).

This technology lets users connect to the Internet and send and receive data at broadband comparable speeds.

The chip is also expected to support video conferencing, which suggests that there’s 3G support going on.

RIM’s co-chief executive, Mike Lazaridis, commented that the next-generation BlackBerries would boast increased browser speeds and help the company push into new markets, while predicting that the new platform would also appeal to third-party application developers.

Research In Motion (RIM)
Pinstack

32 Billion (est.) SMS Messages For 2005 (News Release)

Continuing last month’s groundbreaking trend, a total of 87 million textmessages were sent on average per day throughout August. The handsetclearly proved to be a must have during the holiday season as figures onceagain topped 2.7 billion messages according to figures released today by theMobile Data Association (MDA). The continued increase in text messaging hasallowed the MDA to revise the annual forecast to 32 billion for 2005.

August saw two bumper days for text messaging as youngsters shared GCSE andA-level results, success and commiserations with friends and family. Atotal of 99 million text messages were sent on August 18th, the day thatGCSE results were issued. This figure is 25% higher than the 79 million textmessages recorded on the same day last year and continues the upward trendof communicating by text at this nail biting time. The figure for August25th, the day A-level results were released, was even higher with a total of99.5 million messages sent across the UK networks.

Mobile Data Association

BLINK: Bluetooth Simplicity From Broadcom?

Broadcom Launches BLINK Bluetooth Mobile to PC Software If you’ve ever spent hours shouting at the little blinking blue light on your laptop screaming, “what do you mean you can’t find my phone? IT’S THERE!!”, then you may find Broadcom’s new BLINK Bluetooth software (Bluetooth-Link = BLINK, getit?) bringing your blood pressure down.

Claiming to “radically simplify Bluetooth connectivity between cell phones and PCs”, the software is the result of a collaboration between Broadcom and BVRP Software International (now Avanquest Software), and has already adopted by networking retailers such as Anycom and IO GEAR, as well as a ton of Bluetooth dongle manufacturers.

Although Bluetooth-enabled phones continue to grow in popularity, many people are put off using the functionality because of problems getting some devices to talk to each other.

Broadcom Launches BLINK Bluetooth Mobile to PC Software BLINK software claims to soothe the troubled brows of baffled Bluetooth uses with an intuitive graphical user interface (GUI) that makes complex Bluetooth-related tasks “as simple as browsing the Internet.”

“This software simplifies the use of Bluetooth technology to such an extent that we anticipate ‘BLINK’ to become synonymous with Bluetooth when connecting phones and PCs using products based on our technology,” said Scott Bibaud, Senior Director of Marketing for Broadcom’s Bluetooth products.

Beaming with confidence, Scott continued, “Once users discover the convenience of ‘BLINKing’ files and data between their phones and PCs, the true power of Bluetooth will become clearer to the millions of consumers that already have the technology built into their phones.”

Broadcom Launches BLINK Bluetooth Mobile to PC Software Once fired up, the BLINK software serves up a graphical representation of the user’s mobile phone on their desktop or notebook PC screens.

Once connected, users can operate all the main phone functions directly from the computer, and drag and drop items from their PCs directly to their cell phones.

Via the BLINK interface, users can update and synchronise phone numbers, contact information and calendars as well as transfer pictures, music and data.

The Internet can also be accessed on the desktop via any GPRS/EDGE/CDMA cellular data links and SMS messages can be sent and received.

Broadcom Launches BLINK Bluetooth Mobile to PC Software “Digital photos, phone numbers and calendar appointments are literally trapped inside users’ cell phones because of the complexity involved in transferring this information to PCs and other devices,” said Brian O’Rourke, Senior Analyst at In-Stat.

“Broadcom’s leading work in Bluetooth software will not only lead to greater penetration of Bluetooth hardware in a number of applications, it will also make it easier to use for these advanced tasks,” he added.

Broadcom will be shoving a copy of the software into our grubby hands shortly so check back soon.

Broadcom

E-500 (EVOLT): Olympus Launches dSLR

Olympus Launch E-500 dSLR Competition at the lower end of the dSLR market looks set to heat up as Olympus launch their new Four Thirds System digital SLR, the E-500 (called the ‘Olympus EVOLT E-500’ in North America).

Although housed in a more traditional-looking SLR body, the new camera shares many of the same features of last year’s well received E-300, and is based around the same Kodak eight megapixel 4/3 size CCD.

It’s a fully specified beast, with Olympus introducing a range of improvements and new features including a new 49 area metering sensor (a 7×7 matrix), new high ISO noise filter, a whopping 21 preset scenes and a better control system.

There’s numerous white balance controls onboard (including WB by colour temperature and WB fine tuning) and old school OM4 users will be pleased to see the return of the two spot metering modes for highlight and shadow detail.

Olympus Launch E-500 dSLR Dominating the back of the camera is a large, 2.5″ HyperCrystal 215k LCD monitor offering a wide viewing angle.

Three colour modes are supported – Vivid, Natural and Muted – with users able to choose from two Colour Space Settings, sRGB or Adobe RGB.

Photographers fed up with speckly bits on their pictures will be glad to see Olympus including their unique Supersonic Wave Filter, a sensor cleaning widget which blasts out high frequency vibrations to dislodge internal dust or dirt.

We only wish our Nikon D70 came with one!

Olympus Launch E-500 dSLR Storage is taken care of by CompactFlash Type II and xD Picture card memory card slots, with the camera capable of taking up to 4 RAW/TIFF/SHQ images in a row at 2.5 frames/second; with shooting continuing until the memory card is full at HQ quality.

There’s a choice of three image formats available: RAW, TIFF, and JPEG, with the option to simultaneously record images in RAW and JPEG .

The camera looks great, the features and flexibility are at least as good – if not better – than the competition and, best of all, it’s coming with a killer price tag of just US$799 (~e665~£452) for the E-500 plus 14-45mm f3.5/5.6 Zuiko Digital Zoom Lens, or $899 (~e748~£509) for a dual lens kit with an additional 40 – 150mm f3.5/4.5 lens.

Olympus

Music Video Album Released On Mobile Memory Card By V2

V2 Announce Indie Mobile Music Video Album Virgin’s ‘independent-style’ record label, V2 Music has teamed up with mobile video solutions developer Rok Player to announce the release of an ‘indie music video album’ for playing on mobile phones.

The videos are stored on a memory card which simply plugs into compatible mobile handsets for full-screen play, so there’s no need to download or stream the content.

V2 Announce Indie Mobile Music Video Album Using Rok Player technology, indie kids can play back audio-visual content preloaded on memory cards at an impressive 24 frames a second (full screen) on compatible mobile handsets.

Rok Player-compatible mobile phones include the latest Nokia handsets such as the 6630 and the 6680 and the N-Gage series.

V2 Announce Indie Mobile Music Video Album “This is such an exciting development in the distribution of music videos” enthused Beth Appleton of V2 Music “as nearly everyone has, or will have, a compatible mobile phone and ROK Player turns those into portable DVD players. So now, for the first time, people can watch as well as listen to their favourite artists perform”.

The video album includes music videos from Brendon Benson, Ron Sexsmith, Bloc Party, Stereophonics, At the Drive In, Charlie Mars, Cut Copy, Dogs Die in Hot Cars, Mercury Rev, Paul Weller, The Cribs, The Rakes and The Datsuns.

V2 Announce Indie Mobile Music Video Album Bruce Renny of ROK , commented, “We’re already seeing tremendous interest in our music video albums for mobile phones, and to be able to include this new title in our portfolio is tremendous. We’re expecting the V2 album to prove very popular indeed because of the high quality of the artists it features”.

Although we’re equally impressed with the line up, £16 ($28.5, €23.5) for 13 tracks sure seems a lot of dosh to shell out to squint at a compilation album on a tiny screen. Is this the price teenage cool these days?

ROK Player

Nokia and CHT Organize 1st Mobile Film Festival in Asia Pacific (News Release)

Nokia is working hand in hand with Chunghwa Telecom (CHT), the leading operator in Taiwan to organize the first Mobile Film Festival in Asia Pacific from September 27th to November 9th. During the festival, Taiwan’s first-ever contest for creative self-directed mobisodes will be held. Mobisodes are brief videos specifically designed to be watched on a mobile phone.

The Mobile Film Festival will feature ten newly directed films, including Confession at the Front Line by Chun-Chien Lien, BOY-9-7-6-5-2-0-GIRL by Hung-I Chen, A Traveler’s Odyssey by Po-Liang Lin, Sleepwalking by Mo!relax Team, Ji-shiang Chen, Hong-Bin Chen’s G man, and another five remarkable films by talented college students like De Flower by Chia-Jen Chen. The concept for the mobisodes is based on how a ‘phone’ is interpreted by the individual directors, inspiring new thinking and novelty. During the festival, 3G subscribers in Taiwan can view the mobisodes at a promotional rate.

Mobile communications is being transformed from voice to multimedia comprising messaging, Internet access, video and film. These changes are redefining people’s lifestyle and are opening up new frontiers also in film making.

The ten directors featured at the festival will discuss how the mobile phone, acting as the next-generation media, will impact the creative sector, general audiences, and movie industry. Directors may leverage the varying screen size and viewing direction to create mobisodes, photography, and visual arts. A new set of rules can apply to the acting, subtitles, soundtrack and dialog, expanding the creativity space. Some directors suggest short mobile films will become the trend, which will attract more creative talents to mobile cinematography.

Best of all, the public is free to choose when and where to view mobisodes. Mobisodes will revolutionize creativity and viewing habits to let mobile subscribers truly experience how “Life Goes Mobile”.

Taiwan entered the 3G multimedia era earlier this year, giving the region’s telecom industry the opportunity to offer rich and diversified services such as mobisodes. The local mobile market is eager to experience the many facets of 3G contents and applications.

“Nokia is promoting the ‘Life Goes Mobile’ concept with our state-of-the-art technology and products,” says Mike Wang, Regional General Manger, Networks, Nokia. “With the inauguration of our 3G based Mobile Services Development Center last week in Taiwan, Nokia has the platform to turn mobility life into a reality. We will team up with operators and partners to create innovative, value-added mobile content that dovetail with Taiwan’s consumers’ needs.”

Windows Based Palm Treo On The Way

Windows Based Palm Treo On The Way To the sound of a thousand wailing Palm Pilots, Palm has unveiled a version of the classic Treo smartphone running on Windows Mobile 5.0.

Possibly called the Treo 700w (or maybe the Treo 670 – details are scarce!), the new phone will initially only be available from Verizon Wireless, running on the carrier’s EV-DO broadband network.

A series of ‘first look’ photos on Engadget shows the new Treo to be slightly narrower than the Treo 650, but at the cost of what looks like a smaller 240×240 pixel display, instead of the usual 320×320.

Confirmed specs include Windows Mobile 5.0, a one megapixel camera, EV-DO, Bluetooth and 64MB of memory.

Windows Based Palm Treo On The Way Palm users still waiting for the Wi-Fi card categorically promised at the Treo 650 UK launch in April will be mightily miffed to learn that a SD Wi-Fi card worked straight out of the box with the Windows Treo – a classic example perhaps of why people are leaving the Palm OS.

Formerly bitter rivals, Palm and Microsoft’s collaboration looks to add the security and functionality of Microsoft’s new Window Mobile 5.0 OS to the solid and well-respected Palm Treo 600/650 range.

Palm president and CEO Ed Colligan called the Windows Treo an “historic” product, adding, “We’ve long believed that the future of personal computing is mobile computing, and our collaboration with Microsoft is an historic step in delivering that vision to a larger market.”

Already, pundits are suggesting that the introduction of the Windows Treo marks the end of the Palm OS Platform, still reeling from the withdrawal of the technically groundbreaking Sony Clie range.

Windows Based Palm Treo On The Way Carmi Levy, Senior Research Analyst at Info-Tech Research Group commented that the new Treo signals a massive shift in the handheld/smartphone market, adding that “when viewed in conjunction with the sale of PalmSource earlier this month, it’s an acceleration in the demise of the Palm OS platform and final confirmation that its once-dominant position in the broader handheld market is gone for good.

“As popular as Palm has traditionally been with end-users, it has always been a marginal corporate player,” continued Levy.

The Palm OS has traditionally lacked robust corporate security features, making the Windows Mobile platform more attractive to corporate IT departments.

What Microsoft has lacked, however, is a killer piece of hardware, something they’re likely to now have with a Windows Mobile-based Treo.

Windows Based Palm Treo On The Way There’s been no release date set for the Windows-based Treo yet, but it is expected to be available “very early” in 2006.

Palm plans to bring the Windows Treo to other wireless carriers in the second half of 2006, including GSM/GPRS carriers in Europe and Asia.

Treo
Engadget Treo pics

Pocket Informant Review: Pocket PC (4/5 Stars)

Pocket Informant 2005 is an integrated Pocket PC application that replaces the built-in Calendar, Contacts, Tasks, Notes, Journal programs and adds a Timeline view.

Loaded with customisation options, the program lets you dabble with just about everything and anything you can see on screen – typefaces, font sizes, font colours, categories, category colours, icons – the lot!

Although this seem a bit like overkill, the different screen sizes and resolutions available on PocketPCs means that controlling font sizing can come in very handy.

So, how does this do-it-all Personal Information Manager (PIM) shape up? Let’s take a closer look.

Calendar

The Calendar view offers a host of different views, displaying one day, seven day or whole month views on one screen, with the Agenda view presenting a user-selectable number of days of appointments in a list format, with the option to filter out ‘free’ days.

New appointments may be added by tapping and holding on a day’s title bar. Double-tapping on an entry opens its detail screen for viewing, editing or adding alarms.

Regularly recurring meetings can be set up as templates to speed up text entry (e.g. “Going to pub.”)

As soon as an event has passed it is displayed in italics, making it easy for the easily confused to see what events are remaining in the current day.

As with all the components in the Pocket Informant suite, a global navigation bar sits at the bottom of the screen, offering instant access to diary views, contacts, notes, to-dos and filter and search options.

Pocket PC Pocket Informant 2005 Review Contacts

The Contacts screen opens up with a tabbed alphabetical row along the time allowing nifty access to contacts.

Inputting new contacts is straightforward enough, with the program auto-filling in frequently-entered text.

A whole host of fields are available to include every possible detail of your new contact, with the option to associate mugshots with contacts, and assign multiple categories.

The search facility is particularly clever, with users able to specify that the program looks for entries that start with the search text or for entries that contain the specified text.

Once a number is located, it can be dialled IR, Bluetooth, DTMF or Serial.

Naturally, there are options galore for listing contacts, including First/Last name, Last/First name, providing a picture list, and grouping by company, department, city, state, country, and category.

Pocket PC Pocket Informant 2005 Review Tasks

As you might have guessed by now, the Tasks interface comes with a shedload of options, with entries being sorted/grouped by category, importance, priority, progress, completion, or date.

There’s the usual filtering and grouping options available, with users able to set up nested hierarchical tasks.

Tasks may be dropped on others to establish relationships, child tasks can be created by tapping and holding on a task and the hierarchical display may be expanded or collapsed.

Tasks can also be set to repeat with nagging reminders and start and completion dates entered.

Pocket PC Pocket Informant 2005 Review Notes

Here’s where we were very disappointed.

Unlike the simplicity of Palm’s ‘Memos’, the handling of notes is a real half arsed affair in Pocket Informant – the display is a real dog to get around, and everything seems needlessly complicated.

Sure, the improved text formatting is a nice touch, but finding, organising and categorising notes seems a needlessly tiresome chore.

I hope the Pocket Informant developers – who have a well earned reputation for listening to their punters – take a long hard look at how programs like Agendus on the Palm handle notes and learn from their experience.

Conclusion

Apart from the clunky horror of the Notes interface, it’s easy to see why Pocket Informant has become the most popular PIM application on the Pocket PC.

The program does an admirable job of making it easy for users to search find, organise and display content on the small screen of a Pocket PC and provides excellent value at $29.95 (~€24.5~£16.50).

With its extraordinary amount of user-configurable options, the program can be tailored to fit individual requirements, and with ample power under the hood, it can easily grow with the user’s needs.

Although the sheer range of options can confuse new users (us included), the intuitive, usable defaults make it easy to get started with the program.

Whether many users will ever get around to discovering the true power of the program is another matter, however.

We still think, however, that it’s the best PIM application available for the Pocket PC with only the poor support for Notes preventing it getting our very top rating.

Digital-Lifestyles score: 4/5

Price: $29.95 (~€24.50, ~£16.50)
Buy now online at PocketGear – Special Offer $22.95 until 30 Sep.05

Further information Pocket Informant

i-mate K-JAM Smartphone/PDA Announced

i-mate announces K-JAM smartphone/PDA Building on the success of their hugely popular JAM phone, i-mate have announced the new K-JAM smartphone/PDA.

Powered by a TI OMAP 850 200MHz processor, the quad-band smartphone features a nifty slide out keyboard, with a form factor of 108mm x 58mm x 23.7mm (roughly the same size as an i-mate JAM, but with a deeper case).

The keyboard slides out from the left side of the phone, with the screen rotating into landscape mode for typing.

Built-in storage capacity has been increased to 64MB SDRAM RAM and 128MB ROM (for programs and user’s storage), supported by a miniSD memory expansion slot.

i-mate announces K-JAM smartphone/PDA The display comes in the form of a 2.8″ QVGA (240 x 320 pixels) 64k Transflective screen, and the device runs on the latest Windows Mobile 5.0 OS.

Wireless connectivity is taken care of via integrated Bluetooth 1.1, InfraRed and – delightfully – built-in WiFi

Like its predecessor, the phone sports a 1.3 megapixel camera with a new video/flash light. We hope it’s the not the same one that shipped with the i-mate JAM because that one was spectacularly rubbish.

Equally rubbish was the low-volume distorto-matic speakerphone, but i-mate seems to have addressed this issue by adding new dual speakers with 3D surround sound.

i-mate announces K-JAM smartphone/PDA The phone offers support for a wide range of music formats, and claims 10 hours running time in PDA mode and 4-5 hours talk time.

As with other HTC-manufactured phones, consumers can expect the K-JAM to emerge under a panoply of different names over the coming months, depending on the service provider.

i-mate

XpressMusic Brand And Nokia 3250 Music Phone Released

Nokia Release Nokia 3250 Music Phone and Finnish mobile giants Nokia have come up with the Nokia 3250, a new music-driven mobile phone featuring dedicated music keys and storage for up to 750 songs.

The phone was announced at Nokia Trends, an electronic music festival in Berlin, Germany over the weekend.

Like Chubby Checker in a hula-hooping competition, the unique design twists 180 degrees around to transform the phone keypad into dedicated music keys.

Through its onboard microSD memory card slot, the Nokia 3250 can store up to 1 Gigabyte (750 songs) of high quality music with a battery life quoted at 10 hours of music play (talktime of up to 3 hours).

The music player supports a wide array of digital music formats such as MP3, WMA, M4A and AAC, with the ability to download songs over the air.

Nokia Release Nokia 3250 Music Phone and Songs can be converted from CD and transferred from home PCs using the “drag and drop” Nokia Audio Manager software.

There’s also a beefy two megapixel camera built into the triband GSM 900/1800/1900 phone, with an FM radio with Visual Radio client complements rounding off the main feature list.

The camera is activated in the landscape mode by twisting the Nokia 3250’s phone’s keypad around 90 degrees, and images can be shared by MMS or printed on a compatible printer via Bluetooth.

The Nokia 3250 is based on the popular Series 60 platform and Symbian OS, which gives users access to a wide range of third-party applications.

Nokia XpressMusic

The Nokia 3250 phone features the new “Nokia XpressMusic” mark, a dedicated feature brand designed to make it easy for punters to identify products in Nokia’s growing music-optimized mobile range.

Devices emblazoned with the logo share key features like dedicated music key(s), music pause/resume on incoming calls, ‘substantial’ storage, support for standard 3.5 mm headphone connectors and an extended battery life.

Nokia Release Nokia 3250 Music Phone and “Nokia connects people to their passions – music – and as the world’s largest manufacturer of digital music players, Nokia is leading the charge to make mobile music widely accessible. The XpressMusic feature brand, also introduced today, makes it easier for consumers to identify those Nokia devices which are specifically designed to listen to music,” purred Kai Öistämö, Senior Vice President, Mobile Phones, Nokia.

“One of the first devices to feature the XpressMusic mark is the Nokia 3250, which is going to stop music fans in their (favourite) tracks. Its unique twist design makes it quick and easy to switch between the music keys, the regular keypad and the camera mode.”

Nokia