For hyperactive sporty types, lardy lumps looking to lose some weight and headband-totin’ workouters, Nokia has trotted out its new super-sporty phone, the 5500 Sport.
Apparently their first handset with (ahem) “athletic lifestyle appeal”, the phone is moulded out of bits of trainers – or, as they put it, “engineered with materials used in the latest high performance running shoes”.
Pitched at sweaty joggers and wheezing Seb Coe wannabes, the phone comes in a liquid and dirt-resistant housing, complete with rubber grips.
Jog the line
Lurking inside the handset, there’s a work-out mode for timing your stumble to the pub keeping track of your running times, a planner for setting up an exercise schedule and a pedometer to let you see if you’ve reached your recommended limit of 10,000 steps every day (yeah, right!).
The cunning boffins at Nokia have even included a calculator for working out the calories used up during your workout, with speech software keeping you updated about your pie-cancelling progress.
Music on the go
Personally, we find jogging to be as exciting as a day at the ‘Watch Paint Dry’ club, but at least there’s a built in music player for getting some motivational Toto on the go as you shuffle around your local park.
If you need to stock up on a wide selection of tunes to keep you thumping the tarmac, the 5500 comes with a MicroSD slot (up to 1GB) with the player supporting most of the popular music formats.
Conveniently, there’s a dedicated key that makes it easy to switch between phone, music and training modes with text to speech software feeding you text messages and workout status reports on the move.
A 3D motion sensor also adds new features, including the ability to tap the phone to start/stop the inspirational magic of Totos’s “Africa” while sweating through Stepney .
The phones should be jogging into Europe in Q3 for around €300 ($381/£205) and will be available in a grey and yellow ‘sport’ colour scheme and other, more business-like, hues.
The space-age wireless house is coming ever-nearer with new figures from Strategy Analytics revealing the growth of Wi-Fi networks amongst the sofas, dining tables and four poster beds of the home.
The Americans were found to be leading the world with 8.4 percent penetration, followed by the nippy Nordic region with 7.9 percent.
“Rich people have more electronic gadgets” shocker!
Mercer added that rising ownership of laptop PCs and other portable Internet devices will soon make Wi-Fi the dominant home networking choice for most broadband subscribers.
UK shoppers are set to spend an average £1,000 each online in 2006, according to the yearly report by the Interactive Media in Retail Group (IMRG).
According to IMRG’s own research, usability, customer retention, and interactive marketing were cited as the biggest concerns by over half of their members, with e-crime and delivery fulfilment seen as high-priority issues by around a third.
Compare that to stingy shoppers in the south who said that they’d spend no more than £50 per month online, and wouldn’t dream of shelling out sums as high as £5,000.
Video game kings Nintendo have opened hostilities with arch-rivals Microsoft and Sony with the unveiling of its new “Wii” console.
The Wii will certainly be considerably cheaper that its rivals when it goes on sale later this year, with pundits predicting a price around the $250 mark – cheaper than the Xbox 360 and around half the price of the top-of-the-range PS3.
Sporting an unusual, one-handed wireless controller, the remote control-shaped Wii handset comes with motion sensors and speakers, letting users interact with games by waving their arms about and looking like a bit of a nutter.
Nintendo reckon that users will find their one-hand, noise-making controller more fun and intuitive: “Our goal is to expand the total number of people playing games,” said Nintendo president Satoru Iwata
Reggie Fils-Aime, chief marketing officer at Nintendo, was even more enthusiastic, insisting that the Wii was designed so “even your mother could use it.”
The BBC is making its first steps into the super-crisp world of high definition television (HDTV) with transmissions of Planet Earth and Bleak House in the new format at the end of this month.
HD TV broadcasts can also beef up the whole big match experience by incorporating 5.1 surround sound and displaying the (Rooney-less) stadium action in widescreen.
“We really feel that high definition will be the standard definition of the future,” she added.
Sony has announced the pricing for its eagerly anticipated next generation PS3 console at a pre-E3 conference in Los Angeles.
There’s certainly a lot at stake for Sony, with the company expected to lose several hundred dollars per unit – while hoping to rake in fat profits from software sales over the life of the console.
The company expects two million of the puppies to have shunted off their production line and into the shops during the ‘launch window,’ four million by the end of the year and six million worldwide by March 31, 2007.
Samsung have unveiled their new SGH-X820, proudly labelling it the ‘world’s thinnest phone’.
Apparently using Victorian corset techniques, Samsung’s designers have also managed to wedge in a 1.9″, 176×220 pixel display (262k colours), Bluetooth connectivity, USB support, a TV-out jack and a 2 megapixel camera that records video into its 113mm x 50mm (4.4″ x 2″) dimensions.
The super-slim device supports GPRS/EDGE data on 900MHz, 1800MHz, and 1900MHz GSM bands and, unlike Motorola’s futuristic designs, comes in a traditional format with individual keys.
Pantech Group, South Korea’s second biggest mobile phone company, has announced that it’ll be wowing the crowds with the new PG-2800 GSM ‘finger writing recognition phone’ at the Moscow SVIAZ Expo Comm trade show this week.
The company is also aiming high worldwide, with expectations to shift 27 million unit sales globally in 2006.
With the weather warming up and the great outdoors beckoning, here’s our selection of must-have gadgets for technology addicts heading off for a day strolling over heath and heather.
Smartphone: Treo 650
Where the chuffin’ ‘eck am I? GPS and Memory-Map
Butler is a hugely popular selection of nifty utilities for the Palm Treo smartphone that manages to fix many of the minor shortcomings of the phone in one fell swoop.
Launching apps
Lights out
Butler also offers a straight alarm feature that lets you set up to 6 repeating alarms, complete with customised messages and the option to assign a program to open after you’ve cleared the alarm.
Wrapping up the feature set is a “Hide SMS popup” option which stops you being bothered by SMS screens, an option to beam your business card by holding the phone button down and a useful “Keep Exchange Manager Clean” utility which addresses the annoying ‘preference loss’ bug seen on the Palm OS.
It’s worth persevering though because it won’t take long before you begin to wonder how you ever coped without Butler on your Treo – and at just $14.95 (£8.20,€11.90) it’s something of a bargain!