Vodafone plans to unleash a swarm of new 3G mobile handsets in the run-up to Christmas as the company tries to turbo charge mass market adoption of its third-generation (3G) mobile service.
The world’s biggest mobile operator will adding a total of 15 phones to their portfolio.
Ten of the new phones will be exclusive to Vodafone, with six targeted at entry-level customers in an attempt to encourage the mass market take-up of its 3G services.
“We are confident that this is going to be a 3G Christmas,” ho-ho’d Chief Marketing Officer Peter Bamford.
This rings (festive?) bells with us, giving us a very strong feeling of Deja Vu as we heard ‘Vodafone’s betting heavily on 3G this Christmas‘ in November 2004. Perhaps Vodafone thing that saying it two months earlier this year (Sept vs Nov) will ‘make it happen’.
The period before Christmas is traditionally a bumper trading period for mobile phone operators, and Vodafone is confident that its festive offering of MP3 playin’, video and audio streamin’, video call-makin’ 3G phones will send sales soaring.
The new phones
The entry-level phones will include two handsets each from Sharp and Samsung and one each from Motorola and Sony Ericsson – all exclusive to Motorola.
The non-exclusive handsets will include the hugely popular Motorola RAZR V3x phone, the Nokia N70 and 6280, and Samsung’s SGH-Z500V and SGH-Z140V phones.
Four of the new handsets – two each by Sharp and Toshiba – will be targeted at the well heeled, with the Limited edition Sharp 902 Ferrari serving up exclusive Ferrari content for those folks impressed with that kind of thing.
All of Vodafone new 3G phones will offer new services, with the company hoping to tempt users to regularly dip into their catalogue of 500,000 full-track music downloads and mobile TV services and content.
Vodafone launched their 3G service in November 2004, and was reporting 3.3 million 3G customers by June this year.
The company expects big things from their 3G service, forecasting 10 million customers across its businesses to be using 3G mobile video and picture phones and high-speed laptop cards by the end of this financial year in March 2006.
Sony’s boffins have announced the addition of a new hybrid camcorder/digital still camera to their Cyber-shot range.
Designed to be used with one hand, the M2 features a slightly tilted lens axis which allows a more natural wrist position according to Sony.
This automatically records five seconds of video before the still picture is taken, adding three more seconds of movie footage afterwards.
Those really wishing to inflict pain on their friends could insist on using the Slide Slow plus Movie function.
Hoity toity makers of expensive electronics for the well-heeled, Bang & Olufsen, have invited Samsung to the table in a joint project to design a new mobile phone.
According to Sorensen, there will be just one phone at first with more models to follow.
“We have positive expectations about this, but I know it is a niche product. The phone won’t appeal to all, but if only two percent of the market likes it, that’s good enough,” he added while tucking into a bowl of best Russian caviar.
Hard drives are soon to go the way of 8 track cartridges and steam powered radios according to Samsung’s semi-conductor CEO Dr. Chang Gyu Hwang. 
With a cackle in his voice and a size nine sending a RAID array skywards, Hwang reckons that we’ll soon be seeing laptop memory cards with 32GB of memory, based on multiple 16Gb flash chips. 
A big advantage of using flash memory in notebooks is that the technology is resistant to the sort of mechanical shocks that can often knacker a hard drive.
O2 has announced the launch of the o2 Xda Exec, the first PDA and mobile phone combo device to feature 3G.
Reflecting its business focus, the phone comes with Pocket Outlook, Word, Excel, Powerpoint and PDF viewers pre-installed and offers Bluetooth, Wireless LAN, 3G and tri-band GPRS connectivity.
Combined with our service bundle, we believe that the O2 Xda Exec will build on the success of the Xda range, extending our market share still further into 2006.”
Technical stuff:
Mozilla have made their first preview of Firefox 1.5 Beta 1 – code named “Deer Park” – available to early adopters, Web developers and Extension writers.
Mike Schroepfer, Mozilla’s director of engineering said that automatic updating will reduce the size of patches by 10 to 20 times, explaining that the feature will remove the current requirement for users to download the entire browser to obtain fixes.
Toshiba has unveiled its new DVD recorder with the handy ability to set up and record TV programmes via email.
The RD-XS54 comes with Toshiba’s EASY NAVI menu and the TV Guide On Screen Interactive Program Guide for simple, easy-peasy channel navigation and recording scheduling.
Although on the surface Nikon’s brand new Coolpix P1 and the Coolpix P2 cameras look like standard fare from the photo giant, they’ve got a trick up their sleeve – they both offer Wireless LAN support (IEEE802.11b/g). 
This wireless connection lets users transfer images off the camera’s storage card or transmit them ‘live’ as they’re snapped directly to Nikon’s PictureProject software.
As for the Coolpix P1 and P2 cameras, there’s nothing much to get too excited about, with the two identical cameras offering 8.0 and 5.1 Megapixels respectively with a 3.5x optical zoom (36-126mm equivalent, f2.7 – 5.2).
Framing and viewing images is taken care of with a sizeable 110,000 pixels 2.5″ TFT LCD screen and there’s a SD slot and USB 2.0 connectivity onboard.
Sony has announced the ground-breaking Cyber-shot DSC-R1, a high-end enthusiast digital camera offering a 10.3 million pixel CMOS sensor with a fast 24mm -120mm zoom lens.
Supporting the fancy pants sensor is a high quality Carl Zeiss Vario-Sonnar T 5X optical zoom lens covering 24mm to 120 mm (f/2.8 to f/4/.8.) 
The camera’s $1000 price tag puts it in the heart of dSLR territory and we can’t help wondering how it’s going to compete.
No matter how hard we try, when we see someone wandering about with a Bluetooth headset in their lughole we don’t think, “there’s a cool, go-getting professional”; we tend to have an irresistible urge to shout unprintable things in their direction.
Designed to be compatible with Sony VAIO BX laptops, the HBH-608 connects the computer with the headset via Bluetooth making it possible to handle calls over the Internet (VoIP) without faffing about with troublesome phone cables. 
“The knowledge from two strong brands in the communications industry comes together in this solution. We believe that our joint experience benefits the user, making telecommunication as smooth as possible.”
Best of all, when you need to pop out for a double skinny frappuccino with Bolivian gnu’s milk, the same handset can be kept in your ear and used with your Bluetooth mobile phone on the street.