Wireless connections
Look, we’ll come right out with it. We’re gadget freaks.
We like to strut around with the latest gizmos throbbing in our pockets, and tote the latest technology. When it comes to smartphones, we want the best, but what is the supreme smartphone right now?
We take a comprehensive look at what’s on offer in the top end of the market and chew over bagfuls of specs in our quest to find the perfect smartphone.
T-Mobile may be busy bigging up a rosy picture of the soaraway success of their Android-powered G1 phone and gushing that sales are “exceeding expectations”, but UK trade newspaper Mobile News is telling a different story.
According to the paper, the G1 (‘Google phone’) hasn’t exactly been hurtling out of British shops, with sales failing to reflect the 30,000 pre-order sales T-Mobile claimed before the launch.
Europeans can now can legitimately order their own One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) XO Laptop.
The XO Laptop has been available for around a year in the US under two schemes – buying one to donate and Give One. Get One, which for double the price of a machine the purchaser would feel good for giving one away as well as receiving one themselves.
It’s the Give One. Get One. scheme that will be operating in Europe.
Over the weekend we had chance to play with Blackberry’s first touchscreen model, the much-hyped Blackberry Storm.
The first impressions were very positive: the handset is a great size and feels very solid indeed. The back panel looked like it would survive a drop or two, and the battery door had none of that soon-break flimsiness seen on many phones.
We can’t say its looks are doing much to get our hearts going a-thumpa-thumpa, but the Asus P565 specs are sure doing something to our techie glands.
The big taking point is that this Windows Mobile professional smartphone packs a mighty Marvell TavorP 800 Mhz processor, which Asus claims makes it twice as powerful as any other competing products in its class.
The P565 comes with HSDPA 3.6Mbps, UMTS 2100, EDGE/GPRS/GSM 900/1800/1900 connectivity, plus WLAN 802.11b+g , USB v1.1(FS) and Bluetooth 2.0+EDR.
Freshly minted in their busy Nordic factories is Nokia’s new E63, a rather natty looking handset sporting a full QWERTY keyboard in an attractively slim package.
Hoping to mesmerise the messaging masses with a pre-tax, pre-subsidy price of just €199, the Symbian S60 E63 packs a fair armful of functionality into its lithe 113 x 59 x 13-mm frame, which weighs in at a pocket-untroubling 126g form factor.
Self-crowned by Opera as the most popular mobile browser in the known universe, the latest update, Opera Mini 4.2, has now been released in beta.
The Java-powered browser attempts to give mobile users something akin to a desktop surfing experience by displaying a small image of the full web page which can then be scrolled and zoomed into.
After filing our complaint a few days, ago, we finally received a response from T- Mobile.
Feedback from other readers here and web reports already had our expectations running low, and they did indeed confirm that as loyal customers of 10 years standing, we could expect no discount at all on an upgrade to the G1 phone.
Worse than that, they insisted that our decade’s worth of loyalty would be rewarded with an additional charge of £305, while a brand new customer could pick up the same phone – on exactly the same contract – for absolutely nothing. How crazy is that?
The T-Mobile rep we spoke to certainly seemed to empathise with our position: reading between the lines he was well fed up having to tell long-paying customers that they’re going to be royally shafted by his company (he actually started the call saying that it ‘wasn’t a call he’d been looking forward to making’).
We’ve been with T-Mobile for well over a decade, first signing up when they were known with One2One.
We’ve always been on yearly contracts, but in recent years had elected not to take them up on their offer of a new handset at the end of the contract, preferring to take a discount instead.
As our contract had recently ran out, we gave them a call seeing what kind of deal we could get for the new G1 (which they have exclusive UK rights to). Here’s how the cheery call went:
Smartphones used to be the preserve of a tech-savvy niche and appointment-juggling business folks shuffling between vital meetings, but feature packed handsets have now hit the mainstream.
According the ‘Mobile Market View’ study published by The Kelsey Group, no less than 18.9% of mobile consumers in the United States are now strutting the streets sporting smartphones, with 49.2% set to grab themselves a piece of smartphone action within the next two years.