Compare Latest Mobile Phone Deals

Nokia has introduced its latest Nokia 6301 mobile phone, which offers its owners flawless voice and data mobility across GSM cellular and WLAN networks through Unlicensed Mobile Access (UMA) technology. The sleek Nokia 6301 makes use if UMA technology to bundle in the advantages of landline and a mobile phone, including seamless indoor coverage, sound quality and affordability.

Peter Ropke, Senior Vice President, Mobile Phones, Nokia said, “The convergence of mobile and fixed/land-line technologies means consumers are looking for products that can help make their lives easier.” Ropke added, “With the Nokia 6301 utilizing UMA technology, worldwide triband GSM coverage is combined with superior indoor WLAN coverage to create a device that people can use in virtually any situation.”

The UMA technology applied in the 6301 phone makes it possible for its owners to use the GSM network or a broadband Internet-connected WLAN network for mobile services. This guarantees awesome indoor coverage at the office as well as at the residence. The consumer can have one multi-mode handset that works everywhere with advanced and convenient voice services. And, WLAN/UMA offers excellent coverage and sound quality, even in areas where mobile phone reception has previously been poor.

What’s more, with UMA technology, the Nokia 6301 benefits operators as well, making it possible for them to deliver voice and data services to subscribers over WLAN, significantly increasing mobile service availability while decreasing the costs related to network deployment.

Orange has been chosen as the very first operator to offer the Nokia 6301, as part of its Unik/Unique portfolio.

Yves Maitre, Senior Vice President, Devices, Orange stated, “The Nokia 6301 is a stylish new addition to our Unik range of converged fixed and mobile phones. Orange’s Unik offer brings together the convenience of a single phone and tariff at home and on the move and the widest range of UMA handsets. The Nokia 6301, with its sleek candy bar design and attractive stainless steel exterior adds to the appeal of Unik for Orange customers.”

Embellished in a sleek stainless steel design, Nokia claims that its 6301 phone is an evolution of the modern monoblock design.

The feather light Nokia 6301 weighs just 93 grams and measures less than 13.1mm thin. It comes with an attractive desk stand, making it perfect for home and office. The Nokia Desk Stand DT-23 holds the phone and keeps its battery charged while connected to WLAN.

The other key features of the Nokia 6301 mobile phone are:
 2 MP camera with 8x digital zoom

•  Full screen viewfinder
•  2-inch QVGA screen
•  USB/PC Synchronization
•  Internal user memory of 30MB and 128MB in-box microSD card, with support for up to 4GB microSD cards
•  Voice dialing, voice commands and voice recording
•  MP3 player, FM radio
•  Integrated hands-free speaker
•  Talk-time of up to 3.5 hours and a standby time of up to 14 days

Slated to start shipping by Q4 of 2007 in Europe, the Nokia 6301 phone is expected to be priced at around 230 euros (excl. subsidies or taxes).

US technology giant Apple picked mobile phone operator T-Mobile on Wednesday to launch its iPhone handset in Germany, with deals in more countries expected as the group prepares for the European roll-out of its latest gadget.

Germany and Britain will simultaneously launch the touch-screen iPhone in Europe on November 9, offering Internet access, telephone service and iPod-like music as well as the ability to play videos.

Under an agreement announced on Tuesday, the phone is to be distributed in Britain by O2.

Press reports said that the choice of T-Mobile was the result of concessions agreed to by parent group Deutsche Telekom, which would reportedly pay Apple up to 30 percent of sales connected to the iPhone.

That would represent a first in the European mobile market, and highlighted the commercial significance of the deal for Deutsche Telekom, a former monopoly which is placing its fortunes in services aimed at a younger market.

As anyone who has been tracking the various ups and (considerable) downs of Palm’s fortunes recently will know, there’s quite a lot hanging on this latest release for the company.

Although both Windows and Palm OS versions of their Treo smartphones sold pretty well and received generally good reviews, there has been growing discontentment amongst loyal followers that Palm’s Innovation Dept have been on an extended dinner break for too long. After all, the form factor of the recent Treo range has barely altered physically from its Handspring days, with the recent Palm 680 offering very little over their long serving Treo 650 handset.

Early this year, the company launched their first Windows Mobile Treo phone, the Treo 750v (reviewed here in May 2007), and although it garnered praise for its usability and feel, we felt it still lagged behind the market leaders.

The Treo 500v sees Palm coming up with their first real new design for years, targeting the handset at the 24-35 year old business/consumer demographic.

Available in two colour schemes - grey/silver and white/silver - and given away free with some Vodafone contracts, the 500v presents a sleek, modern and affordable look that invites comparisons with the Blackberry Curve.

Considerably slimmer than its Treo predecessors, the phone measures 110mm x 61.5mm x 16.5mm (4.3″ x 2.4″ x .65″) and weighs just 120g (4.2oz) in total. Not bad at all for a phone sporting a QWERTY keyboard and a decent sized screen, and positively anorexic compared to the lardy lines of the previous Treo range.

In the hand
Our first impressions of the phone were very positive. Although the white finish is asking for trouble with messy types like us (we prefer the look of the grey number), the handset looks fresh, contemporary and rather stylish to our eyes. It felt pretty sturdy too.

The 320×240-pixel screen was bright, clear and crisp and easy to read in sunlight. We also had no problems using the phone at night, with a strong backlight illuminating the entire keypad and control keys.

A metal strip across the centre of phone contains four flush buttons, an oval ‘D’ pad and the call start/end buttons, but despite some initial misgivings about the ergonomics, we found the controls very responsive in use.

The keyboard
The problem with trying to wedge a QWERTY keyboard onto a compact mobile device is that something has to give: make it too small and it becomes unusable to all but pixie-fingered peckers; make it large enough to comfortably type on and you’ll end up with a pocket ripper.

Some manufacturers have opted for slide-out keyboards or virtual onscreen keyboards, but these invariably render the phones pretty useless for one handed operation.

While there’s no denying that the keys on the 500v are pretty small and not for sausage fingered prodders, we liked it and had no problems knocking out texts and emails.

The slim and wide shape of the phone meant it sat nicely in the hand and was substantial enough to let us type messages one handed with our thumb.

Turn it off!
We can only assume that Palm’s designers had been passing the crack pipe around when they arrived at the decision to remove the sound on/off slider from the top of the phone.

It was one of simple but craftily inspired selling points of previous Treos - and a ruddy brilliant idea to boot - so we can’t imagine what possessed Palm to remove this must-have feature. It’s a really frustrating omission and we hope they put it back for the Centro.

At the bottom of the unit is another annoyance with Palm sticking to a 2.5mm headphone socket instead of an infinitely more useful standard 3.5mm jobbie.

Happily, Palm have finally moved away from their proprietary connectors and added a mini-USB slot, so it’s not all bad.

Looking to the left hand side of the phone, there’s two buttons for volume up/down and a dedicated button for launching Internet Explorer.

Spinning the phone around, we can see a 2MP camera at the back and speakerphone grill. Thankfully, they haven’t bothered with those pointless face-distorting convex mirrors that turns your face into a fairground attraction.

At the top of the phone sits the power on/off button.

A look inside
Getting the back off the Treo took a bit of a Herculean effort - so much so that we were fearful of breaking the thing.

Once we’d finally slid off the back cover, we found a user replaceable Li-ion 1200MaH battery sitting tightly inside with the SIM and miniSD card slots lurking below.

Taking out and inserting cards from both slots was straightforward enough, although we wouldn’t like to make a habit of getting the back off.

In part two, we’ll take a look at how the phone performed in use and examine its full feature set.

Source:http://digital-lifestyles.info/

With a 5Mp camera propping up its generous feature list, the Samsung G600 is automatically propelled into the Nokia N95's premier league.

Sadly, without an optical zoom, decent flash, or any sign of 3G connectivity, the slender Samsung G600 mobile phone is already facing relegation. Add a bland, unresponsive build, and you won't be swapping your compact for the Samsung any time soon.

The first thing to strike us about the Samsung G600's admittedly awesome photographic and video capabilities it there's no 3G connectivity and no video calls. The Samsung G600 makes us all look half decent in our videos and snapshots but, with relatively moribund web-capabilities, makes it a faff to share them in real time.

While this alone is clearly no deciding factor for or against the Samsung G600, with demand increasing for mobiles that are fully web-capable, the faster speeds of 3G (compared to GPRS and even EDGE) certainly will be.

Neither were we keen on the Samsung G600's build. It does feel sturdy; pleasingly weighty. It's slim and, yes, sliders are fashionable – some might even think this somewhat sexy – but there's something not quite right in the Samsung's looks department.

Perhaps it's the nasty speaker above the Samsung G600's screen, the ugly, oversized numbers on the call display (albeit a boon for some), or maybe it's the wide, two-tone black casing – a magnet for fingerprints.

It could be the way the Samsung G600's central button operates as Select in every screen except the first, or how screens exit as if they were curtains in a theatre. More likely, it's that buttons need a good, hard jab to be recognised. (Although the Samsung G600 we saw may be a much-abused review model, there's no excuse for the G600's uninspiring appearance.)

But that's not to say the Samsung G600 should be written off: this mobile has received admiring glances from several reviewers, and for good reason. The MP3 player and FM radio produce good sound quality, despite the need for proprietary headphones, while the Google Search function might not be revolutionary but it's certainly useful.

Although the camera doesn't have a Xenon flash, like Sony Ericcson's K800i and makes do with a 4x digital (rather than optical) zoom, it does feature plenty of shooting modes, including macro mode, plus flash, white balance and ISO settings up to ISO 800. Photos taken at a maximum 2,560x1,920 resolution were still of a very pleasing quality – once the Samsung G600 had finally taken them (it is a little slow, bless it).
Verdict

While it might not appeal to our tastes, the Samsung is not to be sniffed at. Patience will be rewarded with good-quality images. Just beware of allowing its single, stand-out feature to blind you from its weaknesses.

Source:http://www.pcadvisor.co.uk/reviews/index.cfm?reviewid=1217

Samsung Electronics said Thursday it will launch a multimedia touch-screen mobile phone in Europe in November, hoping to win the premium phone war sparked by Apple's iPhone.

The Mobile Hybrid, codenamed F700, has a full touch-screen control but distinguishes itself from the iPhone with a QWERTY keypad hidden underneath it. The company plans to sell it in Germany, Britain and France from November, and in Southeast Asia and North America early next year.

The handset drew big attention earlier this month when its new screen interface called Croix received the iF Communication Design Award, one of the most prestigious awards in the world.

Samsung is confident that the new handset will outperform the iPhone.

``iPhone does not have a QWERTY keyboard and people are not accustomed to its touch screen. So we decided to pack a keypad into the handset,'' said a Samsung spokeswoman. ``It also has a very intuitive user interface.''

Samsung is the world's second largest mobile phone manufacturer after Nokia. The firm, like many others, has been concerned by the debut of the iPhone in the United States though its sales in the first few months are believed to be lower than what Samsung had previously expected.

Not to yield their ground to Apple, a computer firm, traditional phone makers have all been developing touch-screen phones of their own. LG Electronics released a series of touch-screen phones early this year including the Prada Phone. Its latest project is the LG-VX10000, which is a hybrid phone with a touch screen and QWERTY keyboard just like the Samsung Mobile Hybrid.

The new Samsung phone has a 3.2-inch color display, an MP3 music player and a 3 mega-pixel camera. But it is not compatible with the Wi-Fi wireless Internet network unlike the iPhone.

Samsung said the price is not fixed yet but will be around that of the iPhone. Apple recently lowered iPhone's price from $599 to $399 for an eight-gigabyte model.

``We are proud to introduce this new type of innovative multimedia handset. Not only have we considered the latest technology, but also the usability to enhance the user's multimedia experience,'' said Choi Gee-sung, president of Samsung's Telecommunications Network Business. ``This multimedia driven handset is designed for consumers who wish to stand out from the crowd, showcasing unrivaled performance, advanced functionality and world-class design.''
Source:http://www.koreatimes.co.kr/

“The Motorola RAZR2 delivers the sharpest mobile experiences available—and customers of almost every national carrier in the U.S. can now own one,” said Stu Reed, executive vice president, Motorola, Inc. and president, Mobile Devices Business in a statement.

Reed continued: “With smart features available such as blazing-fast 3G wireless broadband, and modern style that's slimmer and stronger than the original, the Motorola RAZR2 is the ultimate iconic feature phone.”

Users of all three major technology networks can buy MOTORAZR2 phones: V9 (3G HSDPA), V9m (3G EVDO CDMA) and V8 (GSM). Featuring a larger internal screen for fullHTML browsing and a best-in-class external screen this multimedia device enables viewing media, music and/or messaging without opening the flip. The phone supports up to two gigabytes of on-board memory.

“Haptic” key technology also lets users receive touch feedback on the external screen. Also worth noting is Motorola’s Crystal Talk technology for better voice quality.

MOTORAZR2 supports the most popular music formats and media services. Thanks to the built in stereo, Bluetooth wireless technology users can enjoy a wire-free music experience when paired with the compatible lightweight ROKR S9 Bluetooth stereo headphones.
Source:http://www.tmcnet.com/

Industry safety regulators have always banned their use on board because of fears the signal would interfere with the plane's electronic and communications equipment.

But new technology has been developed which means that passengers will be able to make phone calls on mobile handsets safely while in flight.

This week Ryanair started trials intended to prove phones can be used on the Boeing 737, which is used for millions of short-haul flights a year. If successful, the no-frills carrier expects to be able to offer the facility to make calls on most of its planes by December next year. Other airlines are likely to follow suit. Air France is expected to be the first to make the service available later this year.

But the industry is split between those who believe passengers will welcome the change and those who think they will regard it as an intrusion.

The technology has to be approved by the European Aviation Safety Agency as well as other global safety regulators.

If approval is given it will be possible to use phones above 10,000 feet - the altitude which is where computers and other electronic devices can currently be switched on.

According to industry sources, call charges would be in line with those charged when roaming abroad, roughly 50 pence a minute. Underpinning the possibility of using a phone or email device on board is the invention of a small telephone mast, about the size of a dinner plate.

It means that the phone signal is weak enough not to interfere with other equipment on the plane, but once boosted by the mini-mast, strong enough to make a call. Until the breakthrough the phone signal was too strong because it was seeking the nearest mast, normally on the ground more than 30,000ft below.

The trials come against the backdrop of a Daily Telegraph campaign to keep phones off planes, which many regard as the last sanctuary of peace and quiet.
Source:http://www.telegraph.co.uk/

Google is planning a new mobile payment scheme where mobile phone users pay for goods and services with a simple text message.

A patent application for Google's Gpay text message payment system has just been published by the US Patent Office. The patent application for the Google Gpay system describes a service where mobile users signed up to the system can receive or make payments to each other direct from a handset using text messages.

Gpay users will also be able to pay for items in stores or buy from vending machines using the payment system.

The application was originally filed in February 2006. It's one of many mobile-based micro-payment systems that have been developed to facilitate "mobile wallet"-style transactions. However, with the Google brand and financial muscle behind it, the Gpay system could soon be more than simply a nice idea keeping the US patent office busy.
Meanwhile, in the UK, mobile operators have today switched on a new mobile payment system called PayForIt which enables users to make payments of up to £10 with their phones.
Source:http://www.tech.co.uk/gadgets/phones/mobile-phones/news/

OF LATE, COMMUNITY network sites are gaining in popularity and Internet users love to visit these websites. This has given a major setback to email sites. To bring back users interest, Yahoo is introducing a free SMS feature for email users.

Yahoo Inc after giving unlimited space in the mail account has again come up with one new exciting feature. Now with yahoo email account, users will be able to send SMS to phones – an easy way to connect with friends. This facility will be available soon for more than 250 million email users – a new upcoming feature in coming weeks.

Yahoo Inc has also been testing features that would lead Yahoo email users to communicate through conventional email or via instant messages using Yahoo Messenger or Microsoft Live Messenger.

According to John Kremer, Vice President of Yahoo Mail, “Our goal is to make (Yahoo) Mail a more social experience. We really look at ourselves as sitting on top of the largest dormant social network out there.” Yahoo is also trying to mix up its services to compete with other social networks like MySpace, YouTube and Facebook where Internet users spend most of their time. Users spend less time on Yahoo, AOL.com and MSN.

With the introduction of the new version of Yahoo Mail, users will get three options: e-mail, online instant messaging or text messaging. Users can switch between these three as per their convenience. At first, the text messaging feature will be available for members from United States, Canada, India and the Philippines. The procedure for sending SMS via Yahoo Mail is simple. Enter a mobile phone number, type the text and click on send button.

It is notable that this October, Yahoo will be celebrating the 10th anniversary of Yahoo Mail’s launch.
Source:http://www.merinews.com/catFull.jsp?articleID=126116