Wednesday, March 26, 2008

Samsung launches touchscreen phone that touches you back

By James Rivington :


The age-old problem with touchscreen technology is that you often don’t know whether or not you’ve actually registered a keypress. On old phones it’s easy - you feel the key being depressed - but with touchscreen you rely heavily on visual feedback on the screen itself.

Samsung is one of the companies overcoming this issue by creating handsets that give haptic feedback. Its new Anycall Haptic phones (SCH-W420 and SPH-W4200) let you know what you’re doing by vibrating in different ways when you do different things.

In total there are 22 different kinds of physical haptic feedback that the handsets give, which makes the touchscreen handsets easier to use.

Samsung has the answer

Other companies like LG have already launched phones like this – including here in the UK – but the new Samsung phones are the most advanced yet, in the way that they give different feedback at different times.

Sadly though, they’re only launching in Korea for now, and there’s no word of when or if they’ll make it into British waters.

Other than the haptic vibrations,the phones also have a 3.2-inch screen, 2MP camera and digital TV reception – a requisite in South Korea these days.



Source : http://www.techradar.com/
Posted by martin at 17:09:37 | Permanent Link | Comments (0) |

Friday, March 14, 2008

Talk Freely Without The Tension: Running Out Of Credit With Contract Phones

Pay monthly mobile phone is one of the two major mobile phone deals in the UK. Under this deal, you have to sign a contract to have in possession of unlimited talktime. It also allows you to use the other payable features of the phone as much as you want. There will be no tension of running out of credit.

Contract phone, as pay monthly mobile phone is popularly known, remains favourable for the group of people who use their mobile phone very often. While on move, you will have to face no hassle of buying cards to recharge your mobile. You can talk freely as you have unlimited talktime within your disposal.

The billing system in pay monthly mobile phone is quite easy. In every month, you will be provided with a bill containing the detail of the calls you have made. The bill will also contain a record on the use of other payable features of the phone. You have to clear the bill within a given time. If you fail to pay off the bill in time, you have to pay some extra amount in the form of late fee.

Mobile phone deals in UK come with various lucrative offers. Contract phone is also not an exception. There are lots of variations in monthly line rentals under pay monthly mobile phone deals. You can choose from a lot variety of packages offered by various leading networks providers in UK.

The close competition pervading in the mobile telephony market paved the way of free offers made available with different mobile phone deals. You may find the mobile phone handset of prominent manufacturers, available completely free of cost, with contract phone. You can avail the best package containing suitable monthly line rental, if you approach the online mobile phone shop.

Source : http://ezinearticles.com/

Posted by martin at 12:25:59 | Permanent Link | Comments (0) |

Monday, March 10, 2008

Nokia Opens Factory in Romania

Mobile phone maker Nokia Corp. opened a factory in Romania on Monday as part of a program to shift production to low-cost locations in Europe and just hours after angry protests in Germany over plans to shutter a plant.

The factory will produce mobile phones and mobile phone parts for Europe, the Middle East and Africa in an investment worth 120 million euros ($174 million), Romanian officials said. Some 1,200 people will be employed at the plant by the end of the year.

However in Bochum, Germany, more than 4,000 people gathered outside the Nokia plant there late Sunday, standing shoulder to shoulder in a line that stretched more than 2.5 miles in protest against its planned closure.

 
If we are going down, then we'll do it screaming," said Susanne Klug, wife of a Nokia employee, who took part in the protest, the largest of several that have been held since Nokia announced its plans to shutter the factory.On Tuesday, employee representatives are to meet with members of Nokia's management to discuss the plant's future.However, the investment has been welcomed in Romania, which is trying to stop the flow of some 2 million people who have left Romania to work in western Europe, most since 2000.

"We have a real global business and today the Cluj factory joins this network," said a senior Nokia executive, Juha Putkiranta, at the plant's opening ceremony.Monthly salaries at the plant, 200 miles northwest of Bucharest, will average $318 a month before taxes, which is below the national average.Local authorities said that the agreement with Nokia was valid for 30 years, and that Nokia would be granted some tax breaks.

Source :

http://www.umbrellanews.com

Posted by martin at 15:05:20 | Permanent Link | Comments (0) |

Saturday, March 01, 2008

Nokia E90 vs Nokia N810: Part 2 - GPS, Apps, Web and Multimedia

The previous article in this series looked at the N810 and E90 hardware and their communications features. This time we look at GPS, applications, browsing the web and multimedia.

Just to recap, the E90 is of course a Symbian S60 3rd Edition smartphone, while the N810 is an internet tablet which runs Maemo, a Linux-based software platform. They're both made by Nokia and share some similar features like QWERTY keyboards, large screens and built-in GPS receivers, but there are also fundamental differences in the philosophies behind their design.

GPS & Satellite Navigation

The E90's GPS receiver finds satellites much much more quickly than the N810's. The E90's assisted GPS (which uses the phone network) probably helps, but even without a network connection the E90 is significantly faster. It could be that the N810's performance will improve as new firmware updates are issued, and to be fair this is the first-ever Maemo device with GPS, but at the moment the E90 is a more practical device for navigation purposes.One thing perhaps mitigating this is the N810's touch-based navigation interface that has on-screen buttons, which some may find easier to operate while on the move. There's a dashboard holder included in the N810 sales package, so Nokia is clearly hoping people will fit this device in their cars.


If you're unhappy with the built-in GPS receivers, both the N810 and E90 can use external Bluetooth GPS units instead, including unofficial units made by third party companies.The E90 features free maps through the Nokia Maps/Smart2Go service, which can be downloaded on the fly directly onto the E90 itself, or onto your PC and transferred. The N810 uses a different map service, Wayfinder, which also has free maps but distributed as separate chunks for each part of the world. You have to download the entire relevant map pack for your current area (for example Scandinavia) while you have a network connection, but you don't need a network connection while actually using the map.As for the maps themselves, they both worked in that they tracked movement and displayed roads without a problem, but they also both had significant gaps and mistakes in their Points Of Interest data. To give a couple of glaring examples:The E90's Nokia Maps insists that there are no cash machines at all in Finland, and the ATM category only mentions those hundreds of kilometres away in Russia.

Applications & Games
As far as bundled applications go, the E90 has far more PIM functionality, with a decent built-in calendar and appointments system which is integrated into the active standby screen. The N810 has no bundled calendar at all.Moving on to apps you install yourself, the situation gets a bit more interesting as the two devices take completely different approaches to application development.The E90 uses S60 3rd Edition applications, and S60 is generally based on the same model that all computing devices have traditionally used. The S60 platform has formed a commercial software ecosystem, where companies and individuals are encouraged to make and sell closed source software in the hope of profit. In short, people pay developers for S60 stuff, so the developers make more S60 stuff. There are some open source freeware S60 apps too, but the majority are closed source commercial releases.

The N810 uses Maemo OS 2008 applications, and generally follows the newer open source model for software development. Under open source, enthusiasts and companies develop software together and allow anyone free access to both the applications and their source code. The reason Maemo is so dominated by open source apps is largely because of Maemo's Linux-based nature, which means there are many existing open source software apps for desktop Linux which can very easily be ported to Maemo, and many Linux fans interested in supporting the tablets. However, Nokia is trying to encourage commercial Maemo development as well, and has opened a section on Forum Nokia for the platform, but at the moment open source dominates.

Source : http://www.allaboutsymbian.com/
Posted by martin at 14:39:07 | Permanent Link | Comments (0) |