Shout About Mobiles

Not many people can say many bad things about the LG super-camera-phone of yester year; the LG Viewty, or the KU990i, was a great 5MP camera phone.Yes, it did take a while to get use to the weird scrolling, but as a touch screen phone it did a great job, and has sold millions throughout the world.

And now we now have the second in the series, in the 8MP market range, and it is now going under the name of CG9000.
It has had a few tweaks on the styling but still keeps the stuff that made the first LG Viewty good. The Schnieder Kreuznach logo is displayed around the camera lens, and the lighting is aided by a xenon flash.

This phone is packing some great features – wi-fi, HSDPA, A-GPS and div-x playback for showcasing those brilliant videos (personally, I’m hoping LG stick with having the slow-mo settings as that always raises a smile when you’re watching your friends fall over in slow motion – hehe!).

No confirmed ideas on price yet or what markets it is expected to hit.

As we all know, games on mobile phones are becoming better all the time. And with improvements in the smart phone genre, such as bigger processors (like in the Toshiba TG01 with its 1ghz), the improvements are allowing games to be bigger, better and stronger.

We have seem Nokia develop and release the N-gage application. Nokia failed at the invention of the gaming phone (try an internet search on N-gage and the N-gage QD) because although the phones had heart, they were ugly and useless, with a total lack of battery life.

Games on your mobile are great fun, but they just don’t make the bus journey to work or boring lectures any more fulfilled.
However, some clever people have managed to come up with a way that we can get games such as Quake onto our phones (well, onto the Symbian S60 3^rd edition handsets at least!).
Follow this link to a walkthrough guide on another blog site which written for the Nokia E71, but has the same process because it is the same process for all S60 handsets (that aren’t too old).

For those of you who are in America with the new Blackberry clamshell 8230, you may have heard about Dell’s recall on the device.
As far as we can tell, this appears to be a software related issue, as we have had reports that it was due to dell wanting to upgrade the software, to the latest version 4.6.1.182 .
So, if you are currently sat with the old version (4.6.1.162), you should be getting a text message shortly asking you to update – and if you do, you can ignore all the rumours.
Dell has confirmed that all the new handsets that are being delivered to stores are now are being upgraded, so any new devices brought will not be affect by the issue (as of yet we still aren’t aware of what the issue was in the first place!).

Now this appears to be coming in around the same time as rumours of Blackberry releasing a new application store known as app world.
So if anyone out there happens to have the Blackberry 8230, check to see if you have any new icons or services books appearing regarding an application store.

The creators of Cydia are looking at creating a rival application to the app store for the “jail-broken” iPhone Handset. At the moment, Apple control what can be downloaded onto their phones through the app store, thereby reducing the chances of bugs or viruses causing problems to the phone.

Despite the security this creates, it also restricts some things that the phone can do – which is why quite a few users have unlocked (“jail-broken”) their iPhone’s. A jailbroken iPhone does allow people to install different things and to use the phone on other networks, and it does stop them from doing some of the official things like using the app store.

So at the moment it’s a case of jail-broken users scanning the market to find applications to do what they want their phone to do.
So the market gap is now being filled by Jay Freeman (Cydia creator) who is creating this new application.

However, the next problem will be Apple’s counter move – developing this application will grab their attention as it is very similar to their app store, and as it will be for jail-broken iPhones, Apple could lose money. No company likes those words, so Apple will sit up and pay attention – what will they do?

Putting that aside, will this application be a good thing or a bad thing?

On the good side, it allows jailbroken iPhone users easier access to software and to make the most of their phone.
On the bad side, it may mean Apple will take stronger steps to restrict their phones from being jailbroken and re-lock jail-broken device.

It appears O2 have seen exactly how good exclusive phones are for business thanks to the Apple iPhone – and they have just sealed a deal to allow them, and only them, to sell the new powerhouse from Toshiba the TG01.

For those not yet in the know, this handset comes running Windows Mobile.
Yes, Windows can be a bit slow normally, but this phone can pack a 1ghz processer (which is just a bit smaller than what companies are putting into netbooks that are becoming all the rage at the momen) into it’s little case (it is bigger than the iPhone though, so not that small).

The phone also has one of the largest screen’s to be placed on a mobile device, with it coming in at 4.1 inches using a WVGA display, and it is rumoured to be able to withstand 11 days of usage! As doubtful that is, I’m sure we can all be doing with some extra battery life in our mobiles. Toshiba have managed to do all this and yet still keep the phone down to under 1cm in thickness.

I’m impressed!

We are unsure at the moment if the phone will be restricted to a single network in other countries but we hope not as this could be what Windows Mobile needs to make it run perfectly and actually become an easy to use OS.

Over here in the West Motorola are seen as being behind the times, and this is easily shown by comparing Motorola’s latest “super phones” (V9 and V8) to Nokia or Sony Ericson phones.
However, over in the East, Motorola appear to be the ones bringing the advancements to markets.

Motorola are bringing out the ZN300, this phones appears to have taken a leaf out of the new Nokia N-series styling’s to form a good looking slider. The phone was meant to be supporting both quad band GSM as well as TD-SCDMA which would make the handset stand out and give it a faster data rate, however it appears Motorola have now dropped the TD_SCDMA support. So although the phone does have some nice features for a mid range phone it does lose it edge.

At the moment China doesn’t have standard 3G network (WCDMA/UMTS or CDMA 2000) but is currently using its own developed TD-SCDMA which is being tested by China’s biggest telecom giant, however the other two networks in the country, China Telecom and China Unicom, are hoping to bring out the two standards 3G types, so this will be good for the two smaller telecom networks as they will be able to hack in to the larger phone market with a lot of phones already offering WCDMA, where as China Mobile will be having to get phones made for them.

We have all seen Motorola’s “fall from grace”; once known as the fourth biggest mobile maker, to being known almost as a joke out here across the puddle from America. But apart from the Aura, all they have done is spewed out more and more copies of the V3, and each time they had got worse and we have watched as Motorola slowly left a huge void between its super phone features and that of it’s rivals.

However, we have recently seen a few beats of Motorola’s heart, showing it still has some life left – they have announced two new phones that may help bring it, not back to the front line but at least into the contest.

The first handset is meant to be a phone built in conjunction with Kodak and supports a 5mp camera, being fully touch screen and is rumoured to be running either Android or Windows Mobile, (we here are hoping for Android as its so much better to use) and the second im afraid is another V3 rip-off but this one is called the VE1 which does come with most the goodies that we want in a super phone.

The VE1 is supporting a 5mp camera (I’m so happy Motorola have realised digital cameras can be higher than 2mp), GPS and wi-fi, all housed in a stylish clamshell (that’s one thing Motorola did well – style!). I’m are still unsure on the actual operation system, as it was expected to use the UIQ3 OS that we find in the Z8 and Z10 models, but we’ll let you know when we know more.