New Sharp Mobile Phone Talks to Your Vehicle

Nissan Motor, NTT DOCOMO and Sharp announced today that they have jointly developed a mobile phone capable of functioning as an intelligent key for automobiles. Nissan’s Intelligent Key system employs two-way wireless communications technology to automatically unlock/lock the car door and start/stop the engine. Nissan and Sharp has now integrated these electronic intelligent-key, wireless communications and electromagnetic technologies into the new handset.


Nissan, DOCOMO and Sharp will demonstrate this mobile phone with built-in Intelligent Key in their respective exhibits at CEATEC Japan 2008, which begins September 30. The three firms will continue to develop the product with an aim for commercial distribution in early fiscal year 2009.

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Sony Ericsson Announces PlayNow Unlimited Music Download Service

Sony Ericsson today announced the launch of PlayNow plus, a music download service for Sony Ericsson customers, available for use on both phones and PCs. The service is due to launch commercially with operator Telenor in Sweden in the fourth quarter of this year, with further roll-outs around the world beginning in early 2009. A special edition of the Sony Ericsson W902 Walkman phone will be the first product released with an integrated PlayNow plus service. The service draws from Sony Ericsson’s collaboration with Omnifone and licensing terms have been agreed with all major international music labels-including EMI, Sony BMG, Universal Music Group, and Warner Music - as well as thousands of local music labels.


To add to the discovery and community aspects of PlayNow plus, TrackID charts, generated by Sony Ericsson consumers around the world, are also included. Sony Ericsson plans to include, as part of the service, up to 1000 of recent popular tracks, both locally and globally, with each PlayNow plus phone.

Together with the announcement, PlayNow arena will now also be opening its doors in the UK, the Netherlands, Belgium, Austria and Switzerland in the fourth quarter this year.

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3 Skypephone S2 Reviews

It was a bit less than a year ago that I looked at the original Skypephone. Like the original, the new Skypephone S2 is only available from 3 in the UK. You have two payment options. You can get it on a Pay As You Go basis for £69.99 or on various contracts from free. Online the cheapest contract on which it is free is an 18 month £12 a month deal. The original Skypephone remains available for the time being and will cost you less.


As its name clearly indicates, the Skypephone is intended to help you make use of Skype’s free VoIP calling. Now, you can plonk a Skype client onto other wirelessly enabled mobile devices. Laptops (PC, Mac and Linux), Windows Mobile devices, Nokia’s N800 and N810, and even the PSP. In some cases, it comes pre-installed. But none actually market themselves as made for Skype in the same way as the Skypephone and none have the Skype idea quite so fully integrated.

So, for example, when you switch this handset on, a rolling menu along the bottom of the screen offers you access to various apps including Skype. Choose it and you can sign in or create a new account. If you are already an account holder slapping in your Skype name and password is enough to get you going.

Working from memory, I don’t think the Skype application is much changed from its previous incarnation. If you’ve used Skype on the desktop you shouldn’t have any trouble. The old fair usage policy remains intact too. You get 4,000 Skype to Skype call minutes and 10,000 Skype to Skype IM messages per month.

Call quality was good during testing – in fact better than I can get through my desktop Skype setup at times, though as with any Skype setup I’ve used I did sometimes need to reconnect for better call quality.

Why would 3 want to offer Skype to Skype VoIP calls and Skype IM for free? Isn’t it bad business sense to offer people the chance to make free phone calls?

Well, Skype reckons you’ll use other stuff this handset has to offer that will make it money. It has added Facebook, Windows Live Messenger, an RSS reader (with a 30 feed limit), Google Mail, Google Maps and Google Search to that rolling menu. Then there is general Web browsing to add to the pot. And ordinary voice calls. And the fact that the phone will act as a 3G dongle for your laptop thanks to the provided cables, so hopping onto the 3 network for a bit of HSDPA speed browsing is possible. With all that going on 3 reckons it can make money from users of this handset.

In design terms, this phone is a big step forward from the original Skypephone. The Skypephone S2 feels a lot less plasticky in the hand and its steel backplate and metal keys help make it look and feel like a much higher end handset than its predecessor did. It is small in the hand and pocket at 103mm tall, 45mm wide and 14mm thick and I weighted it at exactly 100g. The screen is a 2.2-inch 320 x 240 pixel offering. It is a bit small for Web browsing, but generally it presented no problems.

The black and sliver livery works well, and I like the large select button. The D-pad forms a relatively thin frame that surrounds the select button, while the softmenu, Call, End, menu and clear keys are also thin. They are arranged in two C shapes to the left and right of the D-pad. Beneath them, the number keys are long silver lozenges. All the keys are well raised from their surroundings and I found I could use them at about two thirds of top speed. The stubby fingered may find them a bit a fiddly.

Side keys amount to left-mounted volume rockers, a right-mounted camera key and a right-mounted carousel interface key. This calls up that rolling menu from whatever application you are in at the time. Each press cycles you through the apps list and pressing the D-pad button switches into the highlighted one.

This is a supremely clever idea as it means you don’t need to resort to the handset's main menu to get to apps on the phone. Even better, you can add apps and websites to the switcher. But this doesn’t seem to go as far as it could. It seems that the list of apps you can add is limited to the on-board games.

It is a real shame there is no front-facing camera for two-way video calling. The back-mounted camera shoots at 3.2-megapixles and as you can see from my test shots it leaves a bit to be desired. Many of the test shots I took were fuzzy. The coloured dish photographed indoors under normal household lights is lacklustre. The flowers show the fuzziness problem well, though colour reproduction is acceptable. The chair is quite sharp and its white quite uniform, although detail in areas of strong highlights is completely lost. Overall, I have seen better from a 3.2-megapixel camera.

The phone has 50MB of built in memory and a microSD card slot very inconveniently located under the battery. It plays music and, on my rundown test, delivered precisely six hours of tunes. 3 says the handset is good for 410 minutes of talk and 262 hours on standby. Sadly, the headphones share the PC connectivity and mains power mini USB socket. A 3.5mm headset would have been so much better.

Other apps not mentioned include a Web browser, three alarms, calendar, calculator, notepad, stopwatch and voice recorder.

Verdict

If you are a keen Skype user, this handset could be an ideal buy. I do have some niggles but 3 has certainly moved its Skypephone concept on, considerably, since its first outing.

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LG KS360 Reviews

LG has been quite busy with its mobile phone launches of late. We’ve had the KC550 bringing 5-megapixels to pay as you go, the touch-control toting KF510, and who can forget the sometimes fully touchscreened Secret KF750?

Each of these handsets offers something different, and the KS360 I have in my hands right now is different again. It will be available initially on Orange and later on O2, on both contract and prepay. Final pricing wasn’t confirmed as I wrote this review, though.

The black and blue front fascia and disjointed D-Pad made up of five round buttons is different enough to be eye catching. Two more round buttons map to the softmeus. All of these buttons are quite small but their raised shaping meant I had no trouble using them.

Two raised pressure pads give you Call and End features, while two more provide a Cancel function and link to a dial pad. These are smaller again than the buttons, but their icons make them easy to find and hit accurately.


The dial pad is interesting. Once called up, the screen suddenly becomes touch sensitive complete with haptic feedback. It works really well, but the screen is only touch sensitive for this one application.

Nestled away inside the phone and ready to pop out of the right long edge when required is a keyboard with a full qwerty pad of keys.

Now, I am more than used to seeing keyboards which slide out like this, but they tend to come on higher end handsets sporting Windows Mobile and aimed at the professional or semi-professional user. The KS360 certainly isn’t in that camp being more of a handset for consumers looking for something mid-range.

The keyboard carries on the blue theme from the front fascia but where it was subtly used there, it is the main colour here for both keys and backplate. The embedded number pad keys sit against a grey background as does a diamond-shaped arrangement of embedded cursor keys. The OK and softmenu keys are grey, the Fn key golden, but the remainder of the keys are blue.

When you slide the keyboard out the screen flips into wide format and you are ready to type.

What will you be typing? Well, this phone does support mobile email so you could tap out messages, but with tri-band GSM, GPRS and EDGE on hand but no 3G you could find this is not the ideal handset for that task. No, you are most likely to tap out SMS messages, use IM and do a spot of social networking.

My review sample was hardwired to Orange and the left softkey had links to, among other things, Orange Messenger for IM and to ‘social networks’. Choose the latter and you go online where there are links to bebo, Facebook and Myspace - you also get links to Flickr, YouTube and, er, Dating Direct.

There is a warning at the YouTube link about it being data intensive, which might help you avoid racking up a huge phone bill. Also likely to turn you off is the fact that over a non 3G connection videos come down slowly.

I found the keyboard a little fiddly to get used to. The keys are well spaced but they aren’t very well raised from the backplate. I never did get totally accurate when working with the pads of my thumbs. I was much more accurate using the nails on my thumbs as I could sight the keys I wanted rather than find them by touch. I never got up to very fast speeds though. In comparison with other phone keyboards this one doesn’t rate too highly on ergonomics.


The already mentioned screen is sharp and bright. It measures 2.4in across diagonal corners and its 240 x 320 pixels and 262,000 colours are up to the job. The overall size of this phone when the keyboard is put away makes the screen seem larger than it really is – which is no bad thing. For the record, then, the KS360 measures 101.5mm tall, 51mm wide and 16.8mm thick. I weighs it at 110g.

Music playback is catered for by on board software. This is fairly rudimentary. It can’t manage playlists or show album art, and there aren’t even controls for shuffle or repeat so you are left selecting tunes to listen to one at a time.

Tracks stored on a microSD card (the slot is on the right edge of the casing) have to be in a folder called Sounds if the software is to find them. You’ll probably need to use a card as there is just 15MB of memory built in. My review sample didn’t come with a headset so I couldn’t try this, but I can report that the connector is proprietary so you’ll need a converter for your own favourite earphones.

When it comes to the camera you are limited to shooting stills at resolutions up to 2-megapixels. There is a side button which launches the camera and can be used to take photos. It is on the lower left edge rather than the more usual right edge, as this is occupied by the sliding keyboard. This means you need to use phone left handed when in camera mode, tapping the camera button with your left forefinger. Lefties will be happy and it isn’t difficult for righties either, it’s just different.

The camera lacks a flash or autofocus. Image quality is OK if all you want is a quick throw away snap, but not up to much more. The coloured dish photographed indoors under ordinary household lights is dull and lacking in vibrancy. The chair photographed outside has definite blue and pink tones to what should be its uniform white. The tomatoes were photographed fairly close in, and show that close focus is a challenge for this phone.

There is a Web browser on board but it isn’t all that good. It wouldn’t load the TrustedReviews home page saying the content was too large. So I guess you are taking your chances with what it will and won’t cope with.

In addition to what’s already been mentioned you get a calendar, memo maker, alarm, voice recorder, calculator, stopwatch, unit converter, world clock and a couple of games.

Verdict

The quirky design of this handset is appealing, and the one-function dialler touch screen is very useful. The keyboard isn’t the most ergonomic I’ve seen, but frequent texters might find it a boon.

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Nokia 6210 Navigator Reviews

Last year Nokia released its 6110 Navigator phone, the first in the company’s line-up to have dedicated sat-nav features and sport the Navigator branding. It came into my office along with a flurry of other mobiles and never quite made it to the front of my review pile but its successor, the 6210 Navigator, has. It isn’t widely available as I write this but I did find it from Vodafone for free on a £30 contract.

This handset looks rather like the 6220 Classic, which I reviewed at the tail end of July. That phone is a candybar, this one is a slider, but the general button design and shiny plastic front fascia make the handsets look like near-identical twins.


The key selling point of the 6210 Navigator, it won’t surprise you to hear, is its navigation features. You may remember that Nokia recently bought navigation specialist Navteq. Even before that acquisition was announced almost a year ago now, Nokia had already been addressing GPS and navigation with its work on Nokia Maps and the integration of receivers into its handsets.

So the 6210 Navigator is in many ways just a step along the road for Nokia. But it does represent quite a significant step in that it is a smaller, neater phone than the 6110 was, and shows that Nokia is getting a grip on how to do the GPS thing properly.

It is a shame, though, that while several other higher end features accompany the GPS, there is no Wi-Fi here. Nokia just doesn’t want to give away all its goodies at once too often, does it?

General handling of this phone is very positive. At 103mm tall, 49mm wide and 14.9mm thick it feels comfortable in the hand. Slide the number pad into view and the handset becomes about 130mm tall. It weighs an acceptable 117g.

The casing is undeniably plastic, and it may not absorb many drops from heights before it cracks, but that is not exactly a novel point to make about a mobile phone.

The key positioning and construction is generally positive. A huge D-pad is flanked by Clear and Nokia Menu keys. Call and End keys and two softmenu keys are large and easy to hit accurately. Beneath them and centrally located is the four-pointed star shaped Navigator key. Press this and Nokia Maps immediately fires up, the key becomes backlit with blue, and you enter navigation mode.

Open the slide and the number pad is accessible. Its keys are as large as the available area allows, and responsive to use. Texting at speed should not present many problems.
The screen is relatively large at 2.4 inches across the diagonal and its 320 x 240 pixels are no surprise. It needs to be sharp and bright to compete with dedicated sat-nav systems but, here, the screen is only a partial success.

It did perform quite well outdoors but in direct sunlight, readability does suffer. If you want to use this handset for in-vehicle or pedestrian navigation and want to see the on-screen maps clearly, hope that it is not an especially sunny day.

The integrated GPS with A-GPS support works alongside a pre-loaded copy of Nokia Maps software. The handset comes with a 1GB microSD card that has local maps pre-installed. Less than 200MB of storage was occupied on my review sample card leaving you plenty of space for your own data. This alone won’t give you point-to-point navigation but the phone does come complete with 6-months subscription to Nokia’s point-to-point navigation service.

The HSDPA connection to 3.6Mbps is good for Web browsing and Nokia’s own browser copes well with websites. A menu option flips the Web browser into wide format – I couldn’t make the phone’s built in accelerometer do this for me, though it was a little flakey all round in my review sample. There is also, incidentally, what Nokia calls ‘turning control’. You can silence an incoming call or snooze an alarm simply by turning the phone face down. Not original, but potentially handy.

A front-facing camera caters for two-way video calling and the main camera sits on the back of the casing. There is no lens cover, but the lens is slightly inset from its surroundings offering some protection against scratching. There is a flash and autofocus. The side mounted camera shortcut button is a long way down the right edge of the phone – I’d have preferred it about a third of the way down where it sits more readily under the forefinger. You can use the central D-pad button to shoot instead though.

The camera shoots stills at 3.2-megapixels. Quality was not really up to what I’d expect, with all the photos losing refinement around the edges of the subjects. The coloured dish photographed under normal household lighting ought to have a white background, too, so the balance is a little off here. The dish itself is reasonably well reproduced, though.

Outdoors, things are better. The whites of the chair are pretty accurate, with minimal signs of any colour shifts, although some highlights are blown out. Colour-wise, the tomatoes aren’t too bad either, but it's easy for the autofocus to get a little confused, especially at close range. Overall, though, we have seen better results from other cameraphones.

The phone plays music of course. Its 120MB memory is augmented by the provided 1GB microSD card. The headset connector is a 2.5mm type and is one-piece. There is also an FM radio if you get bored of listening to your own tunes.

A microUSB connector sits on the left side of the phone. Nokia doesn’t provide a cable but if you get one you’ll be able to access the handset’s memory from your PC.

There is a huge array of additional features, as you would expect in a Symbian S60 3rd edition handset. In the Office folder, Nokia provides such goodies as QuickOffice (licensed only for viewing and not for creating documents), the Adobe PDF reader, a note taker, calculator, calendar, unit converter and Nokia’s ActiveNotes software, which lets you create notes that contain images and other objects.

Among the array of extras on the handset, you’ll find Nokia’s podcast downloader, support for Widsets, mobile email, calculator, voice recorder and a couple of games including one that uses the accelerometer.

Verdict

The camera's sharpness and indoor performance is a bit lacklustre, which is a shame, but if you want integrated GPS in your phone and fancy half a year’s free trial of point-to-point navigation, this could be what you need.

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More IDP-100 pictures

2 weeks ago, Sony Ericsson also annouced one very good accessory. Digital Photo Frame IDP-100. And here more some pics of IDP-100.

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Beautiful G705 and G705u pictures

The day has come. Today Sony Ericsson officially presented to us the G705. The 2.4” screen enhances the premium web experience, whether you are searching Google™ direct from your idle screen, checking emails through the phone’s Exchange ActiveSync™ capabilities or using Wi-Fi™ to access the latest news. The G705 lets you juggle your day the easy way.








Also today Sony Ericsson announced the G705u, the first UMA enabled phone from Sony Ericsson. UMA enables users to seamlessly roam between the mobile network and local area networks thanks to GSM/Wi-Fi™ dual capabilities. Like W595s, G705u is exclusive to the operator Orange in its territories.

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