Mobiele Telefonie

Top Ten Mobile Phone News Stories of the Week

Enjoy our roundup of some of the best mobile phone stories that you may have missed this week: 1.  Another New LG Phone Revealed! Obviously the massive amount of new LG phones spotted this week wasn’t quite enough, as we have another to add to the list.  The GW370 Shannon is a side-slider with a QWERTY keyboard and a touchscreen.  Little else is known at this stage, but this could be the official replacement for the KS360. 2.  HTC Supersonic On Video. This is potentially the next superphone from HTC.  The Supersonic is rumoured to be an Android phone with the ability to run on a WIMAX network – that’s 4G speeds folks!  The video is hardly what you’d call revealing, but it shows the Supersonic is on its way! 3.  Who Will the Apple iPad Go To? Apple execs are in the UK this week to talk to Orange, Vodafone and O2 on the subject of 3G tariffs for their forthcoming iPad tablet.  Although Apple previously gave O2 exclusivity over the iPhone, they are not expected to grant such a deal this time. 4.  Still No Love for the Nexus One. According to The Register, the analysts over at Goldman Sachs have cut their sales estimates of Google’s phone by 70%, which they speculate is due to a poor response from those carriers who offer the phone, as it’s sold via Google’s own website.  Is it really any wonder?  No customer contact means no way to upsell, meaning the majority won’t care. 5.  Mexican Phone Tycoon Becomes World’s Richest Man. Carlos Slim has ascended to the top of the Forbes world’s richest list with a fortune of $53 billion.  He owns, amongst other things, the Mexican mobile phone carrier Telmex and is the first non-American to reach the top spot since 1994. 6.  Nokia Patent Kinetic Battery. Although a patent is no guarantee something will ever go into production, we have a feeling this one may make an appearance in the future.  The Nokia developed Piezoelectric Kinetic Energy Harvester would allow a battery power top up by shaking the phone or presumably, just by general movement too. 7.  Sony Ericsson Unbox the X10. Excited about the Xperia X10?  Want that excitement ruined by Sony Ericsson themselves?  If so, then this video is for you, as it shows those crazy folk over at Sony Ericsson unboxing the nearly-here X10!  To show real brand synergy, they’ve shot the video on a Vivaz HD too. 8.  Your Mobile Knows How You Feel. The first of three news stories from Japan this week concerns a new technology which will let the person on the other end of the line know your mood, even if it changes mid-conversation.  Sensors in the phone casing detect electrical resistance alterations, then sends the data to the other phone, causing it to heat up if your mood is angry or excited! 9.  Lotta Certainly Doesn’t Describe the Spec-list! The Lotta phone concept has been created by a Japanese designer for a company who like phones with cool designs and the minimum of features.  It’s certainly that, as there is no exterior screen on the flip phone, a simple two-tone colour scheme and a traditional alphanumeric keypad.  Looks great though! 10.  Oi! Get Back to Work! Japanese phone company KDDI have been hard at work on a new technology that tracks the movements of workers, then sends the information back to their bosses, who can then see if said worker is working hard enough!  Talk of efficiency and performance evaluation disguises the fact that all this does is invade staff privacy!

Phones Fund Forbes’ Richest Man

Forbes have pronounced that the richest man in the world is Carlos Slim, who sounds more like an action movie character than an entrepreneur despite dominating the Mexican mobile phone industry. And the Mexican regular phone industry, and those of several other Latin American countries.  His three sons head the companies Teléfonos de México, Telcel and América Móvil, and his net worth is now 35.7 billion pounds (36 if you neglect that trivial little three hundred million dollars). To his credit he doesn’t seem to care about the title, because having that much money and still seeking reassurance would be tragic (like Alexander Lebedev, who threatened to sue the magazine if they didn’t put him back on the billionaires list).  The top positions are a powerful indicator of our information age: a mobile phone magnate, Bill Gates the mass-market operating system provider, and stockpicker Warren Buffet – whose entire occupation is based only on the availability and interpretation of data.

A Guide to Bluetooth 3.0 – Samsung Leading the Way

This week, news of a new Samsung touchscreen phone has hit the wires.  So far it’s only known as the SHW-M120S and that it will likely have a 3.3″ AMOLED screen and run Google’s Android operating system.  Samsung have another 3.3″ touchscreen phone coming out soon, the Samsung Wave, which will run their new Bada OS; so could these two have been separated at birth, one raised by Google, the other by Samsung?  We’ll have to wait for an answer when the M120S is pictured. The screen is not the only feature which links these two either, as Bluetooth 3.0 is set to appear on the pair.  This is going to be one of the big new technology features of 2010, with Samsung appearing to lead the pack, but just how different is Bluetooth 3.0 to the version we have now?  Here is a guide to keep you informed: What is Bluetooth? You probably have already used Bluetooth, as it’s present on most mobile phones today.  It’s a short range wireless connection used primarily for sharing data between two phones, but it’s also used in everything from a Playstation 3 and a Nintendo Wii to many computers to communicate with a wireless keyboard or mouse. What is the Latest Version Available? The version found on several new phones is Bluetooth v2.1+EDR.  EDR stands for Enhanced Data Rate and is designed to provide higher data transfer speeds, with a theoretical maximum of 3Mbps.  Other benefits of 2.1 include NFC cooperation and numerous performance and efficiency upgrades. What’s New in 3.0? There has been a major change to the way Bluetooth works with version 3.0, indicated by using its full title: Bluetooth 3.0 HS – with the HS standing for High Speed.  Whereas with a 2.1EDR connection you may see speeds of 2Mbps, with 3.0HS the transfer speeds could reach a maximum rate of 24Mbps!  This has been achieved by changing the way the two devices communicate with each other. The familiar Bluetooth system will still be used to connect your phone with another, but once this has been completed, the actual transfer of data will be handed over to an 802.11 radio protocol, the same used by your wireless Internet router at home. Sending one 7MB music file to your friend with Bluetooth 2.0 took a few minutes, but sending an album or a video of 500MB would have been unthinkable, unless you had several hours to kill.  This won’t be the case with 3.0 though, as not only will you be able to send big files between phones, but you could realistically synchronise your computer’s music player too.  Bluetooth themselves also suggest that with such high speeds, video content could be sent from a device to a TV screen quickly enough for it to stream – great for the latest HD video camera phones! Now, we know what you’re thinking, such speeds will make short work of your battery, right?  Not so, as the efficiency of using the 802.11 protocol provides power savings rather than the other way around. What Devices Have Been Announced with Bluetooth 3.0? The Samsung S8500 Wave is official and will come with 3.0, otherwise there is just the as yet unseen M120S.  Bluetooth 3.0 will be officially available at the end of April, so it’s reasonable to expect other phones to feature the system soon after that. Will My Bluetooth v2.1 Be Useless? No, it will still work as before and best of all, there is a chance that older Bluetooth versions will be upgradeable to the new v3.0 with a simple firmware tweak!  There are no definite details just yet, but we can keep our fingers crossed!

Crazy Crossover Contraptions

Mankind has made it to the moon with incredible technology – technology which is often advanced by some lunatic slapping two crazy things together and being right about it working. One man thought sticking flammable liquid on wheels would work well, another thought teaching fused sand to think was possible, while a third fell onto some bread while running with scissors. But for every high-tech hybrid there are thousands of embarrassing failures, and here we see three that’d be laughed off the set of Dragon’s Den: Kid’s Edition. 1.  Telepathic pinball Congratulations are in order for the Berlin Brain-Computer Interface research consortium, who found the one piece of technology in existence which isn’t made cooler by mind control. The whole point of pinball is the physical interaction with metal and machine, the true tactile feel which turns two flippers into a game of skill, the psychic scream as fiendishly-harnessed physics flings your ball through the precisely machined gap between the flippers for the third time in a row. That’s why computer pinball games are like tofu burgers, and even less fun to play with. Unless you’re Professor Xavier you can’t tilt the machine, and the BBCI aren’t fooling anyone: pinball machines are big and bright, but it doesn’t distract from the fact that it still takes more computer than the average person owns to control just two flipper buttons. 2.  Wolverine-branded TV I'm the best there is at what I do, which is make money for Marvel. We started with the image because there was no way to describe this without at least implying you’re an idiot: it’s a thousand pound television branded by Marvel to look like Wolverine.  And by “branded” we mean “colored yellow for added ‘we picked his stupidest costume ever for this’ kudos.”  If you’re aware that televisions normally display something else when they’re in use, that being what differentiates them from incredible expensive and fragile pictures that people like staring at, well done on being better at technology than Marvel.  Who own Iron Man. But don’t worry, the TV makes sure you see the incredible expensive branding by displaying the Wolverine “splash screen” for eight seconds every time you turn it on, or in other words, you’re paying £125 per second to prevent your set from showing the actual program while punching yourself in the skull shouting “I’m an idiot!”  And if you’re not doing that last bit, you should be. 3.  IBM Jeopardizes Computer Technology IBM announced plans to build a computer capable of winning at Jeopardy last April, and unfortunately it wasn’t on the 1st.  Because they’ve really done it.  The “Watson” system is being trained to defeat human contenders who’ve won on the actual TV show, and if there’s a more pointless use of over four tons of computer hardware we’ve yet to see it.  You could try making Pentium chips in a deep-fat fryer and still not be wasting technology as pointlessly. A giant megacomputer forced to play daytime TV - it's like we're trying to create Skynet Even worse than the concept is the idiotic “no internet” restriction on the project – Watson isn’t allowed to go online to answer questions, aka “The whole reason a computer could be better at this”, and it isn’t like they can train it to Deep Thought deduce its way to any answer.  If it isn’t connected to the internet you just have to copy most of the damn thing onto local hard drives, which is why the shameful machine’s bigger than a Land Rover but less useful than a Robin Reliant.  You could not create a more pointless task for a robot mind without entering it in a “Scratch Yourself” competition. Only one thing stops us from calling for the project’s shutdown:  IBM may be outfoxing artificial intelligence by training it to beat only our most worthless humans at our most pointless activities.  Then when the machines attack, they won’t use their superior combat strength but insist on shouting “What is the capital of Assyria?” And we can say that in safety because Watson’s not allowed online.