Mobile Phone News:

News has come through to us from Latest-Mobile, that the first access version of Nokia’s N-Gage platform, part of their new Ovi portal, has launched, gone live, and is now rocking people’s socks round the world.

At the moment, it supports the Nokia N81 and N81 8Gb, since that phone was always optimised to use Ovi (and N-Gage games, since it has dedicated game controls), but it’s a pretty safe bet it will be rolled out across other Nseries phones. To try out the First Access service, you need to download the software to your phone, and you can get that from Nokia’s N-Gage site.

Of course, it’s not just about games, as Nokia have also launched their very own social networking site called Share On Ovi, which lets Nokia users share photo and video content. So, think along the lines of Facebook, but for a Nokia mobile phone.

Interesting times are indeed ahead, and if the biggest name in the mobile business is going down this route, then it’s a fairly safe bet others will do the same. Sony Ericsson have their PlayNow music download service, the iPhone obviously has iTunes, and so on, so the big push towards a completely life appears to have started in earnest!

Leave us a comment and have your say!

Those wonderful Japanese have just completed a study on the link between mobile phone use and cancer. Their findings? Mobile phone use does not raise the risk of brain tumours.

The research is the first to look at the effects of hand set radiation levels on different parts of the brain.

Tokyo Women’s Medical University found no increased risk of the three main types of brain cancer among regular mobile phone users.

The study, comparing 322 brain cancer patients and 683 healthy people, appears in British Journal of Cancer.

The cancer patients had one of the three most common types of brain tumour - glioma, meningioma or pituitary adenoma.

The researchers rated each subject according to how many years they had been using a mobile phone, and how long they spent talking on it each day.

They studied the radiation emitted from various types of mobile phone, and placed them into one of four categories relating to radiation strength.

And they also analysied how each phone was likely to affect different areas of the brain.

Lead researcher Professor Naohito Yamaguchi said: “Using our newly developed and more accurate techniques, we found no association between mobile phone use and cancer, providing more evidence to suggest they don’t cause brain cancer.”

Contradictory findings

Previous research on the safety of mobile phones has produced contradictory results.

However, most have suggested no association with an increased risk of cancer.

The largest study to date, involving 420,000 people, failed to find any evidence of a cancer trend even after 10 years of use.

Dr Lesley Walker, of the charity Cancer Research UK, said: “So far, studies have shown no evidence that mobile use is harmful, but we can’t be completely sure about their long-term effects.

Source: BBC News UK

Interesting news arrived in my bloated inbox this morning, apparently Nokia have reported having a 40% wordwide market share in the last quarter of 2007.

Nokia is obviously the leading phone maker in the world with those stats, with an increase from 36% from the forth quarter of 2006 to a 40% share in the fourth quarter of 2007.

The growth has been attributed to sales in the Middle East and Africa, and modest growth in Europe, Asia-Pacific, and Latin America, the phone maker said.

Things aren’t so rosy over in the states however, Nokia’s market share dropped to 5.1%, which is 0.8% less than the share they reported the same time in 2006.

A Nokia spokesperson said “Nokia’s mobile phone net sales grew 5% to 7.4 billion euros (about $10.9 billion), compared with 7.1 billion euros (about $10.5 billion) in the fourth quarter of 2006. Nokia also said it dropped its average selling price from 89 euros (about $131) in the fourth quarter of 2006 to 83 euros (about $123) in the fourth quarter of last year, and sold more entry-level phones. ”

Motorola still hold the crown over in the states as the biggest manufacturer, and according to our stats below, Sony Ericsson as a term is searched more often than Nokia by people buying phones online.

Well apparently those weird and wonderful Japanese have come up with a way to spend their lonely time, by writing novels on mobile phones. Seemingly young women have found that they can use their uber texting skills to write entire novels on the teeny tiny keypads of Japanese phones.

Mobile phone novels have been, until recently dismissed in Japan as a genre which would not take off but the year end best sellers list for 2007 included 5 mobile phone novels in the top 10. Admittedly most of these novels have been republished in book form as opposed to it costing a million pounds to send 4000 concatenated text messages.

Not surprisingly most of the stories are set around love, although they are mostly written in short sentences (just like texting) and don’t really have a deep and meaningful plot.

After doing some research i found this quote which explains how these mobile phone novels got started…

“The mobile phone novel was born in 2000 after a home-page-making website, Maho no i-rando, realised that many users were writing novels on their blogs; it tinkered with its software to allow users to upload works in progress and readers to comment, creating the serialised mobile phone novel. But the number of users uploading novels began booming only two to three years ago, and the number of novels listed on the site reached 1 million last month, according to Maho no i-rando.”

So there you have it kids, instead of happy slapping and uploading it to youtube, maybe you could spend your time writing novels whilst waiting for your friends at the bus stop?

With every man and his dog now a member of Facebook, it doesn’t really come as a great big surprise that some of the mobile phone manufacturers want a piece of this rather large pie.

News comes in today that Nokia are in talks with Facebook to strike up a deal which will see a dedicated Facebook application available on their range of phones. Some people will already know that Facebook developed a special version for the iPhone and also allow access to the platform from standard mobile phone browsers, so i am unsure exactly how this may benefit Nokia other than the coolness factor?

Apparently Nokia may also be looking to buy a small share in Facebook, quoting an unnamed Nokia executive who apparently stated that “a partnership is in the works”. Whilst Nokia’s share will probably be nowhere near as large or expensive as the deal penned between Facebook and Microsoft, it will still be interesting to see what new features they may try and bring to the mobile platform.

As you can see from the graph below Facebook has been growing like crazy over the past year or so and has firmly kicked MySpace into touch. Expect to see a lot more announcements around mobile facebook’ing in the future!

A story’s come through to us from Silicon.com, about a new initiative in Glasgow, where plans are afoot to make it possible for people to use their mobile phones on the subway.

Basically, the problem with using a phone down there has always been… well, you know how sometimes, when you’re in a building, and you lose signal because of being enclosed in walls. Now imagine that, but enclosed under building, foundations, roads, and a LOT of concrete.

You can see why the cell tower might have trouble getting a signal down to you… So, what’s the solution?

Simple. Build your own network infrastructure, underground, with transmitters in the stations. Which is what is being done in Glasgow, meaning you’ll be able to use your mobile phones, your WiFi devices, and in future, even DAB radios and mobile TV devices down there!

London’s going to be running its own trials on this soon, so expect the same thing to happen in the Big Smoke.

Right, here’s one for all you jobbing mobile phone spotters out there. We need your help with this one!!

Take a look at this video for “Anthem” (awesome, awesome song!) by Filo & Peri ft. Eric Lumiere:

(EDIT: who’s Eric Lumiere, eh? Admit it, you don’t know! And neither do I! – Technical Markus)

Now, you’ll see, about half a minute in, a phone. And we don’t know what it is! We can only half identify it, but after staring at it for about 35 minutes, we (and I mean all of us, not just me, Markus and Chewie) think it’s a variant of a Nokia 8210.

Old school, eh?

This where we need your help. Please help us positively identify what phone it is, because it’s starting to annoy us. There’s a virtual chocolate biscuit in it for you if you do, so leave us your suggestions in the comments!

Coming soon to the UK is the latest phone from LG, the LG Venus. Looking at this one alongside its siblings, I think it’s fair to say LG have gone touchscreen mad!

You see, while this may be a follow-up to the LG Chocolate, following the same sliding design, it’s far more advanced. The reason for that is what used to be a navigation key. If you remember back to the Chocolate, that had a nav-key in the middle, with touch-sensitive keys. The new LG Venus, however, has chucked out the idea of a hardware nav-key altogether, and gone with a second screen, juts below the main screen.

That might seem silly, until you realise it’s a touchscreen (told you LG have gone touchscreen mad). You access the phone’s functions by brushing and pressing against that second screen. But, of course, not all the features of the phone will have the same controls, and this is the beauty of having a touchscreen to control it, since the controls will morph and change to match whatever feature you’re using.

So, if you are using the mp3 player, then the screen will show you a play button, a stop button, skip ahead and skip back. If you’re on the LG Venus’s main front screen, it will show you your shortcuts to things like your phonebook or your inbox. Which is really rather clever, and works really rather beautifully. On the sliding bit, you also have a traditional keypad, for actually using the LG Venus as a phone.

And then, of course, you’ve got what’s inside the LG Venus. The specs we’ve seen set the camera at a nicely big 3 megapixels, big enough to give you some really gorgeous photos. You also get a rather rocking mp3 player, which should give your ears all the stimulation they need. And to up the storage space on your phone, whack in a bigger microSD memory card.

As we’ve all said before, though, the mark of a good phone is one that makes you feel good using it. Well, there’s no doubt there, the LG Venus delivers in spades!

Well, we promised we’d keep you up to date on who buckled first and went back to their old ways, so here it, a special guide to how we faired with our New Year’s Resolutions. Just to remind everyone, (and fill those in who didn’t know), these were ours:

Technical Markus: “To stop smoking, but don’t quote me on that…”
John the Gooner: “To drink more”
Chewie: “To eat more fruit”
Gary: “To not say innit after every sentence I say. Innit…”
Melanie: “Get myself a Samsung MiCoach to get myself back to the peak of fitness after the Christmas binge!”

Well, everyone except John and Melanie have broken their resolution! (although let’s be honest, breaking a resolution to drink more isn’t hard, especially in John’s case… and Melanie kind of has, since she hasn’t actually bought a new phone, she’s just run about more…)

But who was the first to crack?

In a surprise victory, it wasn’t Gary (who we all thought it would be) but Technical Markus, who lasted a whole 13 minutes before he broke his New Year’s Resolution.

In his acceptance speech, he said, “I’d like to thank all the people who made this victory a possibility, and once again remind the world that you can win big just by being utterly rubbish at giving stuff up!”

As a reward for being rubbish, we made him wait until last week to get his new P1. That’ll teach him!

Now we’re into the new year proper, we now resume normal service!

Quad-play. It’s a word that’s becoming increasingly common. All it means is providers offering the 4 big essentials in the world of converged services: broadband, landline, TV and mobile. Something like Orange’s Home Max package, with a mobile added on the same bill. That’s quad-play.

Tiscali, one of the biggest names in the world of internet providers, will soon be going all quad-play on us as well, according to this story from The Register. And to do that, they only need to set up the final component, Tiscali Mobile. Well, Tiscali Mobile is on its way!

When they bought out Pipex, they also got control of Toucan Mobile, a virtual network, running on T Mobile’s cell towers (similar to Virgin Mobile). So, in 2008, expect to see Tiscali Mobile being offered alongside their broadband, home phone and TV packages. Rumours suggest their service will be sim-only, but that’s cool, because you get 2 very big benefits from that:

1. It’s cheap.

2. It’s cheap.

So, it’d just be a case of buying an all-in-one package from Tiscali, whacking your broadband on at home, whacking your new sim in your mobile, whacking your set-top box on your telly, and bob’s your uncle!

File this one under “very exciting”!