Mobile Phone Blog:

[The opinions expressed in the blog post are entirely those of the author, and do not necessarily reflect the views of Mobileshop.com.]

Right, well, I promised, didn’t I? I told ya, as soon as I paid enough attention to The Apprentice to notice what phones the “contestants” (I use that word loosely, I prefer the word “pillocks”) are using. And tonight, I’ve done that. And they were all using the Nokia N97. Which is rubbish, ‘cos it doesn’t even allow me to link to a modern phone like the Nokia N8.

Still, at least it was an angle. The Apprentice demonstrably had mobile phones in, and that means I can blog about it.

And that means it’s not going to be pretty, because in my honest and sincere opinion, I am convinced of two things… (more…)

Nokia is reportedly going to unveil its E7 touchscreen smartphone at Nokia World 2010 next week.

Those attending the event in London on September 14 and 15 will be amongst the first to see the phone’s four-inch touchscreen and find out if it will run on Symbian^3 or Meego. (more…)

Ya can’t beat a bit of widget-y goodness in your mobile phone. That’s why I use SPB Mobile Shell on my phone (well, one of the reasons), ‘cos I do like being able to set up the interface exactly as I like it. It’s much the same with Android phones, since they use widgets, too. And now, according to Unwired View, Nokia have done some teasing of what they want the next Symbian interface to look like.

And, you guessed it, it’s gone what I call freeform widget-y.

So, unlike the current Nokia N97 Mini (which uses widgets, but has fixed placement of them), with future-Symbian, you’ll be able to put the widgets wherever the hell you like. So, that brings the Symbian touch interface up to date, to compete against things like the standard Android interface, HTC’s Sense interface, SPB Mobile Shell and, of course, the Maemo interface . That’s a lot of competition (including the Maemo phone made by Nokia themselves, the Nokia N900), so Symbian clearly needed a bit of an overhaul to let it compete against pretty much every UI in the world and their dogs.

It ain’t all about fancy widgets, though. The inclusion of freely movable widgets is all part of the process of moving Symbian over to using the Qt framework, which you really won’t care about unless you’re an app developer. If you’re not (and there’s a high chance that you’re not), then just memorise the following phrase: “Qt will make using Symbian all lovely“.

Of course, by the time phones start coming out with the new Symbian interface (some time in 2011, according to the Symbian Foundation), there’s every chance it won’t look a thing like this UI concept. But at least now we have a vague idea where they’re taking it.

More news as it happens! And be sure to subscribe now to get all the latest action from the world of mobile phones!

By now, you should have cottoned on to the fact I love Opera. Their mobile web browsers are, in my opinion, the best ones out there. And despite the fact I use Opera Mobile (‘cos I can, ‘cos I use Window Mobile), their most important web browser is, without a doubt, Opera Mini. It’s the single most downloaded app in the history of mobile phones, ever, and because it’s a Java app, it can run on any phone that’ll run Java.

Which is, let’s be honest, damn near every modern phone in the world. Except the iPhone. Because Apple are being awkward about letting other browsers on their phones, and won’t approve it.

Today, we have some idea of just how big Opera Mini has become, thanks to statistics published on Opera’s website, relating to usage of Mini in November, 2009. And they’re, erm, quite big. Quite shockingly big, in fact. Let’s start with the worldwide stats, and with the smallest number, specifically, the number of users Opera Mini now has. And since that smallest comes in at 41.7 million, the other numbers are going to be particularly huge.

Like properly huge…

Let’s look at actual pages visited by Opera Mini users next. How many different web pages have been viewed by users of the weeny-yet-powerful web browser? 18.8 BILLION, that’s how many. That’s a 231% increase on November last year, which is, er, not an insubstantial figure!

And finally, for the worldwide stats, we come to actual data traffic. How much data has Opera Mini shifted through the networks’ cell towers, down to users’ phones? Well, I’ve put this one last, because it highlights one of the most important features of Opera Mini. Y’see, 285 million MB of data traffic’s been generated for the various networks round the world. But the big thing about Opera Mini is that it minimises the amount of data shifted down to users’ phones, by rendering web pages on their own servers, which causes less congestion on the network, and makes people’s data usage a lot cheaper.

How much data would have been shifted if they didn’t do that server-side rendering? 2.6 billion MB, or 2.6petabytes, if we’re being pedantic. So, basically, users’ data bills would’ve been about ten times bigger, if they didn’t do that server-side rendering. That’s reason number 1 for it being so popular.

Reason number 2 can be found in the top ten list of phones using Opera Mini in the UK. There is not a sniff of a smartphone in there (well, other than the 5800). No HTC Hero. No Nokia N97. Nothing. What there is, though, is a collection of feature phones, including old stalwarts like the Nokia 6300. Hell, the nearly-three-year-old LG Shine is at the number 3 spot, for god’s sake! And there’s your reason number 2: Opera Mini will run on any phone that has Java, so even someone with an old, generally pretty rubbish LG Shine can get the exact same full internet access as someone with a top-end smartphone.

So, in conclusion, Opera Mini is growing at a massive, massive rate. At this rate, I would suggest it’ll need renaming, some time in January, to Opera Effing-Ginormous…

And if they ever decide not to bother making mobile browsers any more (which they never, ever will, since they effectively own the mobile internet), they so need to call their final browser Opera Fat Lady…

More news as it happens! And be sure to subscribe now to get all the latest action from the world of mobile phones!

The Nokia N900, I’m predicting, has got the chops to be one of the most exciting phones of the year, and it’s all thanks to the OS it’s running on. It’s called Maemo, and it’s the first time we’ve seen a phone running on what I call ‘proper Linux’ (yes, I know Android and the iPhone OS are both built on Linux, but hey, go with it). Up until now, though, we’ve only seen a few, sparse details about what the OS is actually like.

Until now, that is, because Mobile Review have put up a really, really, really exhaustive review of Maemo. And I do mean exhaustive. It’s huge.

But what does it all add up to? Well, the first thing is that is best described as basically being the same OS from their previous internet tablets, with some hints of Symbian S60 (like you get in the Nokia N97) chucked in for good measure. The widget-y front end is particularly nice, and unlike Symbian, you’re not tied to putting widgets in specific places, you can drop ‘em anywhere you want on the home screen. Or should I say home screens, because Maemo’s got the same ‘multiple homescreens’ thing going on as phones like the HTC Hero, or, as in my review yesterday, SPB Mobile Shell for WinMo.

Of course, Nokia are still working on the OS, so there are some bits that aren’t as good as they should be at the minute (notably the web browser’s a bit slow, and the mapping app isn’t as good as Nokia Maps on Symbian phones), but even if Nokia don’t fix everything, the OS is completely open source, and once it gets into the hands of modders, you can guarantee it’ll be taken far beyond what even Nokia come up with.

So, all in all, Maemo still seems to be a work in progress at the minute, but it’s still got the chops to be a really impressive bit of kit. Whether it’ll become as prevalent as Symbian remains to be seen, but at the very least, Maemo is good enough to get me excited about the Nokia N900…

More news as it happens! And be sure to subscribe now to get all the latest action from the world of mobile phones!

Way, way back in the dim and distant days of yore June, I ran a blog post about the xpPhone, the first ever phone in the world to run on Windows XP. Back then, I said that if it ever actually made it into production, I wanted to have a play with one, whilst of course making it clear I didn’t think it would make it into production.

I was wrong.

According to Pocketables, the xpPhone will be available soon. And I’m genuinely torn, because there’s a part of me going “ooh, a phone with XP on, this is gonna be sweeeeeeeeeeeet“. Unfortunately, though, there’s another part of me going “ooh, a phone with XP on, that’s never gonna have enough power to run smoothly, and the battery life will be bobbins“.

And for a mobile phone, yes, the battery life is bobbins. The manufacturers, ITG, are quoting standby and usage times of 5 days and 12 hours respectively.

When the device is billed as a phone, that’s not so great. However, if you look at it as a mini laptop, then yeah, that battery ain’t bad at all. That’s my one overriding problem with the xpPhone, if I’m honest. It doesn’t really know what it is. I admire the fact the manufacturer’s tried to slam together the worlds of mobile phones and laptops, to make a new, hybrid, uber-powerful beastie. I just don’t think they’ve succeeded. And, let’s be honest, if you want a mobile version of Windows, we kind of already have that. It’s called Windows Mobile…

However, I’m going to end on a positive, because there’s one thing about the xpPhone that’s made of pure win, and that’s storage. In the mobile world, you’ve got phones like the Palm Pre with 8Gb of memory, and the Nokia N97, with a massive 32Gb of memory.

The xpPhone tops them, because you can have both 64Gb of solid-state memory and a 120Gb hard drive in it, at the same time. That’s quite an awful lot of storage space, that is.

It’s just a shame that I don’t reckon the rest of the phone can possibly live up to that…

More news as it happens! And be sure to subscribe now to get all the latest action from the world of mobile phones!

Gawd bless my sister and her Lovefilm subscription. And gawd bless my sister for having a broadly similar taste in films as me. Oh, and of course, gawd bless her for accidentally telling me her username and password, so I can add films I want to see onto her list (Mega Shark Versus Giant Octopus, you will be mine).

But I digress. Thanks to her subscription, I got to see the film Wanted last night. I’ve been wanting to see that fillum for a while, what with it: 1/ being based on a Mark Millar comic; 2/ being directed by that Timur Bekmambetov bloke, what did Night Watch; and 3/ featuring Angelina Jolie in a wax bath…

Oh, and mobile phones. Well, a mobile phone. A Nokia 8800 to be precise, that looked most like an Arte, so that’s what I’m saying it was. As for the film itself, it gleefully lived up to what I expected from it (since I’d seen both Night Watch and Day Watch, and they were MENTAL). I do like films where the director takes a look at the laws of physics, and decides he’s having none of it.

So, we get a film that has a chase scene in which a big ol’ delivery van keeps up with a Dodge Viper. We have a film in which the Dodge Viper in said chase scene does a flip over a police roadblock, lands on the side of a bus, makes the bus falls on its side, and then drives off the bus and keeps going. We have a film in which Angelina Jolie needs to get from the Lada she’s driving onto a train, and so, drives the Lada into the side of the train.

And, of course, as in all the trailers, we have a film in which the main characters in it can curve bullets through the air, sort of flinging them round corners when they’re shooting.

Mental.

And awesomely good fun. Oh, and very sweary. And, surprisingly, with a really rather decent plot, that’s all twisty and keeps you guessing, right up until the end. Oh, and it’s got Angelina Jolie in, let’s not forget, and she must be an android, or an alien, ‘cos she’s far too ephemerally beautiful to be a mere human.

Plus, she never seems to age.

Kinda makes up for the phone in it not being something like the Nokia N97, but I suppose, since it’s about uber-incredible assassins, that having a smartphone would be just overegging the cake…

Have you seen Wanted? Did you giggle like a seven-year-old as it gleefully broke ALL the laws of physics? Leave us a comment and have your say!

Synchronicity is a wonderful thing, innit. Me and m’good buddy were talking about future phones the other night, after seeing the Xperia Pureness, with its translucent display, and we both agreed that the future would be phones stamped directly onto our eyeballs. A bit extreme, you may think.

But then, today, I saw this concept video from Nokia, and whilst the phone isn’t directly laser-welded onto her retina (and, granted, she’s also got an N97 as the main phone), it is embedded in her glasses…

Essentially, it takes augmented reality to a whole new level, and projects things like her texts and music player onto the glasses. And then, it gets all sci-fi, because she controls the selection of things like music to play by moving her eyes. The glasses can ‘sense’ what she’s looking at, and move the menu selector highlight thing there. Nokia call it Mixed Reality, although, to be fair, given the presence of the Nokia N97 in that video, it looks more like a clever accessory than an actual ‘phone built into a pair of glasses’ to me.

And I still reckon it won’t take off. People like having a phone they can hold, and touch, and, most importantly (this is human nature, after all), show off to their mates.

Oh come on, everyone does it. You know everyone does it. I did it with my X1, my mate did it with his HTC Touch Pro2. Everyone does it…

Still, it’s an intriguing concept for an accessory, so we’ll have to wait and see how this one plays out…

More news as it happens! And be sure to subscribe now to get all the latest action from the world of mobile phones!

There must be something in the air, today. That’s three separate phones, launched today, that have got X in the name. The first one was, obviously, the Sony Ericsson X2 Xperia. But before I get round to those two, the other big news, according to GSMArena, is the Nokia N97 Mini has gone official.

I won’t spend a lot of time on that one, since I’ve talked about it a lot, and you can guess exactly what the phone will be like, just from the name.

And if you didn’t guess ‘like a Nokia N97 but a bit smaller’, then may I suggest some form of counselling. But anyway, yes, the Nokia N97 Mini has been officially announced, with a 5MP camera, a full QWERTY keyboard, and a slightly smaller screen than the big N97. That’s not the big news for me, though. The big news is an entirely new product series, presumably called the Xseries. Given the specs of the two Xseries phones announced so far, I’ll go out on a limb (although not much of one), and say the Xseries is the new, official home of XpressMusic phones.

First up, there’s the Nokia X3, the lower specced phone of the two. There’s no touchscreen, and it doesn’t run on Symbian S60, so it’s very definitely a feature phone, albeit a feature phone with a 3 megapixel camera. However, the big draw is that the Nokia X3 is the first non-Symbian phone to have the Ovi Store, letting you download music, games and extra content as easily as you would on something like the Nokia 5530. In other words, we’re talking entry-level uber-phone, with the Nokia X3, a bizarre notion, I know, but one that seems to be a very accurate description.

Finally, there’s the Nokia X6, and this one’s got me a bit excited, as it’s quite clearly the replacement for the 5800. So, you’re looking at S60 Touch, a 3.2 inch touchscreen, a 5MP camera, GPS and, of course, the Ovi Store. The intriguing news, though, is that the Nokia X6 will only be available on Nokia’s Comes With Music package.

So, three new Nokia phones announced, and in the same day, three phones with X in the name. Cosmic significance, or divine intervention?

Well, no, obviously not, but I needed a line to end this blog post on, and that was as good as any other…

More news as it happens! And be sure to subscribe now to get all the latest action from the world of mobile phones!

Ahhh, here we go, another one in my ongoing series of blog posts, where I point at luxury phones and go, “Er, how much??” You’ve probably seen some of these posts before, and if so, you’ll know that one of the main targets I point at is Vertu. There’s a good reason for that, because the prices on them things are just huge, especially when you consider they can all be best described as a Nokia with a fancy hat on.

And I don’t mean a top-end one like the Nokia N97, no. I mean a 3310.

Well, today, I have something else besides the phone to point at disbelievingly. Y’see, according to IntoMobile, Vertu are launching their own virtual network in Japan. Normally I wouldn’t give two hoots about a Japanese network, because it has no bearing whatsoever on my life, or on your life, on anything in this country, really. But there’s one simple reason why I’ve decided to do a post about it.

The price.

Seriously, you wait till you see how much it costs. Whatever tariff you’re on, you’ll never complain about high charges again. I’m not kidding, the Vertu tariff would set you back just under £350 (52,500 yen) per month. THREE-HUNDRED AND FIFTY POUNDS. EVERY. BLEEDIN’. MONTH.

Dear god…

Oh, and it gets better. That price doesn’t include the price of the phone. Handset subsidies? What are those?

So, essentially, if you lived in Japan, and wanted a Vertu on the bespoke Vertu tariff, what would it cost you in total? Well, the tariff, over 12 months, would cost you in the region of £3822. The cheapest Vertu I can find would cost you an extra three grand on top of that. So, you’d be looking at a minimum of £6822. And that’s an absolute bare minimum, depending on which phone you go for, the whole package, over one year, could cost you upwards of £20,000 (or however many yen that is). Of course, you get the Concierge service with it, but having that just tells the world you’re too lazy to book your own air tickets or whatever…

I think I need to go and have a lie down after seeing those numbers…

Vertu – simply the best phones in existence, or overpriced tat for people with more money than sense? Leave us a comment and have your say!