Digital Trends
There’s only so much you can do to dress up a classic clamshell cell phone. But as Nokia proved at this year’s CTIA, there’s also always room for improvement.
The Nokia 7205 Intrigue, a phone we already profiled when it was first announced, proved to be just as agreeable in real life as in Nokia’s packet of glossy press photos. It’s slim, slippery, and just distinctive enough to draw eyes without turning into a spectacle.
With Clear’s WiMAX mobile Internet service now blanketing Baltimore, Portland, and many more cities to come, Samsung has decided to roll the dice on the fledging standard’s success and release a mobile Internet device (MID) with WiMAX built in and running Windows Mobile 6.1. We sat down with the long-rumored and now-revealed Mondi at the company’s CTIA booth.
Last we saw Nokia’s fabled N97, the high-profile prototype was tethered to a company representative’s waist at CES, and crowds were lining up just to get a minute or two to play. This time around, we managed to get some breathing room with the yet-to-be-released phone, and it’s quite a machine.
As you may recall, one of the biggest names in GPS seemed to be on the rocks around CES time this year, since Mio’s parent company Mitec snapped Magellan up in December. And with the umbrella company already having merged the European Navman brand into its homegrown Mio brand, it looked as if Magellan might be assimilated the same way.
Not so, says Raphel Finelli, Magellan’s senior manager of public relations. We caught with him at Magellan’s MobileFocus booth on Wednesday night, and got the details on its mysterious position following the merger. According to Finelli, Magellan is still alive and kicking under Mitec, and if anything, it’s Mio that will be merged into it.
We never actually had a chance to try them ourselves, but we’re told Jabra’s original BT8030 Bluetooth headset made a fine music-and-talk solution short of one fatal flaw: it’s gigantic. The good folks at Jabra apparently went back to the drawing board and invested in a shrink ray to produce the new Halo headset, unveiled at CTIA, which sports many of the same features but has seemingly been hammered down to near paper-thin proportions.
After hearing that you could actually silence rings from Sony-Ericsson’s new T707 fashion phone with a simple wave of the hand over the phone, we were a little bit surprised to hear that the company was building such innovative new technology into a phone built primarily for looks. As it turns out, there’s not much to it.
According to a Sony-Ericsson rep, the hovering tech is a simple feat of optical recognition, using the already-built-in camera. When the phone rings, it automatically turns on the camera, which, if you’ve set it down on the table properly, is facing up. Code within the phone simply looks for a hand waving, and it triggers the ring to mute.
Although Nokia debuted the original version of its just-announced E71x – the E71 – all the way back in 2008, it didn’t manage to capture too much attention in the States simply because it only became available here in an unsubsidized form. And you would really have to be a Nokia devotee to swallow its $400 price tag without thinking twice. That said, with the magic of carrier subsidizes, the same phone is now making waves around the country thanks to AT&T, which will be offering it for an extraordinarily reasonable $99.
Though most cell phone companies were quick to jump on the touch-screen bandwagon with unabashed iPhone imitators, Motorola has, for the most part, stuck to its tried-and-true physical keypad models in recent years. It seems to have finally caved this year, though with the introduction of the QA4 Evoke.
In true Motorola style, there’s plenty of polished chrome and curvy corners on this phone, but also an obviously Apple-like home button below the 2.8-inch WVGA screen that brings you back to a grid array of icons. In other words, this is Motorola’s first real shot at the iPhone.
Consumers have been complaining about the problems associated with DRM technology on their music files: songs can’t be transferred between devices, shared with friends, backed up easily, and (in some cases) quick working altogether because an online music service decided to call it quits. Verizon Wireless has apparently listened, and has joined the DRM-free bandwagon in announcing more than 5 million MP3 tracks are now available from its Online Media Store.
While TV manufacturers are still struggling to scale OLED technology up to the sizes needed for mainstream televisions, it looks like mobile phones can benefit from the technology just fine in its current state. Samsung became the very first company to bring a carrier-subsidized OLED phone to the U.S. when it announced the Impression earlier this week.
We had a chance to see and handle the Impression, which resembles what you might expect if you’ve seen previous OLED displays. Much like its television counterparts, the Impression’s display possesses a vibrancy and contrast that’s seemingly impossible to achieve in standard LCD screens. Its colors have all the eye-catching potency of neon signage – in pocket-sized form.
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