Photos: HTC Touch HD, the phone Android should've launched on
Mobile PhonesThe T-Mobile G1 has sparked some controversy at Crave, around whether or not the hardware does Android justice -- most of us think it doesn't. Yes, the G1 is practical and good if you like a mechanical Qwerty keypad, but where's the sexiness? Where are the iPhone-killing looks? Well, they're on HTC's next device, the HTC Touch HD.
Boasting a massive colour touchscreen that measures 50mm wide by 82mm tall, a slim design and all the features you'd expect from a modern smartphone -- GPS, Wi-FI and HSDPA -- the Touch HD is a real beauty. Alas, Google and HTC aren't running Android on it -- instead the Touch HD stumbles along on Windows Mobile 6.1 Professional. Continue reading...
3G speed test: T-Mobile G1 vs iPhone 3G
Mobile PhonesNo sooner had we taken our UK T-Mobile G1 out of its box when someone shouted out, "Does it have 3G then?" It does indeed have 3G, but what's more interesting is that during testing we found out that it's faster than the iPhone 3G's connection.
Our first test, timed by the venerable Rupert Goodwins, involved visiting eHam.net on the G1 and iPhone 3G's browsers. The G1 loaded the page in 12.69 seconds and the iPhone 3G took 23.16 seconds -- almost twice the time. Continue reading...
T-Mobile G1 vs iPhone 3G: Can Google bite Apple?
Mobile PhonesWe've managed to get our hands on a T-Mobile G1 here in the UK, to see if it's worthy of all the hype and answer the question everyone's asking -- is it better than the iPhone 3G? From the packaging to the headphone socket, we've given it a thorough going over on the next few pages. Continue reading...
Orange to be exclusive carrier of HTC Touch HD
Mobile PhonesOrange is going to be the exclusive carrier of the HTC Touch HD handset in the UK, the operator said yesterday.
Orange said it would be carrying the handset from "early November". The Touch HD has garnered a degree of interest for its use of a 97mm (3.8-inch), 480x800-pixel, widescreen WVGA touchscreen. The operator is claiming this will be well-suited to various applications, including Web surfing, streaming mobile television and viewing photos taken on the handset's 5-megapixel camera.
The quad-band Touch HD uses the Windows Mobile 6.1 Professional operating system together with HTC's TouchFlo 3D user interface skin, and has GPS, HSDPA, Bluetooth and Wi-Fi connectivity. It has a 1,350mAh battery, and HTC claims it can provide up to 310 minutes of talk time. Continue reading...
Sonos gets iPhone app, Last.fm streaming 
Sonos CEO John MacFarlane dropped by CNET UK last week with a full Sonos Music System setup in his arms, an Apple Time Capsule full of music and an iPhone. Curious, since Sonos doesn't have anything to do with iPhone.
Except that now it has. We're pleased to exclusively reveal online that as of today, Sonos has added a fully functional iPhone app to the iTunes App Store, enabling full control of your multi-room Sonos system from your iPhone or iPod touch. And it's free. Continue reading...
Google Earth for iPhone: We're not worthy
Mobile PhonesSome iPhone and iPod touch apps are pretty, some are useful and some are dumb, but the Google Earth iPhone app is just genius. Combining all the best features of Google Earth and the iPhone, Google has created something truly special.
Hardcore iPhone users will know that a similar service already existed, in the form of Earthscape, but it failed to deliver the full Google Earth experience. Enter Google Earth iPhone, which allows you to zoom in and out of our lovely planet by pinching the screen, tilt the iPhone to see 3D geographical images, search for your location via GPS and tap Wikipedia and Panoramio links for location-based information.
It's smooth, fast and delivers the same experience you'd expect from the desktop version. Continue reading...
Qik: Live video blogging for the win
Mobile PhonesQik -- that's 'quick', pronunciation fans -- is a video-streaming service that lets you gush live moving pictures from your mobile phone on to the Internet. It's essentially a live version of YouTube. It's been around for a while, but yesterday it announced support for BlackBerrys.
We had our doubts about Qik -- the idea that people would shoot live video and then stream it to a captive audience seemed ambitious, but it is working and the number of users is growing every month. Continue reading...
Mobile operators discourage upgrades to save cash
Some UK mobile operators have begun trying to dissuade customers who are near the end of their contracts from upgrading their handsets.
The operators are instead offering such customers discounts on their monthly tariffs. The strategy is tailored to this financial quarter, when customers are beginning to feel the effects of the credit crunch. It means the operators do not have to spend as much money on new handsets, which they would typically give to customers for free or at low cost in exchange for staying with the network in question. Continue reading...
Photos: Nokia 6600 Slide is too cute to ignore
Mobile PhonesWhen companies get really big, they sometimes forget what made them good to begin with. We thought Nokia was one of those behemoths. But every now and then the Finns release a phone that shows us they haven't forgotten their roots.
The Nokia 6600 Slide is a compact slider phone that isn't as powerful or exciting as the honking great N96, but it doesn't have to be. This is a simple, well-designed phone that we think we're falling in love with -- or at least developing a very strong crush. Continue reading...
3 to offer Comes With Music on N95 8GB contract
Mobile PhonesCurrently, if you want to get on board Nokia's Comes With Music boat, you need to head down to Carphone Warehouse and snag a particular pay as you go Nokia handset, SIM-free. Not any more. 3 told us this morning it will be offering Nokia's N95 8GB with Comes With Music -- and on a contract, not pay as you go.
From 3 November you'll be able to sign up with 3 for a Nokia N95 8GB for 35 a month. This will include an 18-month subscription to Comes With Music -- not just a year -- plus 300 minutes or texts (any combination) and 1GB of Internet usage.
Without Comes With Music, you can get an N95 8GB, 1,100 minutes or texts and 90 video-calling minutes for 36 a month on an 18-month contract -- just a quid more a month. Continue reading...
Intel issues apology for iPhone-bashing execs
Mobile PhonesIntel issued a correction yesterday regarding comments one of its executives made earlier this week slamming the iPhone as incapable of working correctly with the Internet.
It's hard to see this as anything other than a formal apology to Apple and ARM for comments made by Intel's Shane Wall and Pankaj Kedia at the company's Intel Developer Forum in Taipei, as reported by our sister site ZDNet Australia. Continue reading...
Nokia E63: Qwerty hits the comeback trail
Mobile PhonesWe love the Nokia E71: it's the best email phone around. So when we found out there might be a successor coming out soon, we danced a dorky little jig. Rumoured to be called the Nokia E63, this messaging-centric handset doesn't look very different to the E71. Annoyingly it's rumoured to be made out of plastic instead of the E71's luscious metal, which was part of the reason we liked it so much.
On the upside there'll be a standard 3.5mm headphone jack so you can plug in your headphones, a feature not available on the E71. Other features include HSDPA and Wi-Fi. According to several blogs, the E63 will come in three flavours, each with slightly different features, but there's no official word yet. Continue reading...
Spurned Intel pans iPhone's Internet performance
AccessoriesIntel's romance with Apple appears to have gone sour.
Company executives have started including the iPhone as one of their prime examples of smart phones that don't run "the full Internet" because they don't use an Intel chip, according to a report out of the Intel Developer Forum in Taipei from our friends down under at ZDNet Australia. Continue reading...
Motorola Aura: Because square screens are so passe
Mobile PhonesWe can see the marketing now: "If you liked square screens, just wait till you see a circular one!" The latest phone to roll out of the Moto fun factory is the Motorola Aura, a fashion phone with a circular display. This may be the actual pinnacle of Motorola's desperation -- we can't see how it can get any weirder than this.
We have no idea how the design process works for something as bafflingly awful as this, but we like to think Moto executives clambered on to a meeting room table and fought to the death over their chosen shape, screaming, "Triangle!" "Square!" "Circle!"
Another feature that would be snivellingly grateful for one iota of your attention is the Aura's opening mechanism. Combining stainless steel, sapphire crystals and a Swiss-made bearing, the Aura is apparently a 'watch-inspired' phone. Continue reading...
iPhone: Now Apple's most important product
Mobile PhonesThe rampant success of the iPhone has forced Apple and its financial watchers to re-evaluate the value of the company. Saying that Apple's iPhone business "had become too big to ignore," Apple CEO Steve Jobs made a rare appearance on the company's earnings conference call on Tuesday to explain just how much money the iPhone is dumping into Apple's coffers.
For the first time, the company used supplemental financial details to give some colour on the contribution that the iPhone could be making to Apple's bottom line if iPhone sales were handled like Mac sales, and the numbers are astonishing.
The iPhone now accounts for 39 per cent of Apple's business, having generated $4.6bn in revenue from sales of 6.9 million units during the quarter. Continue reading...
pleasefixtheiphone.com is Web 2.0 at its best
Mobile PhonesThis was going to be a post about the site pleasefixtheiphone.com, describing how it achieves user-generated content nirvana by combining a Digg-like voting system with a subject people are passionate about -- things people want fixed on the iPhone. Unfortunately, it seems to have been pulled, or at least the homepage isn't working for us.
So in the absence of being able to visit the site, let us tell you why pleasefixtheiphone.com is so great. The phone industry, or any business for that matter, struggles to communicate with its customers and often uses unrepresentative surveys to poll user satisfaction. Enter the full power of the Internet. Continue reading...
Motorola planning release of its own Android phone
Mobile PhonesMotorola, which has been struggling to make a popular successor to its Razr, appears to be gearing up to debut a social networking smart phone that uses Google's mobile operating system, Android, according to a BusinessWeek report.
Motorola's Android phone, according to the report, is expected to feature a touchscreen similar to Apple's iPhone, as well as a slide-out Qwerty keyboard that allows users to connect to social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook. It is unclear how similar it will be to the newly released T-Mobile G1, which also uses Android. Continue reading...
Five biggest things Steve Jobs got rid of
GadgetsSteve Jobs, Apple co-founder and CEO, and one of the only people capable of out-staring Chuck Norris, is fond of simplicity. In the world of consumer electronics, every complexity taken away produces an equal and opposite feature.
We've collected five of the biggest things Jobs has got rid of over the last few years, and we encourage you to add your own in the comments below. Continue reading...
BBC iPlayer goes mobile: Which player is best?
MP3 PlayersFirst it was available only to Windows users. Then it adopted Adobe Flash and opened up its streaming walls to Mac and Linux. Now, the BBC's iPlayer is available not only on all desktops, but on the iPhone, and now a plethora of mobile devices that support Windows Media DRM.
We've got almost all the devices the iPlayer is compatible with in our capacious desk drawers, so we thought it'd be awfully charitable of us to load up some BBC content and take our favourite players for a spin. Continue reading...
LG KC780: A trimmer 8-megapixel camera phone
Mobile PhonesMobile phones are like buses: you wait for ages for one to come along and two turn up at the same time, and drive straight past you. Enter the LG KC780, an 8-megapixel slider phone that's hot on the heels of another 8-megapixel camera phone from LG, the stupidly artistically named Renoir.
We're not sure why LG would introduce two 8-megapixel camera phones so close to each other, but we ain't gonna complain. The KC780 packs EDGE, but disappointingly no Wi-Fi or 3G. You can shoot video in slow motion and you can put the ISO up to 1,600 for (no doubt useless) low-light shots. There's even a motion sensor so pictures align themselves automatically. Continue reading...
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