Monthly Archives: February 2010

GSMA announced the winners of the Global Mobile Awards 2010. HTC Hero was crowned device of the year, while the technology breakthrough award goes to Orange for the HD voice technology.

Yesterday on a special ceremony at the MWC 2010 GSMA announced the winners of the Global Mobile Awards 2010. The best mobile handset this year is HTC Hero, which beat the other four nominees in this category - Samsung Star, Nokia N97 mini, BlackBerry Bold 9700 and Samsung Omnia HD.

The Orange's mobile HD voice technology won the prize in the Best Mobile Technology Breakthrough category overtaking the Snapdragon CPU and the new Opera Mini browser, which were the other hopefuls in the category.

The Last City is the new mobile game of the year, so if you haven't tried it yet, maybe it's time to check it out. The other nominees in this category were The Sims 3, Farm Frenzy, Hero of Sparta and Speedhero.

You can find the full list of the Global Mobile Awards

We'd already seen first hand what kind of GPU improvements Apple made with the iPhone 3GS (in comparison to the iPhone 3G, anyway), but if you've ever wondered how Cupertino's latest stacked up against Google's Nexus One in the graphical department, your answer is just a click away. The technical gurus over at Distinctive Developments set out to determine which handset was capable of pushing more frames per second when really taxed, and through a series of pinpoint tests, they discovered that the Nexus One (in general) lagged behind. The reason? Reportedly, Google's phone isn't using Neon floating-point optimization, but if it did, the scores you'll see just past the break could be quite different. Hey Mountain View, you getting all this?

When Google unveiled the Nexus One in early January, it somewhat arrogantly attempted to separate the phone from its competitors by calling it a "superphone." In the weeks since the Nexus One launch, we've seen users complain about spotty data network reception and non-existent customer service which made the Superphone experience feel disappointingly mediocre.

Despite those shortcomings, Google has put the question on the table and we've been left wondering: What should a true next-generation "superphone" experience consist of? GeekTech's got an answer for you.

Interface

A phone's interface is the first element we will consider and it is possibly the most important: Our phones are with us all day and we interact with them more often and more consistently than other devices.

To improve upon the current standard of capacitive touchscreens and acceleromoters would mean changing the behaviors and expectations that we've come

We've seen lemons power a digital clock, and we've seen an Orange tent energize a gaggle of Apples. But have you ever wondered how many oranges it would take to charge just a single Apple? Name games aside, we have to hand it to Imperial Leisure, the company that executed a new iPhone-centered advertisement aimed at raising awareness for Jaffa oranges. We won't spoil the whole thing for you, but we will say that you'll be far hungrier after watching than you are right now. Video's past the break, per usual.

F-Secure announced today the availability of its new standalone smartphone solution, F-Secure Anti-Theft for Mobile. The solution provides three useful security features to protect your phone: remote lock, remote wipe and theft control and is available for Symbian and Windows Phone platforms.

The remote lock protects confidential information quickly and easily by locking the device with a single SMS message. The theft control feature activates if someone changes the SIM card by locking the device and informing you of the new number. The remote wipe is the ultimate safety measure, erasing all the data on the phone with a single SMS message.

Indi Siriniwasa, regional director for F-Secure Australia and New Zealand, says, “You carry your smartphone with you where ever you go, which means it can be particularly prone to being lost or stolen. Nowadays our mobiles contain a great deal of personal and confidential data that need protection. F-Secure’s standalone anti-theft

Touch Screen Technologies

In the good old days we'd let our fingers do the walking when using the Yellow Pages. These days our fingers do a lot more with our mobile phones.

Touchscreen technology has come along way in the last few years. It was once a technology reserved for high-end PDAs, and now touschscreens are incorporated in a large range of new mobile phones, from the most expensive all the way down to a handful of prepaid models too.

How do you choose the right touchscreen?

Firstly, there are two major touchscreen technologies being used in mobile devices: capacitive and resistive. Capacitive touchscreens work by transferring a small electrical charge from the screen to your finger and detecting the region where the charge is removed. Resistive screens use two extremely thin layers below the glass that are pressed together when the screen is touched. The difference between the two means

Well this one is a... doozy? Today Nokia announced a rather bizarre partnership with Intel. Namely, the two companies are merging their odd, half-finished, Linux-based OSs into one crazy little package called... MeeGo. No, really. Intel is mixing its peanut butter Moblin with Nokia's chocolatey Maemo to create a "software platform that will support multiple hardware architectures across the broadest range of device segments, including pocketable mobile computers, netbooks, tablets, mediaphones, connected TVs and in-vehicle infotainment systems." That broad enough for you? According to the company's press release, the new platform will begin baring fruit (AKA devices) later this year, though the specific types of devices weren't touched upon. Nokia's CEO, Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo claims that the union will "create an ecosystem that is second to none" through openness, though at this point it's largely bluster. Why the two monoliths have decided to pair up on these decidedly niche platforms rather

Windows Phone 7 Series. Get used to the name, because it's now a part of the smartphone vernacular... however verbose it may seem.

Today Microsoft launches one of its most ambitious (if not most ambitious) projects: the rebranding of Windows Mobile. The company is introducing the new mobile OS at Mobile World Congress 2010, in Barcelona, and if the press is anything to be believed, this is just the beginning.

The phone operating system does away with pretty much every scrap of previous mobile efforts from Microsoft, from the look and feel down to the underlying code -- everything is brand new. 7 Series has rebuilt Windows Mobile from the ground up, featuring a completely altered home screen and user interface experience, robust Xbox LIVE and Zune integration, and vastly new and improved social networking tools.

 Gone is the familiar Start screen, now replaced with "tiles" which scroll vertically and can be customized as quick launches, links to contacts,

As promised, HTC introduced three new phones and the score is Android 2 - WinMo 1. The HTC Legend is a Hero's remake and the Desire is a half-twin of the Nexus One. In the PocketPC camp, there's the HTC HD mini. Small it very well is, not so sure about the HD bit. But still, the tiniest among them is actually the big news here. The Legend and the Desire leaked well in advance.

 The HTC Legend will run Android 2.1 (Eclair) to be enjoyed on a 3.2" AMOLED capacitive touchscreen of HVGA resolution. The Legend is powered by a 600 MHz processor, and has 384 MB of RAM and 512 MB of ROM. Of course, you'll also get a microSD card slot, a built-in GPS receiver and support for HSPA, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth.