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RIM launches 7100x (updated)

[UPDATED: with picture]
Research In Motion announced the BlackBerry 7100x which will be available on the O2 network in the UK.

I expect it to be very much like the 7100v and t available on Vodafone and T-Mobile USA networks respectively, but with a different theme and color scheme. (and there it is in the picture!)

BTW, want the Vodafone 7100v theme on your T-Mobile 7100t? here's how to do it.

skiing with ipods and the Nine.9

I recently went skiing out west, and one of the biggest things i noticed from last time i went skiing (two years ago) was that pretty much everyone now skis and snowboards with iPods or equivalently equipped MP3 players, but mostly iPods.

i brought my iPod to ski with as well, but i was a little concerned about the safety of doing so...but using the stock apple iPod headphones which don't do much in the way of noise cancelling - i think it did enhance the experience, especially on the 10 minute lift rides. at low volume, you can still hear most conversations as well on the lift, so i quickly became convinced.

the second biggest thing i noticed was that pretty much everyone was using their cell phones all over the mountain. granted this was breckenridge, where they have always allowed such outside distractions - but it was surprising as well...in fact, i had my son in ski school and they required that you had a cell phone, else you had to rent a pager from them. and amazingly, T-Mobile had service even at the top of the mountain. 5 bars. I get about 3 bars at my house in surburban chicago.

so it's only natural that the ski/snowboarding accessory companies would pick up on this trend.

enter the Giro Nine.9 helmet pictured here with an OEM Skullcandy link [amazon], which splits your cellphone and music player signal in such a way that if the phone rings it overrides your music player and becomes a mobile phone headset.

there's still time to return that u2 ipod...

...and get the hasselhoff version instead.

XM XRt12 - rack component XM radio

Polk Audio and XM have put their heads together to release the XM XRt12 - an XM radio meant to be put in the rack with the rest of your stereo equipment.

There's something to be said for this form factor. I absolutely loved my turtle beach audiotron until it broke and they wanted almost as much to fix it as to purchase a new one.

You might say it's more convenient to have a portable unit that you move around from place to place, but i never do this. if it's in the entertainment center, it's just that much more accessable.

The XRt12 is available now from the Polk Audio site for $299 + subscription.

XM releases portable player, the MyFi

I was just talking about how this would be cool the other day! Gotta love when that happens. $349 is a little pricey though, especially when it doesn't include the $10/month subscription.

It can save 5 hours of playback too..interesting.

ah, the nokia 6670, what the 6620 profile should be

the wonderful mobileburn site has some good pictures of the new nokia 6620, which is basically a repackaging of the 7610 for the business user. c'mon nokia, you gotta squeeze an EDGE radio into this profile, stat.

nokia's official announcement

vodafone's oem of the rim 7100v

[via digital-lifestyles.info]Vodafone UK will be launching a new OEM version of the Blackberry 7100v with their own trim and detailing. looks pretty sharp and will be available Oct 1.

P910 tomorrow

sony ericsson dev program just notified me i'll be getting a SE P910 tomorrow. stay tuned...

rim releases blackberry 7100 phone, yes a phone

research in motion has announced it's new 7100 series phone, yes phone, that will first be available on T-Mobile US. looks very cool, can't wait to see how that keyboard works out. there's still no better way to get mobile email than a blackberry.

get notified when T-Mobile has this phone available

dual CDMA / GSM phones

if you read this weblog by feed, you've already seen some pictures of this - but i've been using a samsung A790 given to us by qualcomm/verizon to test an application, and it's a quad band phone which includes both CDMA and GSM bands. this is marketed to verizon's "business customers" - i'm not sure why they don't offer it to the general public.

i know this picture shows a cingular SIM card in the phone, and to clarify, that SIM does not work - it was just what i had on hand when i took the picture. when you switch to GSM mode with this card in it, you get a "please insert a Verizon SIM card" message and it prompts you to go back to CDMA mode. flipping between CDMA and GSM is a manual process, and is meant for when you get off the plane in europe or asia.

incidentally, when i put in a vodafone españa SIM card, it did seem to accept it, which makes sense given the owenership structure of those companies.

my only other comment is this phone has about the worst keypad i've ever used on a phone. way worse than nokia's wackiest design.

digging around a little, i see there are more of these dual CDMA/GSM phones coming out, especially in China, where they already use SIM for CDMA.

see this link on the motorola A840 over at mobileburn.com

got my airport express...

got my airport express. it's a pretty cool device, a lot packed into a little package. this will make me get totally entrenched in the apple iTunes world. their master plan is working. it's funny, but i used to be gung-ho about MP3 being the open format everything could use, now i'm not sure i care...as all my devices become capable of playing iTunes AAC files, i'm not sure i care so much anymore.

at any rate, i'll report more once i put the device through its paces.

iPod your BMW

iPod your BMW. i don't own a BMW but i know a few people who do...and this must be pretty tempting for them. i'm amazed at the deals apple is striking and what they are doing with their products - there is just no one close i can think of as far as innovative procduct design.

apple airport express

i really hope the apple AirPort Express is as good as it looks. i've already ordered mine. what's so amazing about this product is the many problems it solves at once. makes your printer a node on the wireless network, allows you to jukebox your tunes to anywhere in the house quickly and easily, and acts as a Wi-fi repeater? holy crap. yeah, there's a lot of fine print at the bottom of that page, the most disappointing which is "irPort Extreme and AirPort Express can extend the range only of an AirPort Extreme or AirPort Express wireless network."

yeah sure, d-link and linksys have had such things for a while now, but this looks like apple just did it right.

nokia 6600 available from T-Mobile US

i just happen to be browsing the T-Mobile US site, and saw that the Nokia 6600 is now available from a carrier here in the states:

http://www.t-mobile.com/products/images.asp?phoneid=218043&class=phone

n-gage2

ah, you gotta love it when things fall off the truck.

i can't read thai, but these pictures of the nokia n-gage 2 or whatever they will call it are pretty amazing. looks like they fixed all the flaws...speaker and mic are on the flat side of the phone, not the edge, and the memory card can be removed without removing the SIM card. very cool. i can't wait.

pics of the n-gage 2 at flashfly.net

bluetooth GPS for smartphones

even if the misspell "Sony Ericsson" on their home page, this service from gpware looks pretty cool. it's a GPS navigation module that communicates via bluetooth with your smartphone and looks similar to many on-board navigation systems.

I'd love to try this out and see how it worked.

a new class of device

it's interesting that a new class of mobile device is starting to appear on the horizon. what do we call these? pocketpc, taken. handheld, taken. palmtop, been said. i don't know - let's call them mini-PCs. either way they are pretty cool if they work. the basic idea, is a mini-handheld-pc that is your all in one, desktop that you plug into a keyboard and monitor at work and home, and have a fully functional PC OS on the road, with the ability to plug in mobile phone, data, and wifi cards.

one is made by tiquit and one is made by OQO that shows it's heritage of having an apple powerbook designer.

they remind me vaguley of the philips velo the first windows ce device i owned, which was semi useful at the time, but no desktop or laptop replacement - and in general this class of devices were a big flop.

it will be interesting to see if these companies can get any traction. i have a hard time thinking of a startup hardware manufacturer like this that tried to create a category buster and didn't die a painful death. they all run out of money. palm is one ( and you can argue they are dying a slow, painful death) but then they had the backing of 3com, didn't they?

a lot will depend upon price and execution, of course, but i could think of a few solutions that this could be used for, where the power of a pc is needed, but the professional is always on the go. the medical field primarily comes to mind.

big hardware companies with lots of cash can execute on these types of things and, i wish apple would do one of these with an OS X device.

quick camera phone shootout

i get a lot of questions about which camera phone to buy these days, so i decided to take a few we had laying around here and put them to the test... here's a snapshot of the lovely chicago river, across the street from chez burning door. these pictures were all taken within seconds of each other. you be the judge. the pictures themselves are just one dimension of buying a cameraphone, and there well may be some valid reasons for buying a phone that doesn't have the best picture quality, because you won't really be able to print these pictures anyway.

clearly all cameras are not created equal. all pictures were taken on the phone's highest quality setting it had. some of these pictures were resized to fit on the page. i am always amazed how the exact same picture can look so different through different lenses. there's a proverb in there somewhere.

	nokia 3650 takes a pretty clear picture, but a bit orangish
	nokia 7250 brighter. a little blurry, a bit of fish eye. doesn't do well with the glare
	sony ericsson P800 clear, color is on, dimensions look good.
	sony ericsson T610 a little blurry, a little fisheyed
	LG VX 6000 sharp picture, a little dark

nokia 3660 goes back to classic keypad

i just noticed that the new nokia 3660, the successor to the 3650, will be going back to the classic 3 x 3 keyboard layout from the circular keypad layout on the 3650. anyone know why exactly?

perhaps the circular design turned some people off. i actually kind of liked the circular keypad. i think it made double thumb text entry a little easier, once you got used to it.

with all the usability testing nokia is known to do, i'm surprised they retreated so quickly. i wonder if they will still offer both versions in all markets.

comparison of UIQ phones

"unofficial club sony ericsson" has a good side by side comparison of the existing symbian 7 UIQ phones on the market. it will be interesting to see how sony ericsson fills the gaps with the upcoming p801/p900. my only three gripes with this line of phone is that
a) it's a little thick
b) memory stick duo. a 1 gig SD would be a lot more useful!
c) put a joystick and some buttons somewhere

otherwise, it's about as close as it gets to an all in one.

specs for the sony ericsson Z600

sony ericsson has released some details on the soon to be released Z600 - which will be their first clamshell design. also included will be a MD-TFD screen which will hope to correct the problems that have plagued the t610 in being able to see the screen outdoors in the sunlight. it looks pretty similar to the t610 otherwise - can't wait to try this one out!

first impressions of Microsoft Smartphone 2002

in the battle for the smartphone market, one thing microsoft seems to understand is that one size does not fit all. they see that some of their users prefer a full featured pda that also doubles as a voice and wireless data phone, and other users prefer a full featured phone that has aspects of being a pda. this suite of operating systems, now being pre-marketed as "windows mobile 2003" in the past has consisted of "pocket pc phone edition 2002" and "smartphone 2002" respectively. The pocket pc phone edition has been seen in north america on the t-mobile pocket pc, the samsung i700 sold by verizon, and the hitachi sh-g1000 communicator sold by sprint pcs - and in europe as the t-mobile mda and the o2 xda. the smartphone os, however, until very recently was only seen on the orange spv in europe and the uk, and now as HDC tanager via other channels.

i've been carrying around a pre-production developer version of a smartphone 2002 device provided by everlink wireless which has been labeled as the "red e sc100 smartphone". as it is a pre-production device, i will try to keep my comments on the smartphone os itself, and not on the device itself. there definitely were many times i had to reboot the device because of errors, and there were times i could not tell where to place the blame for errors and glitches, but suffice it to say the phone itself has been more than functional for my needs, exceeding expectations in some areas, although also dissapointing me in others. I tested using t-mobile us GSM service, with a GPRS connection provisioned on their internet3.voicestream.com gateway which allows outgoing access on all ports.

to those who are familiar with the pocket pc, or the pcoket pc phone edition, the smartphone will make them feel right at home. the home screen that exists on the other devices also appears here, but in smaller fashion. the icon bar fits 5 application icons, containing the most recently launched items, and appointment, message status, and profile all can be viewed, selected used to launch their associated application. the status bar shows the same message and GPRS indicators, as exist on the phone edition, which i had used before, so i already knew the meaning they brought to bear as the icons appeared and reappeared as i performed actions on the phone.

my use consisted of setting up an email account that would be accessed via GPRS, daily browsing, texting (SMS), making phone calls, and attempting to play games and MP3s. here's my observations with these activities:

email task:
for my use, i need my phone to connect to a non-microsoft-exchange email account to retreive my mail on a timely basis, preferably before i would have to "pull" it. in short, the blackberry sets a pretty high bar for email, and i would like to get as close to that experience as possible (can't wait to try the nokia 6800 with blackberry integration!).

evaluation:
as existed in the pocket pc phone edition, the smartphone os can't deal well with an imap server that isn't exchange based. mine is linux based running sendmail and u-dub imap, and the smartphone hangs trying to download all the other stuff in my home folder that isn't my mail, and there aren't any options to prevent this. so as with ppcpe, i was resricted to using POP. that aside, the email experience on the os is strong.you can view about 5 subjects at a time with the sender, and i say it's about 50% better than you can do on the sony ericsson t68 or t610. you can choose what to download, and reading and writing mail using the keypad is functional. the user can set the email client to autosynchronize from frequent as every fifteen minutes to once a day or never - which worked better than i have seen it on some other devices.

browsing task:
browse this weblog, along with mobile content provided by microsoft, and i few others

evaluation:
as far as the "mobile internet" goes - this is the best i have seen on a phone profile. the smartphone version of IE advertises itself as windows CE IE 3.x compatible, which is enough to browse many places without a problem. it has a "fit to screen" mode which does a fantastic job of rendering many sites readable without having to scroll to the right. mobile browser developers, take note - this is the right way to do it. if this isn't enough to convince the masses that WAP is dead, i don't know what is. the bookmark capability is easy, but the one thing that was a little annoying is that the "back" button tended to always reload the page from the network instead of cache. with a 256 MB SD card, i have plenty of room to cache some of the sites i browse often.

texting task:
text a contact, receive a response, and text again

evaluation:
this phone/os combo has t9, which i personally think is much more efficient than the pen based interface of the pocket pc phone edition. i found it curious that you could fill in a subject and body in your SMS, although you can send to multiple recipients, including SMS and email users in the same message. smartphone uses the "one inbox" approach to messaging. all email, sms, and mms (seen from demos) appear in one inbox. for some reason, this feels natural on the blackberry, but still a little unnatural on the phone. it didn't help that the incoming sms i received got sorted below the email i was receiving because of time differences on the source servers. either way, i think the messaging being agnostic to the bearing channel is an interesting approach we'll see more and more of, but i know i've certainly been trained by other phones to look in differnt inboxes for different media.

making a phone call task:
make a call! simple enough?

evaluation:
i like it when i get wowed with a usability feature. just start typing a name OR a number from the home screen and the smartphone starts presenting you with a subset of your contacts that match. as you keep typing, the list gets smaller but rarely does this require more than 2 keystrokes. everyone should emulate this. also, you can go to the calendar, notes etc while on the phone. speakerphone is supported, and worked well on this model.

gameplay task:
play solitaire and mini-jetfight

evaluation:
some innovation here. the platform does a great job of supporting keyboard based games by labelling all buttons with a keypad number shortcut. so instead of having to use the joystick to move around, they keypad can easily be used. for instance, in playing solitare, to move a card from one stack to another, you might press 6 then 5. mini-jetfight is a graphic intensive flying game that seems to support multiplayer server based play. i only tried the one player game, but although the game took forever to load, the results were pretty spectacular for a phone. almost as good as a sega genesis on a phone. it's not quite up to par with the 3d libraries supported on the sony ericsson p800, but it was a heck of a lot easier to play with a joystick than a pen!

task:
listen to an mp3

evaluation:
this particular phone comes with an SD media slot, so it was pretty easy to load up a bunch of mp3s onto the card and put it in the phone. smartphone 2002 comes with windows media player as you might expect, capable of playing music and video. as far as playing mp3s...not so good here. i'm not sure if it was the phone or the os, but the VBR ripped MP3s i took right off my music server were unplayable. the processor tried to keep up, but could not buffer enough to play them at all. stutter, stop. stutter, stop. i probably could have ripped them at a lower bit rate and been fine, but i'd never do that. i want the mp3s that play on my ipod to play here as well. i'd like to see how some other phones fared on this task.

future potential:
this particular phone provider didn't supply an MMS client, but i would expect the resolution of images and media play to be supported in an above average manner. i also didn't see bluetooth support but i'm sure thats coming down the pike. one thing that was encouraging was the SDIO slot that seems to be supported on all the smartphone devices. this is encouraging because it would seem to be a clear path to a combo wi-fi/GPRS phone using a card such as the
sandisk sdwifi card or a similar one made by Socket and the smartphone os does seem to support peripherals such as this...that is, networking is not tied to WAP/GPRS.

microsoft still has a long way to go to fend off symbian. verizon will soon be launching a motorola smartphone with a clamshell design in the US where symbian doesn't have an overwhelming foothold, but even in europe where smartphones have been released at multiple operators, the numbers pale in comparison to sales of devices running symbian. microsoft also has to address the younger market somehow to gain market share, which i don't see happening without a rebranding and repackaging. perhaps some cool games will do the trick.

my general impressions are very positive. the one negative i see is battery consumption, as i think is also a problem with pocket pcs i have used. microsoft states in their FAQ that the average battery life should be 2 days with constant use. in my tests where the email client was grabbing mail every 30 minutes, the battery lasted 8 hours tops, again under the caveat of beta hardware.

the bottom line is there are some impressive capabilities provided by the operating system, that if used right could gain a share of the expanding smartphone market for the business user.

Nokia Observation Camera

the nokia observation camera is a creative use of MMS. this essentially makes it pretty easy, albeit expensive, to setup a webcam. just put in a sim and have it send pictures to a phone or email address...or a moblog.

it can snap pictures based on time, movement, or changes in temperature. and a remote user can monitor the temperature or contol it by sending it SMS commands. it does one way audio as well, so you can call it and hear what is going on in the room.

nokia says it can be used for "innovative advertising" with a couple good ideas...customers can check out how busy a restaurant is or weather at a resort.

i can see some telematic uses as well. it can be mounted in a vehicle with an external antenna. want to see where your truck is? send it an sms.

anyone else have any other creative ideas?

it seems to be going for about $380 USD.