About Electronics

CNN: The technology executives and analysts here in Barcelona this week are trying to figure out how take all the content found on the Web and migrate it to your mobile device. There are a number of hurdles though. Most of what people find at Web sites is free to the user, whether it’s silly videos on YouTube or news footage and stories on CNN.com.The mobile phone network operators like to charge for content. One executive, who didn’t want to be quoted, told CNN this creates a “closed garden” of content that is controlled by your mobile operator and is dependent on what deals the operator has with a select group of content providers.

That couldn’t be more different from the advertising supported model of most Web sites and the hyperlinked world of the Web. (…)
The second challenge is that so much of what is viewed on the Net is user generated content; videos, personal Web pages, social networking sites.

This is the material that phone operators and handset makers want to offer. Nokia for instance announced Monday that users of its N90 series of big screen handsets will be able to access YouTube’s mobile service when it launches.

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Electronista: Bluetooth headsets let people drive without always holding a cellphone, but this can become problematic when needing to show caller ID, or dial a new number. Nokia is filling the gap with the CK-15W, a display that mounts to car’s dashboard.

The screen is 2.2 inches, and lets users browse and select calls and contacts using a separate input device. Buttons are also present for adjusting volume, or accepting and declining incoming conversations. Users can personalize the display with their own colors and themes, and it should be compatible with a variety of Nokia phones.

The CK-15W should ship to Europe in the first quarter for €180.

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Navigadget: Navman F40 is just like F30 but different. How different? Take out the TMC traffic receiver but instead this time throw in a cradle for bluetooth support. Another enhancement over F30 is the addition of maps for all Western European countries.

Navman F40 Europe enhances the F20 with European maps and Bluetooth hands-free functionality. The F40 works with all Bluetooth compatible phones and can be paired with up to five different phones at any one time. This means no re-programming of settings. Plus the on-screen caller display allows users to safely see exactly who is calling them.

So how much extra do you have to pay for a bluetooth cradle and more maps? Only £30 (about 45 euro). The Navman F40 Europe will sell for £229 (about 340 euro).

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Akihabara: Not everybody has 3G or 3.5G with HSDPA but that doesn’t prevent manufacturers from going further. Every geek knows that future wireless communications will have to go through WiMAX, and we were presenting yesterday 3 Samsung products equipped with this technology.

So far, only a handful of us were able to see what it does in real life, but Samsung is now demonstrating what WiMAX can do at the 3GSM. More precisely, it’s the WiMAX WAVE 2, with 40Mbps download rates and 12MBps upload rates. For example, you can download a 700MB movie in 2mn 45seconds! We’re going to have to increase the disk space on our PDAs soon!

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AV zombie: Sony’s upcoming second generation Blu-ray player, due later this year, will offer CD playback but not hi-resolution audio. The lack of CD playback on the current BDP-S1 has led to some sharp criticism of the unit from reviewers, which Sony is keen to address. However, the model (pictured), currently known only by its Sapphire codename, will not be able to play Super Audio CDs. “It’s all down to the cost of implementing the functionality,” said a spokesman.

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T3: New ‘Nokir’ mobile steps up to the plate with raft of monster features and a stupidly low price.Fancy a spanking new slick Nokia cell, but can’t face waving goodbye to the last of this month’s salary? Never fear help is at hand. The cheekily monikered Nokir E828G is rammed with more features than you can shake a real life branded blower at, but clocks in at a measly £100 (about 150 euro).

Stuffed with an MP3 player, full screen MP4 playback and a regular as you like 2 MP camera, this lovingly aped mobile is also home to a 2.6-inch high-res screen that’ll make checking out video a doddle.

Its real killer feature though is the touch screen, knocking the mainstream competition squarely into touch.

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Navigadget: A lot of people have been talking back and forth about the RIM’s new Blackberry 8800 but nobody was sure if it would have GPS navigation capability or not -until today- when it was officially announced at the 3GSM conference in Barcelona, Spain.

Through its built-in GPS, the BlackBerry 8800 can pinpoint its location and provide “out-of-the-box” support for a wide variety of location based applications and services, including BlackBerry Maps. BlackBerry Maps provides driving directions — with the ability to track the route via GPS — and integrates with other BlackBerry applications, so users can generate a map from an address in their BlackBerry Address Book and send maps via email from their BlackBerry 8800.

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Heise: In Western Europe companies were able to sell 185 million mobile phones and smartphones last year. When compared with the year before this works out as an increase of nine percent. While other branches of industry can only dream of growth of such magnitude, the manufactures of mobile handsets, accustomed to success, do not consider such figures a reason to celebrate.Mobile phone sales in the fourth quarter, normally a period of heightened consumer spending, grew by a mere four percent in quarter-on-quarter terms, the market research company IDC, which is also the source of the figure quoted above, observed. According to the assessment of IDC the massive price cuts above all were responsible for this growth.

The four leading companies, Nokia, Motorola, Samsung, and Sony Ericsson, together secured 86 percent of the mobile phone market. Hence there was not much room for smaller manufacturers. Nokia led the pack with a market share of 35 percent, followed by Motorola and Samsung with 16 percent each.

Smartphones are becoming ever more popular, 29 percent more units were sold in Q4 2006 when compared with Q4 2005. All in all these now account for eight percent of the mobile device market. Handhelds without mobile-phone capabilities, on the other hand, were on the whole ignored by customers.

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Reuters: The number of households around the world with high-definition television (HDTV) will treble over the next five years as viewers switch to its clearer, more vivid picture, according to a report (…).The transition to HDTV has been called a landmark move for the industry, similar to the shift from black-and-white television to color.

According to Informa Telecoms and Media, the number of homes taking the product will jump to 151 million worldwide by 2011 from 48 million at the end of 2006 when an estimated 1.2 billion households had a television.

The report said some 58 percent of HD homes were currently found in the United States and 20 percent in Japan, with Britain, Canada, China and Germany also high on the list.

“The falling price of high-definition sets has really caught the public’s imagination, and consumer uptake is impressive,” Adam Thomas, the report’s author said.

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MobileMentalism: Seems Nokia have been busy at 3GSM this year. They’ve just announced the new Nokia N77 mobile TV phone. Not quite such a technological tour de force as some of the other N-Series phones we’ve seen in the past, but the N77 is remarkably low priced for an Nseries phone – just 370 Euros.

The key feature of the Nokia N77 is, of course, mobile TV, with the N77 suporting DVB-H broadcasts, and displaying them on a large 2.4″ screen capable of displaying 16 million colours. Unlike other mobile Tv-supporting phones, though, the N77 is built from the ground up as a mobile TV phone, and comes with dedicated TV control buttons, programme guide, and (…) live TV recording.

As if to show off, the Nokia N77 doesn’t just do TV well – it’s also a full-featured mobile music phone. It can store up to 2GB of tunes, comes with high quality stereo sound, and supports MP3, AAC, AAC+, eAAC+ and WMA formats. It also has a 3.5mm jack for connecting standard headphones to.

Based on the Symbian S60 OS, the Nokia N77 supports tri-band GSM, plus 3G. It may not set the world on fire, but it does like an extremely competent mobile TV phone (as opposed to a phone that’s got mobile TV support added to it to beef up the spec sheet!)

Better still it won’t cost the earth – Nokia expect it to retail for just 370 Euros. The Nokia N77 release date is Quarter 2, 2007.

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Teleclick: Sources indicate that LG Electronics has won first prize in a GSM Association contest rewarding the production of low-cost third-generation mobile phones.

The Korean handset maker’s winning prototype is expected to sell for around $100 (about 77 euro), breaking through a key price barrier that keeps 3G phones out of the hands of low-income consumers.

LG’s new phone will be unveiled (…) at the 3GSM Congress trade show in Barcelona, where it will be in high demand from as many as a dozen different carriers.

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Dialzero: Telecom Italia Mobile will soon be marketing a TV-capable cellphone manufactured by Chinese phone maker ZTE in partnership with Israeli chip maker Siano Mobile Silicon Ltd. The launch of the Brionvega N7100 is expected to make ZTE the first Chinese cellphone maker to distribute a mobile TV phone. The phone has a 240 by 320 pixel color screen, 2-megapixel camera and 3.6-Mbit/s HSDPA modem.

The chipset from Siano is a quad-band, multi-standard mobile TV receiver. A combination of RF tuner and demodulator, the SMS1000 supports DVB-H, DVB-T, DAB, DAB-IP and T-DMB mobile digital standards, allowing ZTE to reuse its mobile TV phone for other standards and markets.

“We are proud to introduce the most advanced 3G DVB-H phone in the European market,” said Li Ying Feng of ZTE.

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