Camera Phones Plaza

Cath Kidston, the queen of the floral prints industry decorated the Nokia 6111 and Nokia 6230i. The Carphone Warehouse has put it all together, offering Cath Kidston's facelifted models in your choice of "Bird," "Pop Flowers," or "Star" designs. Of course, neither Cath nor Carphone Warehouse bothered to tweak the phones' guts to add UMTS or anything cool like that, but hey, the patterns sure are purty anyway.

Via engadget.

The guys at techfresh found this cool promotional video of the Sony Ericsson W850i available on youtube. The phone features a 240 x 320 pixels 256k colors TFT display, a 2 megapixel camera and 1GB memory.

The Sony Ericsson W950 is an exciting new addition to the Walkman series of Sony Ericsson. It is a smartphone based on the Symbian 9.1 UIQ 3.0 with a stylish and yet classical design. Although it doesn’t feature a camera, the 4GB of free space and the dedicated multimedia keys would make any music lover jump from joy. The large touchscreen TFT display with QVGA resolution is just another fascinating feature for the tech buffs. It seems that the W950 has got what it takes to overtake the high-end music phones market and it is our job to see how it performs in every possible aspect.

The Sony Ericsson W950 seems like the utmost music phone in its pure form. The whopping 4GB of internal memory are enough to store all the tracks you love to listen to. The addition of dedicated music keys that come alive when you start the player is just great. Moreover, all this comes in a rather compact body.

Although the 4GB of storage memory might make you think of Nokia N91, in fact the Nokia handset has more to offer such as a 2 megapixel camera and Wi-Fi. Nevertheless, N91 is much bigger and weighs a hefty 50 g more. Therefore, there is no room for comparison between the two and we would not make such attempt in our review.

The Sony Ericsson W950 retail package includes a USB cable and a Walkman stereo headset with a remote control. Of course, as with any other mobile phone, the contents of the retail package remain strictly market and country dependant.

The music player is the same as the one used in the Walkman-branded Sony Ericsson phones. Well, not quite. In fact, Sony Ericsson W950 boasts one of the most developed music players we have seen in a mobile phone. Of course, it supports playlists with shuffle and loop options while offering the usual equalizer presets including the Walkman MegaBass one. The dedicated music player key on the keypad along with the multimedia keys, that come alive once you have started the player, really make the life easier for the user - not that we would expect any less than that when we are talking about a Walkman-branded mobile.

Nice innovations are the several animated background visualizations, which are a very nice touch, by the way. An added way to sort all your music is by using the added rating and mood designations. First, you can add ratings to the songs and then filter the available tracks by their rating. The mood designation, on the other hand, means that after adding a corresponding mood to your tracks you can later on filter the songs and virtually listen only to those that suit your current mood.

In the end, it all comes to your priorities. Sony Ericsson W950 is a great smartphone, a great phone, and a great music player. That is if you don’t expect your mobile phone to take pictures and you are not much into messaging. That great display would have put to a good use a Wi-Fi capability but it would have added to the price.

It’s up to you to decide whether this is the right smartphone for you, but if you are into listening to music, the Sony Ericsson W950 is among the best solutions on the market.

Read the full review on gsmarena.

The Groupe Sense PDA has launched in Hong Kong the Xplore M70 smartphone, 18 months after the launch of its predecessor, the M68. I have mentioned here the M68 because the two handsets seem to have a very close relationship, both phones practically sharing the same technical specifications. There is a plus for the M70 though: it offers a very nice and good looking design to all future users.

The tri-band GSM handheld, working on 900, 1800 and 1900 MHz networks, is running an almost defunct Palm OS Garnet v5.4 operating system, a 64k colors 176x220 pixels touchscreen, a WAP browser that can be upgraded by installing a HTML browser that comes with the included software CD, a 1.3 megapixel digital camera, a multimedia player offering MP3, MPEG-1, MPEG-4 and 3GP playback, a SD/MMC memory card expansion slot, Java games support, Bluetooth, Infrared and USB connectivity, and last, but not the least, an optional push e-mail service.

Even if the device's operating system is on the edge of being declared an endangered OS species, you will be happy to know that this would still be a very good choice because of the continuous development of new Palm applications and the outstanding number of apps already developed.

Until now, the Xplore M70 is only available in Hong Kong and a release date of it in other parts of the world has not been made public yet.

Via mobile-review.com

TV on your mobile is the next big thing, or so they say. I’m not talking little clips of this and that, either, but full blown live programmes, just as you’d expect to see on an ordinary telly.

Virgin Mobile is first out of the starting blocks with real broadcast TV to your mobile with its exclusive Lobster 700TV. Inevitably Virgin Mobile has coined the word ‘tellyphone’ though this only covers part of the deal, as TV is coupled with DAB digital radio.

TrustedReview made a review of this device and here are some of their conclusions. What’s doubly interesting about the Lobster 700TV is that it is a Windows Mobile Smartphone – Virgin Mobile’s first. Now, my initial thought in this respect is that there was a conflict here. Live TV is a consumer focussed offering, while Windows Mobile Smartphones are aimed more at professional users or at consumers who are keen on keeping a handle on their lives with Outlook PC sync.

As already noted, this is a HTC made device, and usually that company does a good job when it comes to build, but here things feel a little less solid than usual. The casing looks like the plastic it is, and the numberpad buttons, while nice and large, have a lot of movement in them, almost as though they might come off.

Bluetooth is built in but is neither infrared nor Wi-Fi (the latter is still rare for Windows Mobile Smartphones). The handset is Tri-band GSM, and there is a 1.3 megapixel camera on the back with neither flash nor self portrait mirror to give its low megapixel count a lift. HTC could easily have made the large silver surround for the lens double as a self portrait mirror but chose instead to inlay grooves into most of it.

Nonetheless, with the handset reporting 71MB of available storage out of the box, if you have any intention playing digital music through Windows Media Player you are going to want to add memory.

The expansion medium selected is microSD cards. Regular readers will know I am not the greatest fan of this format because it is so very tiny. I’m doubly irritated in the case of the Lobster 700TV to find that the slot is not only under the battery but also under your SIM card. Yep, you need to power down, take the battery out and take you SIM out to swap cards. What on Earth is HTC thinking of, designing a memory expansion system like this when end users are likely to want to hot swap cards to get music in and out of their handset?

Still I guess what you really want to know about is the TV and DAB radio capabilities and performance. The service comes courtesy of BT Movio. TV-wise you get BBC1, ITV1, Channel 4 and E4. But note: Channel 4 is just showing its Short Cuts service, a made for mobile TV channel, and the BBC service is available only on a 12 month trial basis. Some American, film and sports content will be missing according to BT’s announcement of its Movio service.

The conclusion is that the guys at trustedreviews are in two minds about the Lobster 700TV. Yes, it has all the capabilities of a Windows Mobile Smartphone, with TV and DAB radio thrown in. But the number of TV stations it handles is small – which is why they’ve given it such a low value rating - and you can’t really see yourself wanting to squint at its screen for long. Surely nobody is that addicted to TV that they can’t video something to watch later on a bigger screen?

Read full review on trustedreview.