3GSM Live

Last week I spent some time with Nokia's latest new multimedia phone A-95. That's the phone they don't call a phone, they call it a multimedia handset. This is because Nokia has set the phone up with Sony features. There's a 5 megapixel(?) camera, music player, ___ & this time out in the headline it's GPS. So users can see where they're going, either on foot or when plugged into their car as part of their in-car system. It's a very impressive phone too. The bottom half of the phone slides down to reveal the keypad & there's a further slide at the top which when push reveals the play Musicbun(?). Is it gonna change the shape of phones? I don't know. My feeling on their 95 is this is about far realistically as a gadget phone in it's current guise can go. It has almost every bell & whistle on board. Nokia can't really take it much further. What's the point of having a 7 megapixel(?) camera on a Mob.? 5 megapixels(?) is more than enough. Sure you can have different types of music players & features like track ID which identifies ___ music which is on the Sony Ericsson phones but that really is the end of the story I think for gadget phones. So where does Nokia go now? I think it's now shifting away from simply adding facilities & now need specifications. ___ use the phone & also need facing the way their interact with them. I think part of the height of the Apple Eye(?) phone & the LG card phone is a huge excitement ___ facility. Their touch screens have been around in various guises for a very long time. Hugely it started ___ firmly the Eye(?) phone & the pride(?) phone of T&T. At least thought they are offering something completely new. They're just not building on existing specifications. There's also the possibility of that Nokia should look into developing other applications to make life easier for Mob. users & 1 wouldn't push for various aps perhaps even linked in with GPS which would certainly differenciate the A-95 from some of it's competitors but I think we really have hit the ball in terms of gadget phones. I don't really think

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Hi, it's day 2 at 3GSM here in very very sunny Barcelona & it's been very entertaining so far. I've been in Samsung press conference in which they went through the ultra mobile range. You can have a look at it on the Tech Digest & Sihiny Shiny website - there's videos of some of their very good products there as well. Going back to the conference now. 1 thing I'm very keen to look at is the HTC phones, apparently they've got some new Windows Mobiles 6.0 devices, 1 of which is causing a real stir. It's called the Advantage and is basically a fairly big Smartphone type thing but it kind of straddles the line between a laptop & a UPMC & it's getting a lot of good reviews so hopefully we can have the video of that up shortly. Also I'm gonna check out some of the social networking groups that are looking to move onto mobile.

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Well it's almost time to go home after day 1 of 3GSM and the thing that I think is very strange about the show is the rise & fall of mobikle TV. There are plenty of phones about with mobile TV, many sporting DVB-H, which is the digital terrestrial system favoured in the UK. There are many good models: Sagem have got My Mobile TV, which is an impressive little phone and Samsung have got models as well. The image quality is generally good too. The sad part of it all though is that the chances of them actually coming to the UK  at the moment, is pretty miniscule really. I don't think we will see them till probably 2010. So is mobile TV dead, who knows? Virgin had a bit of a nightmare in the UK with their lobster phone. I don't think a huge amount of people are watching the video on Vodafone from Sky. Maybe mobile TV is just not the big thing that everyone thought it was going to be. So lots of DVB-H phones, some of them look really good and the sad part is that certainly we won't be watching, not in the UK anyway.

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Well we've just had the most exciting moment of the show so far. Yup I've seen the new Blackberry, the 8800 and yes it is about as exciting as you would imagine. It's basically like the 8700 but they just tweaked it a bit. The big story with it is they put a GPS in there, so you can hopefully use that of whizz around the country and it will tell you where to go. Downside is it's not 3G; it's only GPRS so not good for big downloads or super fast web browsing. The other interesting thing about it is the odd nipple - can I use that word? - that's on the Pearl has been moved over onto it. You spin around very very quickly with it, but I find it a little bit annoying. I know a lot people like it so I'm not going to slag it off too much. I don't know when it's going to be on sale. It is definitely coming to the UK, I'm sure it will sell by the millions, and personally I wouldn't want to go near one ever.

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You know I said it's been a quiet 3GSM. Well, I take it all back. I've just been to the Samsung stand and it's a really great collection of phones. The one that I think will grab the headlines is the U100 Ultra phone, which is basically the skinniest thing you've ever seen. It is the size 0 of Mobiles, it's 5.9 mm thin. Yeah, it's still got a few features, such as the 3 megapixel camera on there. I'm not sure about the battery life, I can't imagine the battery is that great, but it's a pretty impressive model.

There's also a HSDPA model called the U700, which has got plenty of features. They've also got plenty of other phones in the Ultra series of other models. The F300 could also be a stand out. This is a music player, and what they've done is put all the music playing facilities on one side, so it looks like a Samsung MP3 Player from about 9 months ago, and then placed the phone on the other, it is very very cleverly done, very well executed. I'm not sure how much storage it's gonna have - it uses Micro SD - but it's got a 2 MP camera and basically looks the business. There's also a version for video; it's called the F500 Ultra Video and it's got a 2.4 inch landscape screen. It's very very clever as it folds apart, so half the phone turns into a stand. There're lot of other Samsung phones, which I think I'll save for another story.

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Hi, this is Ashley now. It's sort of around lunch time and everyone's packed up and is chomping on Tapas. But overall it's been a disappointing 3GSM for me. It's not really been this huge breakthrough of Blockbuster phones you've seen in previous years. It's been more of consolidation, besides a big story it's a matter of HSDPA that's around. HSDPA is of course a kind of Super 3G, which has got download speeds of up to 3.6 megabits per second and it labels mobile phones to see all of kind of things. It certainly improves the quality of the video screening and surely downloading large files. But virtually every new phone here seems to be HSDPA compatible, so that's the way it's going. In terms of the handsets. The massive story hass probably been Motorola, which after a quiet year has come back with interesting products. Nokia was very quiet really, there's no huge phones, you know these serious phones, and the new communicator, the E90, is quite impressive. Sony Ericsson didn't have anything new on their stand. So very quiet, I'm gonna spend the rest of the day now, kind of taking in this smaller parts of the exhibition. Trying to find some more of the squawky stuff. There are a few smaller handset manufacturers we haven't spoken to yet and obviously a lot of applications. There's a lot of talk here of Web 2.0 applications going on to mobiles, and we then we had an announcement from Nokia about YouTube. So we'll try and find some more of that stuff and we'll have an update on Spin-my-Blog which is obviously paring this Voice-to-Blog service. So that's what I'm gonna be doing this afternoon.

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And there are some amazing new phones at the Sony Ericsson stand. Actually there aren't - they showed them all about a week and a half ago. It's quite bizarre really, they've got a huge stand and no one is on it. Everyone is at Nokia, Samsung, and LG. So come to 3GSM, go to the Sony Ericsson stand, and you don't get to see much. But the new Walkman phones look good. You saw a few videos last week, so not really much else for me to say. So we are gonna be looking at some other places. Samsung coming up in a min.

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Hi, this is Susi, and I'm using this miraculous talking to blogging stuff for the first time and actually all I want to do is swear just to see if it works. But I'm going to hold myself back and instead tell you about the LG Prada phone which I've so far only seen behind glass - there's that much security. It's so pretty and it looks so nice. So we've been promised a preview of it at 3:00 this afternoon, so if you check back about 3:30 I will be able to tell you all the intimate details and might have come across some new Prada shoes or something like that.

You can but hope.

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Well, we've spent quite a long time at the Nokia stand, and to be honest, not particularly blown away. What they've done, I think, is they're banking everything on the N95, which is the fantastic consumer phone. What they have though is an upgrade of some of their more corporate business phones. The big one they're pushing is E61i, which is an upgrade of the E61 and they've, to be honest, done quite a good job on it. The E61 for me was a bit of a dog, it looked awful, had a really, really nasty kind of joystick to it, and it just didn't really feel like a quality Nokia phone, but the E61i, it's finished in silver, it's got a much more sensible kinda rock switch. It's also got 2 megapixel camera, which the 61 didn't. So that looks pretty impressive. There was some new communicator, remember those? The flip-open ones, it's just the E90, it's basically got GPS in it, just like the N95. It's the usual know selection of features, it's HSDPA, WiFi. There's good battery life on it and that keyboard that is the standard for the communicator series. So some interesting updates, but Nokia haven't really set the 3GSM alive for me.

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Last week we told you about YouTube going mobile and how it's gonna be on the Vodafone platform in the UK. Well at 3GSM today, Nokia has unveiled what it's billing its new mobile internet video experience. What it basically means is that on its N series devices - you know, the high end Smartphone - it's gonna offer access to YouTube, basically, and there's a new web browser with something called Mini Map which enables the browser to actually check out sites like YouTube. It's gonna be embedded in the Nokia N95, which is coming out very soon, and from then on it'll be in all Nokia N series phones. So yeah, big news, we're very excited about that. The other big story for Nokia is the Nokia N77, which is sort of a brand new TV phone. Now this yrs is DVBH, which is basically the digital TV system that we've got in the UK. No news on whether it's actually gonna work within the UK yet but it's just a very stylish device, quite thin, packed with features, you know, all the usual stuff, digital music player, integrated stereo speakers, pretty decent camera, but the big thing is, it's fairly small, and the idea is that you're gonna sit and watch your TV on it. I think it's fairly similar to the Motorola devices we were talking about earlier on today. So some good stuff from Nokia. Check out the video, which should be on Tech Digest very shortly.

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