In the news, I reported on Nokia's unveiling of the new Ovi Maps, which is essentially free for consumers to use - so long as they have a Symbian-based Nokia phone, of course.

I speculated in the story that this might hit the makers of standalone navigation kit such as TomTom and Garmin, but further consideration has made me rethink this.

The fact is that standalone kit tends to ship with a larger, more readable screen than your average smartphone, and this is quite important when you are trying to use the device while driving. Phones also tend to go into power-saving mode if you haven't pressed a button for a few seconds, even when connected to an external power source. And what happens if you have an incoming call just as you reach a critical junction?

Interestingly, analyst firm Canalys thinks that Nokia's mobile operator partners stand to lose from the move, since they offer their own paid-for navigation tools to customers. These often download map data on-the-fly thereby driving up mobile data use as well, whereas Ovi Maps comes with the map data for all of Europe pre-installed on new Nokia phones.

Thinking about it, I can't see why you would want to use a mobile phone for in-car navigation rather than a device custom-made for the purpose, so perhaps TomTom and Garmin are safe.

Then again, I'm sure others will disagree. Is there something I'm missing?

Posted by Daniel Robinson on January 21, 2010 | Permalink | Comments (5)

Google's official unveiling of its own-brand phone has finally brought to a halt the seemingly endless speculation over the device, the existence of which was long denied by the company, but which soon proved to be more than mere vapourware as the name and images of it eventually leaked onto the web.

The Nexus One, which can be ordered today from a new online store hosted by Google, has met with a mixed reaction from commentators and industry experts. Some have hailed the device as the only worthy challenger to Apple's iPhone, while others said that it renders other Android-based devices obsolete. Many, however, have expressed indifference to the Nexus and the "superphone" tag that Google has labelled it with.

Indeed, a glance at the specifications shows that the Nexus One, with its 1GHz Qualcomm SnapDragon processor, large touch-screen, Wi-Fi and 3G wireless support, plus built-in GPS, is very similar to other handsets such as HTC's HD2. This should come as little surprise, since the Nexus is actually manufactured for Google by HTC.

But it is the available software and services that set any mobile apart from the competition, as Apple has demonstrated with the iPhone, and the Nexus includes one or two surprises here.

As well as a newly minted version of Google's Android platform, the Nexus features speech recognition throughout, dynamic noise suppression on voice calls, and is also said to support automatic synchronisation of photos to the web.

However, in other respects the Nexus seems to have little to offer that consumers cannot already get with other Android-based handsets, such as access to Google Maps, Google Mail, Google Talk, and Android Market for downloading applications, so it is difficult to see justification for claims that the Nexus is the first in an emerging category of superphones.

Then there is the question of why Google has chosen to compete against its own partners, such as Motorola. The Android platform might be open, which is why it has attracted a number of handset vendors and carriers, but the fact that Google has been the first to market with an Android 2.1 device could easily convince its partners that they are not in an equal partnership.

Google's ultimate goal, as some observers have maintained, is probably to boost web advertising by getting its platform used by as many people as possible. Perhaps the company is hoping that it can follow Apple's example and use the cachet associated with the Google brand to draw consumers to the Nexus One instead of rival phones.

Whatever Google's motives for marketing its own-brand handset, the Nexus One seems a little disappointing after all the hype and rumour that preceded the launch. It certainly does not seem to be the "iPhone killer" that some observers have labelled it, especially as many buyers are drawn to Apple's handset because of its close integration with the iTunes music service and the huge number of available applications as much as for its slick design and touch-driven user interface.

However, here at V3.co.uk, we will reserve ultimate judgement until we have had a review model to test out for ourselves.

Posted by Daniel Robinson on January 6, 2010 | Permalink | Comments (2)

RIM's recently announced BlackBerry Bold 2 updates (but does not replace) last year's Bold model, incorporating changes based on customer feedback regarding size and other aspects of the original device.

I was given a brief demo of the new Bold 2 - otherwise known as the Bold 9700 - which is slightly smaller and lighter than its predecessor and swaps the pearl trackball for a touchpad. It also features version 5.0 of the BlackBerry OS (recently introduced on the new Storm2 handset), and a slightly higher resolution 480 x 360 pixel display.

My first impression was that the Bold 2 seems noticeably smaller than the Bold, even though RIM has only shaved off a few millimetres all round, and it feels about the same size as one of the older Blackberry Curve models.

It looks like it would fit better in your pocket than the original Bold, and at 122 grams, is also less heavy to carry.

The other noticeable difference is the touchpad, which enables you to use some of the same gestures that are possible on the Storm2's touch screen, such as swipe, zoom and double-tap.

In practice, this means you can swipe your thumb across the touchpad to move from one open window to another. The touchpad also makes it easier to scroll quickly up and down through your messages much faster than was possible with the pearl trackball, which will please those business users who make heavy use of their BlackBerry for emails.

However, the Bold 2 has a very similar keyboard design to the Bold, with the oddly sculpted keys that some people (myself included) find more difficult to use than those of the BlackBerry Curve models.

Rob Orr, director of product management for RIM in EMEA, countered that users have a choice and can pick the keyboard that suits them. The original Bold will continue to be sold alongside the Bold 2, he added, because some users said they prefer a larger device.

Because it shares the updated OS 5.0 with the Storm2, the Bold 2 has the same enhanced web browser, which seemed pretty good for accessing standard web sites in the brief time I had available to try it out.

For corporate users, OS 5.0 also opens up access to the enhanced features of RIM's latest BlackBerry Enterprise Server (BES) 5.0 release, such as the ability to flag emails for follow up and access to Windows network file shares.

Like the Bold, the new model has Wi-Fi and GPS, but has double the Flash memory at 256MB.

Other notable features include a microSD card slot that can easily be accessed just by sliding the back cover down by a centimetre or so.

RIM also said that owners of existing BlackBerry devices will be able to get an upgrade to OS 5.0 sometime early next year.

Posted by Daniel Robinson on October 26, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (0)

The much-rumoured successor to the BlackBerry Storm will be available in the UK later this month from Vodafone, but I was given the chance of a quick demo today by RIM.

The Storm2 looks very similar to the original model, but its styling has been tweaked a little with contouring to make it more comfortable to hold, and the four keys (call, hangup, go back and BlackBerry key) have been moved onto the glass instead of being separate buttons below the screen.

But the biggest change is the display. The updated SurePress technology uses an electromechanical system to give tactile feedback, instead of the screen actually moving, as was the case on the original Storm. This should, hopefully, make the device more robust.

With the power off, the screen is obviously solid and unmoving. But when the Storm2 is active, pressing on the screen generates the sensation that it gives slightly then springs back.

When you press the screen, any control that your finger touches lights up, but is not activated until you press. Anyone used to other touch-screen phones might find this a little strange at first.

RIM maintains that the new system makes it easier and faster to type on the touch screen, but I found I kept hitting the wrong keys when thumb typing, so it possibly takes a bit of practice.

Fortunately, the new Storm2 is also the first Qwerty BlackBerry to come with auto correction, and users are encouraged to just bash away and "trust" the Storm2 to work out what they are typing, according to RIM.

Like the original Storm, you can use the device upright and get a SureType-style on-screen keyboard, or you can rotate it sideways, whereupon the display automatically changes to match, while the keyboard switches to a full Qwerty to make better use of the screen area.

One good thing about the new display is that it is multi-touch; you can hold down the shift key and press another one to access an upper case letter, just as you would on a physical keyboard.

Also new in the Storm2, all of the on-screen controls are active, so you can (for example) touch the Wi-Fi symbol to turn this function on, instead of having to hunt through the menus.

Other features I saw in the demo include markers that can be positioned by fingertip to mark the start and end of text to be copied and pasted, and a touch-activated search in the email window.

Here, touching the name on an email returns a list of all messages associated with the same name, while touching the subject shows just those messages in a particular email thread. The resulting messages are opened automatically, and you can jump from one to the next with a quick sideways flick on the screen.

Overall, the Storm2 looks like an improvement over the original, but from the brief hands-on, I would still prefer a BlackBerry with a real keyboard for heavy messaging work.

Posted by Daniel Robinson on October 15, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (0)

T-Mobile's newly unveiled Pulse handset is the carrier's third Android device, but the first on a pay-as-you-go tariff and designed to appeal to a broader market.

I had a very brief hands-on with the Pulse at T-Mobile's London launch event, and was impressed with the smoothness of the gesture-based user interface.

However, another journalist at the same event criticised the Pulse's resistive touch screen for not being quite as responsive as the capacitive design used on Apple's iPhone.

The 3.5in screen is certainly a decent size, and T-Mobile even suggested that this would allow the Pulse to replace an in-car satellite navigation device when used with the built-in TeleNav software.

T-Mobile's Canvas home screen provides a desktop area larger than can fit onto the physical display, and you can move around with the flick of a finger to pan or scroll the display.

Canvas also lets you customise this home screen by dragging in the icons you most often access from the application menu to create a shortcut, similar to the way you would on a Windows PC.

The handset itself is about the same size and weight as the iPhone, but unlike Apple's device has the standard green and red call / hangup buttons as well as a miniature trackball bracketed by menu / back keys for those who don't like using the touch screen for everything.

An on-screen keyboard pops up whenever you need to key in text, such as when composing an email, and T-Mobile offers a choice of full Qwerty or a layout similar to RIM's SureType. Its predictive text input algorithm also offers a choice of words you can tap to select.

The device we saw was a pre-production unit, and so there were one or two quirks. The screen did not automatically change orientation when we twisted it round as it is supposed to, for example.

However, in the brief time available we found the device seemed to deliver a reasonable experience when accessing the web. We especially liked how easy it was to browse Android Market for available applications, one feature that has driven uptake of Apple's rival iPhone.

The Pulse certainly ticks all the right boxes at first glance; HSPA support, Wi-Fi, GPS (with a trial version of the TeleNav navigation software), touch-screen and a decent-looking user interface.

A full review of the T-Mobile Pulse will appear on V3.co.uk, just as soon as we can get hold of one for long enough.

Posted by Daniel Robinson on September 3, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (3)

Skyfire has released an update to its ground-breaking mobile browser which lets smartphone users see web pages as they would appear on a PC, including multimedia content such as Flash and Quicktime.

Essentially a bugfix release, Skyfire 1.1 has been tweaked to improve page load times and features updated plug-ins for Flash, Silverlight and QuickTime content. It adds support for WML, the markup language used in older WAP pages.

Skyfire also said it has improved scrolling and zooming on the Symbian version of the browser, and fixed an issue whereby the Windows Mobile version would sometimes quit on startup.

Using Skyfire on my Windows Mobile 6 handset, I found little visible difference in the new version. However, pages did seem to load slightly faster over a 3G network connection, with the checkerboard background pattern showing less often when I scrolled to a part of the page that was not in the browser cache.

Embedded videos on sites such as V3.co.uk and the BBC's news site also seemed to display more smoothly. In fact, it still amazes me with just how good the video playback is with Skyfire.

To set against that, Skyfire does seem to burn through the battery life on my handset when it is in use, and this is one thing that the new update hasn't addressed.

I also fired a quick email to Skyfire asking them for any news on the promised BlackBerry version of the browser - no reply so far.

Posted by Daniel Robinson on August 26, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (0)

The HTC Hero has recently arrived at the V3.co.uk labs, HTC's latest phone to run Google's open source Android mobile operating system.

We'll have a full review of the device up next week, but here are some of our first impressions.

In terms of design, HTC has stuck with the same principles it employed for its first two Android devices, so we have a large touch screen above a handful of buttons and a trackball which sit on a 'chin' that juts out. On the HTC Magic, the lines and this lip were all very gentle and understated, while on the Hero the lines are a lot harder and the lip is quite pronounced. This makes the Hero look a lot more professional than its predecessors.

Also, thanks to the change from a resistive touch screen to a capacitive one, the interface is a lot more responsive and it now supports multi-touch as well.

The screen is also the best looking by far, and this comes down to not just the components used but also the addition of Sense. Much like it did with the inclusion of TouchFlo over Windows Mobile, HTC's Sense adds a layer over the Android interface to help make it more intuitive. Sense also brings in a lot of integration and a few new applications and widgets to help enhance the experience. It also gives you access to seven screens instead of Android's usual three.

Some of these include the ability to tie your contacts to your communications and social networks, so now you can see an individual's details as well as any emails, calls and messages with that person and recent Twitter, Facebook or Flickr updates.

There is also the inclusion of what HTC calls 'Scenes' which are essentially profiles, so you can set up which layouts, shortcuts and widgets you want to use in a particular situation and then change between them as you desire. Unfortunately Scenes is only skin deep, so you can't make different account or settings changes for each profile.

As with all Android devices the Hero's ease of use and functionality is closely tied to Google's services, and while there may be privacy concerns about how much information Google has on each and every one of us, the upside is that contacts, email, calendar and instant messenger are all automatically synchronised with your Google account.

The physical keyboard in the G1 was one of the best I've ever used, but it did make the device very bulky. Having scrapped that on the Magic, I turned to the virtual keyboard, which was usable but was often very annoying. I'm happy to say that the soft keyboard on the Hero is a pleasure to use, thanks to the combination of the capacitive touch screen and a much improved dictionary that can actually learn.

HTC has also bumped up the camera on the Hero to 5MP - but there is still no flash - and the company has finally included a proper 3.5mm headset jack so you can hook up your favourite pair of headphones rather than having to use the rather uncomfortable mini-USB headphones that were bundled into the G1 and the Magic.

As a whole the device generally runs pretty smoothly, but it can be be a bit slow and occasionally lags, which can be particularly frustrating when you're not sure if it's overloaded or if it hasn't acknowledged your input.

It can be easy to forget that Android is still a very young operating system and so can still be a little rough around the edges, particularly if you're looking for enterprise level features. Sense goes a long way to helping fill some of the gaps that still exist in Android and make the whole experience that much better.

There are still some bugs, missing features and annoyances - but that could also be said for every other mobile operating system and device around. It's impressive to see how quickly developers have rallied around the operating system and developed applications for it; with the possible exception of the Apple iPhone's App Store, the Android Marketplace is almost certainly the best mobile app store around.

I'm not done putting the Hero through its paces, but so far I'm very impressed, not just by the device itself but also by how quickly Android has, and is still, evolving.

Update: The full video review of the HTC Hero can be found here

Posted by Ian Williams on July 30, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (4)

With the announcement today that Palm's Pre smartphone will be available exclusively on O2's network in the UK (at least for a while), yet another worst-kept secret of the mobile industry was confirmed.

Reports pointing to O2 as the chosen European carrier started to circulate earlier this year, almost as soon as the Pre was unveiled at the CES show in Las Vegas, yet as recently as last week, both O2 and Palm continued to label this as mere speculation.

More worrying for Palm is the long delay before UK buyers will be able to get their hands on the Pre. At the moment, the Pre looks like one of the hottest handsets around, offering a modern, gesture-based user interface like that of Apple's iPhone, yet the Pre is smaller and offers a slide-out Qwerty keyboard for easier messaging.

However, the iPhone 3GS is available to buy now, while the Pre is currently only available in the US. Several other interesting new smartphones, such as the Samsung i7500 and Toshiba's TG01, will also hit the streets here long before the Pre is available. Who knows what else might emerge before Christmas?

This problem isn't restricted to Palm, of course. One V3.co.uk staffer commented recently that Nokia's N97 handset would have been a "killer device" if it had shipped soon after its unveiling in December 2008. Instead, it didn't show up until June this year, by which time it had already been eclipsed by the excitement over the new iPhone.

O2 said that it wanted to ensure everything necessary gets put in place before the Pre goes on sale in the UK, which is a laudable goal. But in the fast-moving world of today's smartphone market, the danger is that the Pre could be overshadowed by newer devices by the time customers get the chance to purchase one.

Posted by Daniel Robinson on July 7, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (0)

The Symbian Foundation has revealed it now has the Symbian OS running in a test symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) configuration on an evaluation handset.

In a post on the Symbian Foundation blog, executive director Lee Williams wrote that "a team at ST-Ericsson, and ARM have the operating system now running on a highly capable SMP configuration."

The test platform is apparently a reference smart phone built around a ST-Ericsson U8500 chip, one of the first silicon implementations of ARM's Cortex-A9 MPCore, a multi-core version of the ARM architecture found in almost all today's smartphones.

Williams said that multi-core handsets can accommodate features such as high-definition video and hardware accelerated 3D Graphics supporting OpenGL.

Symbian said it intended to support the Cortex-A9 MPCore architecture when it was announced in 2007, but that multiple core processing is only likely to be used when required, to preserve battery life on handsets.

Posted by Daniel Robinson on June 4, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (0)

I've often fancied one of those natty little Bluetooth headsets that let you take a call while your phone is tucked out of harm's way in your bag or pocket, but there are such a confusing array of these that I've never got around to actually settling on one and buying it.

This week, one of my colleagues solved the problem by offering me one he had been given free by a vendor. I won't name the model in question, but I can't say I'm impressed with the device at all, and I'm now glad I didn't waste any of my own money.

It isn't that the device doesn't work. I had no trouble pairing it up with my mobile phone, after which the handset always diverted audio to the headset whenever the latter was switched on.

No, the problem is that nobody can hear a blasted word I'm saying if I use it to make a call.

The headset is one of those fashionably tiny devices that clips comfortably over your ear, but is so small that the microphone part is actually resting against your cheek. An awful lot of these devices share a similar design, but placing the pickup so far away from your mouth is an obvious flaw, surely?

Whenever I tested the headset to make or receive calls, the person at the far end either couldn't hear me at all, or said it sounded like I was speaking to them from the middle of a boiler room.

Has anyone out there had better luck with these devices, or can recommend one that actually works?

Posted by Daniel Robinson on March 12, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (0)