CellPhoneBurn

I haven’t done any ’silly concept’ posts for a while, but we have an entire section on this blog dedicated to silly concept mobile phones. Basically, I pick a famous brand name, and vamp about what their concept mobile phone might be like. However, I have to admit defeat and say that I probably can’t come up with a sillier concept than this, fresh from the pages of Engadget Mobile (who, it would seem, have written their entire post with tongue welded into cheek). It’s a set of thumb protectors, that you wear when texting, or using your Blackberry.

And its name? Awethumb.

Oh. Dear. Lord.

Click here to view the embedded video.

I have a strange love and hate relationship with the N96. On the days that I carry my E71, I miss the gaming, music and the camera of the N96 and when I have the N96 I can’t wait to get back to the E71 because of the battery life and speed. However, that might soon change.

If you look at the N96, everything about it screams VIDEO. The 2.8″ screen, VGA capture at 30 FPS, 16GB of storage for recording and storage, the dual LED that can be used as while recording and lastly, its box itself - from which the above picture comes. Anyone would think that Nokia has gone all in for making it into a video production and consumption monster. At least I did, before I had the following incredibly frustrating experience. My videos have not been set ‘free’.

Nokia is apparently going to launch a new handset today, in under three hours time. That should get us all excited, isn’t it? However, I am not, as from the looks of things it might just be a low-mid end phone and not even a S60 device. The phone launch isn’t even the reason of this article. The reason is the viral campaign itself - My Phone Knows Everything About Me - and how true is that.

(Note: all views expressed are SOLELY those of the author, and do not necessarily reflect those of Mobileshop.com)

The world is full of urban myths around mobile phones. I even did this blog post about it, trying to debunk some of them. There’s one urban myth, however, that seems to keep cropping up again and again and again. It also happens to be the one that gets on my wick more than any other: the oft-debunked idea that you can cook an egg using mobile phones.

As part of a very good series on sustainable software, Gianugo Rabellino writes:

The market couldn’t care less about your developers’ kids in need of new sneakers or your VC craving about his next Lambo: the argument that someone has to pay for software development is one of the biggest straw man of Open Source - the market pays for value, and if you build very little, guess what, you won’t get more than peanuts.

Oh dear.

I think I’m going to get whined at forever. I may have accidentally mentioned to an extremely impressionable woman, who should know better, that there’s supposed to be a Hello Kitty mobile phone coming to the UK at some point (mind you, there has been since May, when the licensing deal was signed, according to Mobile News).

I’m never going to hear the end of this, am I? All the extensive (well, extensive-ish) knowledge of mobile phones, and I’m destined to get badgered about one with a cartoon cat on it…

Perhaps some back story is needed here.

It has almost become an accepted fact that Eseries devices from Nokia have better build quality than their Nseries siblings, for a long time I thought so too. However, for the good or the bad, that belief of mine has been shattered. Eseries devices have disappointed too and that leads me to this post.

In the last two month or so I or my friends have picked up three Nokia E90’s and two N82’s and what is bad is that all but one have had some problem or the other.

E90

It is no secret that I am a big fan of Nokia S60 devices and don’t think twice before recommending such a device to anyone. What’s more is that I am also in a habit to observe what devices are people using, somewhat automatically.

So when I actually see people using Nokia S60’s I more often than not suggest an application, some tweak or anything to help get them more out of a device. On all occasions people have been happier after incorporating what I had to say, but this one occasion was different.

Going over the recent Eseries launches, I couldn’t help but feel that there was just no answer to the E71 from the Nseries department, we have waited and we have waited but sadly there is still no Nseries QWERTY. What this will mean is that a lot of people who *like* their music and their pictures will look towards the E71 as a inviting proposition. Could the E71 pull it of? Yes! But have Nokia allowed it to? No!

Disclaimer: The views in this blog post are the views of Technical Markus only, and do not necessarily reflect MobileShop.com’s views.

You may have heard about this, but in the last few days, there’s been a ruling from the Advertising Standards Authority forbidding top tier mobile phone manufacturer LG from showing the advert for the LG Venus in the UK. And why was it banned? Because the woman in the advert, at one point, appears to be using a mobile phone in her car.

It has been a while since Nokia has got the message that smartphones need ample RAM. If we look at just a few of the recently released phones, it becomes clear all of them have a decent amount of RAM, be it the E90, N82, N95 8GB even the slightly lower end phones like the N81 and E51 have been endowed with enough RAM.

Has anyone noticed the cleverly worded adverts that appear to offer things like mobile games, ringtones and wallpapers for ‘free’, only to sting you with some indecipherable small print after you’ve signed up?

Well I have been caught out by something similar. I’m not 100% sure how it’s come about, but I’ve got a pretty good idea, and I’m quite cross. So I thought I’d warn you, as you may be getting ripped off in a similar fashion.