Mobile Phones Blog

Here’s a little early Christmas treat from O2. Anyone who signs up for any of the O2 Mobile Broadband solutions between today and Christmas Eve will be eligible to receive a Prepay Sony Ericsson T280i FREE in the post.

The T280i is a straightforwards, no-nonsense candybar phone with an FM radio, Bluetooth, a 1.3 Megapixel camera and the capacity for MP3 ringtones and MMS messages – hardly cutting edge you’ll agree, but it’s a nice little stocking filler nonetheless. As a phone it’s fine; you get some 7 hours of talk time and 300 hours of standby time thanks to the reliable battery performance, so whilst it might not be as amazing as getting a free next-gen 128GB iPhone 7G*, O2 are effectively giving you a free back-up phone for use in emergencies when your main handset runs out of juice, therby saving you the £49.99 RRP.

O2 Mobile Broadband gives customers a clear idea of the speed they’re getting thanks to the handy LED display built into the USB modem, free on the Pay Monthly Mobile Broadband plans. O2 customers also get unlimited access to any of the 6,100 Wi-Fi hot spots operated by The Cloud.

NOTE: *Our elite team of lawyers, one of whom worked on the defence case for the 1984 film The NeverEnding Story, has advised us to point out that this phone doesn’t really exist.

Google have just rushed out a patch for the T-Mobile G1, after it was recently discovered that typing the word ‘reboot’ shortly after turning the device on, caused the Android phone to do just that.

Google were quick to respond to user complaints and sent out the fix in the RC30 update, which was made available to UK users as of the 12th of November (this Wednesday).

Rich Cannings of the Android Security Team said that; “This is definitely a big bug,” and although he admitted that there was an element of security risk, any hacker would have had a hard time getting access to someone’s G1.

“An attacker might have [had] to convince a user to install a game with keyboard movement commands that typed out ‘telnetd’ to launch the phone’s telnet application to open the phone up to remote control,” said Cannings. The bug was announced earlier this week, with a fix written and released within a matter of days – anyone attempting such a high-level hack would have needed a larger window of opportunity than the one which was presented.

The bug, whilst fixed quickly however, reflects very badly on quality control of both the phone and the Android OS and presumably prompted a giant ROLF from iPhone users.

This story reminded us of that bit in The IT Crowd where Jen is convinced that Googling Google will break the internet. Would’ve posted the YouTube clip here, but as all embedding has been disabled by request, we’ll play nice and link to it instead…

More details have emerged concerning the forthcoming ‘Facebook Phone’ developed by INQ, an offshoot of Hutchinson, owners of 3 Mobile.

Designed purely with social networking in mind, the INQ1 – pronounced ‘ink one’ – is a slim tablet slider phone that looks set to take the wind out of the sales of the high-falutin’ likes of Apple and T-Mobile with their fancy pants iPhones and G1s – the INQ1 will retail for the very credit-crunch friendly price of FREE on 3 contracts costing upwards of just £15 a month for 18 months.

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Stand aside Zune Guy, there’s someone out there willing to go to even greater lengths to publicly declare their love of a piece of hardware via the medium of Indian ink and public self-abasement.

One T.J. from Toledo, Ohio, who goes under the alias of ‘Stressed’ on the CrackBerry.com forums – ‘the #1 site for BlackBerry users and abusers’ – boldly stepped up to the plate when aforementioned website launched their ‘What Would You Do for a BlackBerry Storm?’ contest.

Of the 187 BlackBerry addicts who said that they would get the image of a BlackBerry handset or the CrackBerry logo indelibly etched into their flesh, it was T.J.’s life-sized representation of the BlackBerry Storm, that earned him his prize – the first of ten BlackBerry Storms to be given away by the guys at CrackBerry.

The tattoo comes complete with the circular ‘CB’ insignia, and the barely legible and heretical legend ‘iPhone Sucks’ scrawled underneath it, all permanently engraved on the back of his right leg, just below the calf muscles.

The tattoo was done by one Brian Krabach of Revelation Tattoos, who is seen in the video below sporting an iPhone t-shirt.

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The LG Wine KF300 clamshell has just been released exclusively on the Orange network. The LG Wine is one of those whip-smart flip phones which is high on design, but not so hot on features, but is sure to attract a certain type of customer, one who wants a phone to be a phone first and foremost, but wants its looks, if not its features to be on the cutting edge.

The LG Wine boasts a reflective anodized effect finish, into which is hidden a discreet exterior TFT, displaying the usual secondary screen fare; signal strength, battery life, time, that sort of thing. Much like the Sony Ericsson Z610i, the secondary display retreats from view when the phone is inactive, only kicking into life when you open up the handset, or if you have a message or missing call waiting to be returned.

It has to be said that the features of the LG Wine aren’t really that amazing; a benchmark standard 2 Megapixel camera, capable of recording video (which unfortunately comes sans flash or autofocus) and a rather basic MP3 player – but then again, this is simply a decent mid range phone designed for the fashion conscious and feature agnostic.

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The highly anticipated BlackBerry Storm 9500, developed by Research In Motion in tandem with Vodafone is set to open up an almighty downpour on the smartphone/PDA market upon its release here in the UK tomorrow.

The Storm marks a new venture for RIM, being as it is the first BlackBerry PDA to come with a touchscreen UI, and a rather nice one at that. The interface features a unique brand of haptic feedback which is as of yet unseen on any other touchscreen handset. Whilst other touchscreens will give you a neat little conformational buzz whenever you tap in a command, tapping and typing away on the interface of the Storm is a different proposition – the actual screen itself depresses slightly into the main body of the handset and satisfyingly clicks back out. Keystrokes are accompanied by a slight feedback buzz which is similar to, but altogether different from the type of haptic feedback were used to from the LG Viewty et al.

The BlackBerry Storm is RIM’s most media-friendly handset so far, designed to, er, rein in the typical hardcore Blackberry buyer who might have been swayed by the push email support available on some of the newer smartphones on offer from rival makers. Among its features is a 3.2 Megapixel camera, 3G internet access and sat-nav functionality. Up to 16GB of storage is available, enough space to store plenty of choice tunes downloaded from the Vodafone Music Store, direct access to which, is a fully integrated feature.

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Yesterday Barack Obama crossed the finishing line in 1st place by 183 college votes, which was more than enough to see him secure the title of President of the United States of America and step into the history books as the first ever non-Caucasian premier the US has seen.

It has been suggested by many that a key feature of Obama’s success, his charm and personality aside, was due to his campaign team embracing mobile phones and social networking to help ‘GOTV’ (Get Out the Vote!)

Prior to the Democratic election victory, Obama’s running mate Joe Biden announced that some 2.9 million text messages were sent out from the Democrat camp to people signed up to receive them; this has now been claimed as being the biggest text message marketing campaign ever!

By contrast, John McCain and his frightening sidekick demonstrably failed to get to grips with the modern world, evidenced by McCain’s apparent claim that he didn’t know how to use the internet, and by Sarah Palin’s embarrassing ‘Yahoogate’ gaffe.

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Yesterday Lewis Hamilton crossed the finishing line in 5^th place, which was enough to see him secure the title of Formula One World Champion and race into the history books as the youngest ever winner of the title at the tender age of just 23.

“I am speechless,” Hamilton said. “It’s been a long journey in which I had the support of many people. My team did a fantastic job during the entire year and we sacrificed ourselves a lot. I am happy for having achieved this for all of us.”

Hamilton, who needed to finish fifth or better to win the title, is the youngest F1 world champion at age 23. Spaniard Fernando Alonso was 24 when he won in 2005.

No doubt team sponsors Vodafone will be happy – perhaps they’ll want to tie Hamilton’s historic win into a promotional campaign which sees them punting the top 7.2Mbps speeds available on their mobile broadband network or something. Last Winterval, Vodafone gave Hamilton a free Samsung F700 to show off to the world, and he was spotted on the arm of Pussycat Doll Nicole Scherzinger at this year’s Vodafone Music Awards.

Today sees Nokia launch the N85 in the UK – the latest addition to the N-Series and one that follows on from the N81, a spirited attempt to revive Nokia’s N-Gage mobile gaming platform.

The N85 combines design elements from the N96, in that it features the same reflective black plastic curves and the dual-slider format, and the same gaming-on-the-go functionality of the N81. The N85 however benefits from the four media keys which slide out from the top-end of the handset; these double as four action buttons for games, as opposed to the two on the N81; we can see a version of Guitar Hero working quite well on the N85.

The directional menu key adopts the mantle of the D-pad, which, combined with the four buttons mounted at the opposite end of the handset, makes the N85 resemble a miniature Atari Lynx handheld console, which may appeal to the retro sensibilities of hardcore gamers and eighties nostalgists.

Whilst mobile gaming is the main thrust of the N85, Nokia haven’t neglected other multimedia features; a 5 Megapixel camera (now the de rigueur camera resolution for N-Series phones, it seems) comes included, bolstered by a dual LED flash and autofocus.

The music player supports all of the main file formats (MP3, WMA and all the AAC extensions) and comes with a 3.5mm jack plug socket, allowing you to use your own headphones, although Bluetooth stereo support is also available. For a more in-depth hands-on look at the Nokia N85 and it’s various features, head on over to the Dial-a-Phone site.

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High-end audio manufacturers Bang & Olufsen, who teamed up with Samsung to make the celebrated Serenata handset (and the not-so-celebrated Serene) and contribute audio components to the U600 and F400 handsets have bowed out of the mobile sector.

The Danish audio kings have ended their relationship with the Korean electronics powerhouse, meaning that no more Samsung phones or DVD players will come equipped with B&O-branded components.

Bang & Olufsen big wig Karl Kristian Hvidt Nielsen said that the decision was purely a financial one, based on the dastardly credit crunch meaning that folks no longer had as much cash to throw around for their infamously expensive equipment as they did before.

The news comes as Motorola unveiled their über-pricey AURA fashion phone, a handset which boasts an attention to detail of which the boys at B&O would be proud of. But as the world tightens its collective purse string, perhaps launching a rather expensive item isn’t such as good idea right now, especially when you plan to give thousands of your own workers the boot…