The UK Mobile Phone Blog

Sony Ericsson And Orange Help To Find Britain’s Next Big Talent

November 18, 2007 at 12:14 pm by Hannah | In Just For Fun, Mobile News

Sony Ericsson and Orange have teamed up to not only sponsor T4’s Mobile Act Unsigned, but they are also offering 50 free mobileAct Unsigned tracks to people who buy a Sony Ericsson Walkman phone on Orange. The offer is already in full swing and runs to the 31st December. The code to claim your tracks is valid for longer until the end of January, and you can download until the 22nd February.

The offer coincides with the launch of the Orange exclusive colour variants on the W910i – exclusive to Orange in red and the W590i in pink. There is a leaflet in the box that explains how to redeem your 50 free tracks.

MobileAct Unsigned airs every Sunday on T4 at 12.35 and is a nationwide search to find the best of Britain’s talent. It’s hosted by Alex Zane and features some of the industries leading players, including Radio 1’s Jo Whiley, Alex James the bassist from Blur and Simon Gavin, the head of A&M Records. The winner gets a record deal worth 1 million pounds. See www.mobileact.co.uk or visit the Orange WAP site for more information and downloads.

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Exclusive Nokia N82 Review - What Cameras Have Become

November 15, 2007 at 4:56 pm by Jay | In Mobile News

Update 19th December: The Nokia N82 is in stock now at Mobiles.co.uk and available to order for delivery before Christmas.

Yesterday Nokia announced the launch and release of the latest addition to the NSeries range, the Nokia N82. Whilst most people are still waiting for their phone to arrive, we at Mobiles.co.uk have got a handset in house ready to review, thanks to the NSeries Blog.

The N82 focuses mainly on the camera, hence the tagline “What cameras have become.” However, it would be a shame to think that is all the N82 has to offer. There is a lot more than that. The Nokia N82 also boasts excellent navigation and internet connectivity options too.

Firstly, the camera. The Nokia N82 has is equipped with a 5.0 megapixel camera, that has a Carl Zeiss lens and a Xenon flash. Picture quality is of the highest order. The phone has a lens cover on the back, which when flicked open activates the camera. The camera opening speed is very fast, much quicker than many camera phones to date. Once active, the screen acts as a full view finder, and there is a list of options down the right hand side of the screen. You can navigate through these simply enough with the cursor D-Pad. The first of these options is Scene Modes. Through this you can choose the settings required, for macro, portrait, landscape, sports, night (used without flash) and night portrait (used with flash). There is also an option for you to create your own user defined settings, to access quickly and easily. Other options allow you to control the sequence mode, colour tone, white balance and exposure. There is also a self timer option.

The camera has auto focus, and the quality of pictures is very good. Once a picture has been taken, a quick press of the shutter key takes you back to the main screen ready for another shot. The speed is impressive. Once a picture has been taken, you can upload it to any number of your favourite online services, including VOX and Flickr.

There is a quick access key on the front of the phone, which when pressed takes you to the last picture taken. Through this you can choose different albums to browse through or look through a slide show of pictures available in the gallery. Flick the D-Pad to the right or left and you can quickly browse through other options such as music, videos, games, maps, internet bookmarks and contacts. The order of the tiles can be changed to reflect your own personal requirements. Browsing through captured images is faster than anything I have experienced on previous S60 phones. You can also automatically browse pictures in landscape mode by tilting the handset onto its side, due to the built in motion sensor. This also works well for example when using the web browser, turn the phone onto its side and instantly view websites in landscape mode.

Away from the camera, there are a host of features ready to keep the gadget freaks happy. Navigation wise the phone has an internal GPS receiver and supports A-GPS, and comes with Nokia Maps installed. Testing the phone, lock on to location in Maps took less than 10 seconds. Very quick, and much quicker than experienced with the N95. The bright, clear QVGA TFT screen supporting up to 16million colours makes navigation very clear and very easy to follow.

The Nokia N82 is loaded with connectivity options. It supports WiFi, and uses the simple Nokia navigation wizard to establish connection. From the main standby screen, simply browse for an available WiFi connection, and once located, select start browsing. Simple, quick and effective. As well as WiFi the Nokia N82 has Bluetooth 2.0, supports 3G and HSDPA.

The Nokia N82 has a 3.5mm jack point, which means you can use your own personal choice of headphones when listening to music. The N82 supports Micro SD cards so you can add additional memory to store a whole host of your favourite tracks and videos. There is also support for TV OUT, which simply means you can plug your N82 to the TV and view the screen of the phone on the TV. The cable for this is provided in the sales box. Personally I find it simple and straight forward to use the TV OUT cable with a scart adaptor, similar to that which is used on Playstation consoles. You can then plug the N82 into a free scart socket on the TV.

One of the new options to appear on the active standby screen is the search option. Select this and it opens a whole list of searchable categories on the devise. You can search the internet, or search through content on the device. You can look through music, contacts, calendar, messages, email messages, bookmarks, images applications notes and landmarks from the Maps application. Simply highlight the category you want to search through and press right on the D-Pad to move through to the next screen. It all works smoothly and is very easy to use. The addition of the search option to the standby screen does start to make the screen look very busy, and unfortunately the NSeries handsets do not have the excellent ESeries option of active standby plugins. The plugins on ESeries phones allow you to choose which applications you have showing on the main standby screen and works very well. I wait for the day NSeries will include this excellent feature too.

The Nokia N82 has a nice feel in the hand; it feels well built and very solid. It has a feel of the sort of phone that you would be happy to take out and use. Nokia say the focus market for the handset is for the style conscious person who wants the latest features. And overall feedback on the design from colleagues in the office has been very positive.

The Nokia N82 is a well balanced phone and very easy to navigate, due to the excellent S60 platform. The keypad on the phone is reminiscent of the W880i, but the keys are spaced out wider apart, so are not as difficult to operate as it may seem. It is certainly more comfortable than that found on the N73. It is hard to find fault in the N82. Of course, we may well find a few niggles over the coming weeks but initial impressions are positive. The over-riding impression of the Nokia N82 is how simple it is to use. Whilst there are a host of features available, everything is simple to use and logically laid out.

The N82 is destined to be the next success story in the Nokia NSeries range, so come back on Monday when we’ll have a more detailed look at photos and video taken by the N82 as well as news of more exciting Nokia mobile phones - including the successor to the beautiful 8800.

Some screenshots taken from the phone (Click on the image to see full size):
The Main menu view:

Search Screen:

Standby screen:

Image gallery:

Last picture shortcut menu:

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Most popular mobile phones in October

November 11, 2007 at 5:12 pm by Jay | In Mobile News

The following is a list of the most popular handsets in October 2007 according to specialist case manufacturer Krusell. The Krusell figures are based on the popularity of the cases they sell, and covers sales figures from 50 countries over 5 continents. The top selling mobile phone last month was the Nokia 6300.

Pos	Manufacturer Model
1	Nokia 6300
2	Sony Ericsson K810i
3	Nokia N95
4	Nokia N73
5	Apple iPhone
6	Nokia 3110
7	Sony Ericsson P1i
8	Sony Ericsson W850i
9	Sony Ericsson W880i
10	Sony Ericsson K530i

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Review of the Sony Ericsson K810i camera phone

November 8, 2007 at 9:50 pm by Daniella | In Mobile Phones

First Impression

The Sony Ericsson K810i camera phone has kept some similarities to its original the K800i in terms of overall looks and features. One major difference to the k800i though, is the keypad. The phone now has 4mm wide disc shaped buttons, which were easy to use, however some people might find it hard to adapt to due to their small size. The phone has a rubbery soft feel on the back, and the front is shiny. In between each line of vertical buttons there is a large space. This phone is slimmer and lighter than its original weighting at just 103 grams.

Camera Test

The cyber-shot camera is excellent. It has a 16X digital zoom, and has loads of features that allow you to take photos with different themes, effects, and background frames. The quality of the photos is very good, and there are several different capture modes, including sports, which allow brilliant quality photos for fast moving objects, and beach/snow mode is for when the surroundings are very bright. There is also a new feature called “photofix” where a picture can be adjusted after it’s been taken to give it a professional look.

The camera also has four different picture sizes to choose from. The only setback from the camera is the shutter speed in which the photo is taken, as it is quite slow. However the camera does have a burst mode called ‘Bestpics’, and this allows 9 pictures to be automatically taken one after the other straight away.

One of the things I found annoying was when looking through all the pictures in the photo album. When a picture is chosen, it initially looks blurred and distorted. After about a second the picture clears up and looks normal, but sometimes it can take longer than a second. This can be irritating when trying to have a quick browse through photos.

The camera is very easy to use on this mobile phone due to its shortcuts. As when the camera function is on, the buttons on the left hand side of the keypad give you direct access to all of the camera and video settings. These buttons have icons which are lit up in blue to show you what they are for. Also at the top of the screen there are two photo album shortcut buttons, one takes you to the camera album and the other takes you to the last picture taken with the camera.

The video camera is just of an average standard, as when used on the automatic mode the picture can look quite fuzzy and pixelated at times. This is the same when using 3G video call.

Music Test

There are lots of features on this phone music wise. A new service that has been added to the phone which the Sony Ericsson k800i did not have is TrackID. This is a music recognition service that is free, it identifies songs that are played from a external music source such as an FM radio. This service is quick and it is able to collect the song, artist and album name. The phone has a FM radio and a media music player, which separates the songs saved into Artists and Track categories. Playlists can also be created to gather all your favourite songs together.

As well as the music player there is also Music DJ, which allows you to create your own song using four different instruments. The Playnow service also allows you to download your favourite songs. When music is played on this phone it is clear and of good quality, this is the same when listening to music through the headphones. Music can also be listened to through a wireless Bluetooth headset. All in all a great music phone.

Living with it

Living with this phone for two weeks was good in general. One of the main things that I liked about this phone was the FaceWarp software. It’s the most amusing thing on a phone ever! The most annoying thing about this phone is the signal interference noise. This noise is when the phone is polling to the network. It happens when the phone is near computer speakers, a Hi-Fi, or a car’s radio, and it is by far the worst signal noise from a phone that I have used. The phone has great battery life as I barely had to charge it even though it was always being used. A great function is that a video clip can be stored with each contact on the phone. This means that when someone calls the video will be played along with the videos noise. Texting on this phone was simple, and once you have got used to the small buttons, it becomes very rare to accidentally press the wrong button, as the buttons are quite well separated.

Conclusion

In general I think that this phone is a good basic mobile phone. It’s simple to use, and as well as having a few extras it has all the essential things anyone would need. This was the first Sony Ericsson mobile I have used, and the impression that I got was that it seems like a practical and reliable handset. It has lots of fun and entertaining stuff to do, such as Music and Photo DJ and FaceWarp. This is a cybershot camera and it does have everything you would expect from a digital camera, as there are lots of things to do with the camera and pictures.

Continue reading Review of the Sony Ericsson K810i camera phone…

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New Handsets for Sony Ericsson 2008

November 7, 2007 at 1:31 pm by Hannah | In Coming Soon Handsets, Mobile News

Sony Ericsson Launches – Mobile Phones

Last night I had the privilege of being invited to the launch of the newest Sony Ericsson products, due to be released within the first few months of 2008. These products most definitely fit in with Sony Ericssons favourite words; discovery, innovation, enrich and enable and certainly go a long way to contributing to their aspiration of being in the top 3 manufacturers list.

Sony Ericsson are very focused on the web, and how the web has changed the way in which we work and play. The web has now become a way of life to many consumers, and with this in mind they are launching new web based phone and a new PC communications device.

The K660i

Aimed at the youth market, the Sony Ericsson K660i is designed for using the web, with HSDPA. It also comes with four 1-touch illuminated shortcuts for web browsing. You can view the web in landscape or portrait and the central navigation key becomes they mouse when in web mode. Sony have also for the first time on a generic Sony Ericsson handset enabled Google maps. It comes in two colours, Lime on White and Wine on Black. It comes enabled with instant messaging, RSS feed reader and desktop, Email Client, 2MP camera with 4x digital zoom, Bluetooth, and a music player complete with FM Radio, TrackID, PlayNow and MegaBass.

MD300 USB Modem

Sony Ericsson also launched their first USB Mobile Broadband Modem. It has quad band EDGE and tri band HSDPA. It can operate on Mac-OS X and Windows 2000, XP and Vista. It also has a 128MB internal memory for storing files on it. It has Sony Ericsson wireless manager on it and comes with auto-installation and auto-configuration making it quick and easy to get up and running.

W380i

August 2005 is an important date in many consumers’ lives; it was the date when the first walkman phones went on sale. Since then over 45 million walkman phones have been shipped. The walkman phone is a phone which combines more storage, better battery life and different accessories. However, Sony Ericsson have now realised that the consumer expects more; more music, more ways of playing the music and more ways to share music. With this in mind, they launched two new walkman phones.

The Sony W380 is the successor to the W300 and comes in a clamshell design. Aimed at the youth market, it comes complete with many unique and original features such as gesture control, which mutes calls or silences the alarm with a wave of your hand. It also has the walkman controls on top of the phone, so that you can easily manage your music. The slogan for this handset is ‘ hear, see and feel music’ which is accurate, as the handset comes with a media manager, that means you can easily share and transfer music, photos and videos between your computer and phone. The W380 comes with TrackID, PlayNow, FM Radio, 512MB memory stick, Bluetooth, MegaBass, 1.3MP Camera with 4x digital zoom, RSS reader, Web, GSM, GPRS, EDGE and comes in Electric Purple, Magnetic Grey and Champagne Black.

Sony W890i

The W890 comes with the slogan ‘Design for music’ which is exactly what this phone is, complete with a 2 GB memory stick that can store up to 1800 tracks, you will never run out of songs to listen to. The handset itself is really slim and stylish, and is as thin as a CD case. It comes in three colours, Espresso Black, Mocha Brown and Sparkling Silver. It comes with a headset in the same colour to keep the style flowing. It comes complete with FM Radio, PlayNow, TrackID and MeagBass, along with many of Sony Ericsson’s other music features.
The 3.2 MP camera comes with a digital zoom, and is also enabled for video recording, and picture and video blogging. It also comes with an RSS feed reader, the web, email, Bluetooth, HSDPA, EDGE and GSM.