iPhone is a very interesting device. It was a big sensation on the cell phone market when it appeared. Apart from being the long-awaited phone from Apple, it also introduced many features that were anticipated by community. People wanted multimedia phone with huge and bright screen, and, of course, as it is from Apple, it must have Apple’s iTunes integrated perfectly. All these features were implemented correctly, and in result customers obtained one of the best smartphones on the market. However, other companies did not want to miss this opportunity, and hurried to make their own iPhone rivals. It is hard to compete with such a strong opponent, but some of the models apperaed to be quite interesting. In this top we wanted to choose top 10 iPhone killers, or so-called ones.
Tag Archive for 'phones'
Phonescoop.com provides us a video preview of the Motorola ZN5 the 5-megashooter. Check it out after the break.
[via Techeblog]
Fujitsu has launched its F706i waterproof phone. The phone is available in four colors and it’s front plain surface hide a LED panel behind that display phones operation, (time, lock…) and displays a nice pattern (design figures with 50 different colors). F706i features the 2in1 phone option (you can have two telephone numbers on one device (dual sim maybe)) , HSDPA support, 3G WorldRing (can be used overseas), the DCMXiD (electronic wallet), PC web browser (a real internet browser), 2.7-inch display, 1Seg TV tuner and a 2.0-megapixel camera with image stabilizer. Unfortunately this phone is only available in Japan. Fortunately there are more pretty models after the break.
I want one!!! the white one.
More pictures, larger pictures, more girls, more info at Akihabaranews
In a move that could give a welcome, if short-lived, boost to consumer electronics makers and retailers, consumers up and down the West Coast are snapping up headsets that let them talk on cell phones while driving — and stay in compliance with a law that took effect in California and Washington state on July 1.
Demand for hands-free headsets has been so robust that the Verizon Wireless store in San Mateo, Calif., added a whole new section for the devices, says store manager Aari Jethmal. “The shelves have been cleared and restocked and cleared and restocked.” Verizon Wireless, owned by Verizon Communications and Vodafone, is the second-largest U.S. mobile-phone provider, after AT&T.
Sales Boost Expected
The law, which stipulates penalties for driving while talking on a handheld cell phone, is a boon for Plantronics and other makers of headsets that use so-called Bluetooth wireless connectivity. “Historically Bluetooth headsets have been a low-margin product, so they would need to drive significant product to move the bottom-line needle,” says Avondale Partners analyst John Bright, who has an “outperform” rating on Plantronics shares. “Luckily California is the largest state and a heavy cell-phone usage state, so it certainly bodes well for heavy volume.”
On June 26, Bright raised his estimate for Plantronics’ June quarter earnings by a penny, to 35 percent a share, in anticipation of the law taking effect. That’s a cent higher than the average of Wall Street estimates. The shares have gotten little apparent lift since the law kicked in, slipping to 21.05 on July 2, from 22.32 on June 30.
Plantronics expects a sales boost in California for the second and third quarters, says spokesman Dan Race, though he didn’t provide specifics. “We’re seeing good interest in our premium products,” Race says.
Other Bluetooth manufacturers poised to benefit include Motorola; GN Netcom, maker of…
Last month, Apple announced that its new iPhone 3G would cost just $199 for the 8GB version and $299 for the 16GB version. AT&T confirmed that pricing Tuesday, but clarified that those prices are only for certain users — buyers of any iPhone before the iPhone 3G goes on sale July 11, new AT&T customers, or subscribers eligible for an upgrade discount.
For all others, the price is $399 for the 8GB iPhone and $499 for the 16GB iPhone 3G. In a new wrinkle, customers can buy the iPhone 3G without a service plan, but the price is steep at $599 for the 8GB iPhone 3G and $699 for the 16GB iPhone 3G.
AT&T also announced monthly service plans for the 3G iPhone, ranging from $69.99 for 450 anytime minutes to $129.99 for unlimited minutes. The plans include unlimited Web and e-mail access, but not texting. AT&T will charge $20 for unlimited text messages.
Those monthly service fees are higher than for the original iPhone. So will customers blink at those rates, even with a subsidized service plan?
New ‘Value Proposition’
Tim Bajarin, principal analyst at Creative Strategies, doesn’t think there will be much blinking. “I believe the new iPhone delivers a different value proposition via software, so the pricing plans will be viewed through the lens of its new software applications capabilities,” he said in an e-mail.
Apple’s iPhone 2.0 software will be preloaded on all 3G iPhones, AT&T said. The software supports a new ecosystem of third-party software and will connect to the Apps Store, Apple’s mechanism for users to download software over the air.
Apple’s Web site advertises that users will “find applications in every category, from games to business, education to entertainment, finance to health and fitness, productivity to social networking.” And it boasts that the apps will exploit iPhone technologies…
From mainframes to minicomputers and then personal computers, each new computing generation has displaced its predecessor by reaching a broader audience and costing far less. And each time, the dominant company in one generation loses control in the next.
That is why the PC industry’s commanding chip maker, Intel, might do well to be alarmed by the computer chips being designed by Qualcomm, a maker of chips for cell phones.
An engineer at Qualcomm’s gleaming corporate campus here demonstrated a palm-size circuit board capable of displaying high-definition video. What was striking about the demonstration was not the quality of the video images, which is now common. Rather it was that the microprocessor chip, called Snapdragon, drives the display with less than half the power of a similar chip recently introduced by Intel. Qualcomm designers say it will also cost less.
As the PC shrinks in size, it is on a collision course with the multifunction cell phone. Many expect the resulting effect to transform both devices and all the companies that make them. The new smartphones, always-on portable Internet devices that are part cell phone, part computer, change the rules of the game in computing because computing speed — at which Intel excels — is no longer the most important factor. For a cell phone relying on a small battery, how efficiently a chip uses power becomes more important.
The new mobile world represents a special challenge for Intel, which until four years ago ignored the issue of increasing power consumption in its flagship X86 chips, which have been the PC industry standard for almost 30 years.
Other chip makers have not ignored power consumption. Just last month at Computex, an electronics trade show in Taiwan, the Silicon Valley graphics chip maker Nvidia demonstrated a small mobile computer that worked five times as long…
From mainframes to minicomputers and then personal computers, each new computing generation has displaced its predecessor by reaching a broader audience and costing far less. And each time, the dominant company in one generation loses control in the next.
That is why the PC industry’s commanding chip maker, Intel, might do well to be alarmed by the computer chips being designed by Qualcomm, a maker of chips for cell phones.
An engineer at Qualcomm’s gleaming corporate campus here demonstrated a palm-size circuit board capable of displaying high-definition video. What was striking about the demonstration was not the quality of the video images, which is now common. Rather it was that the microprocessor chip, called Snapdragon, drives the display with less than half the power of a similar chip recently introduced by Intel. Qualcomm designers say it will also cost less.
As the PC shrinks in size, it is on a collision course with the multifunction cell phone. Many expect the resulting effect to transform both devices and all the companies that make them. The new smartphones, always-on portable Internet devices that are part cell phone, part computer, change the rules of the game in computing because computing speed — at which Intel excels — is no longer the most important factor. For a cell phone relying on a small battery, how efficiently a chip uses power becomes more important.
The new mobile world represents a special challenge for Intel, which until four years ago ignored the issue of increasing power consumption in its flagship X86 chips, which have been the PC industry standard for almost 30 years.
Other chip makers have not ignored power consumption. Just last month at Computex, an electronics trade show in Taiwan, the Silicon Valley graphics chip maker Nvidia demonstrated a small mobile computer that worked five times as long…
Wait. Scroll. Scroll. Tap-tap. Wait. Wait. For many years, that was the typical experience of someone surfing the Web using a mobile phone or PDA, at least in the U.S. Although some content providers offered stripped-down versions of their sites specially designed for mobile users, most did not, and reading a page designed to be viewed on a PC on the small screen was about as much fun as sitting in a dark room reading a newspaper by flashlight.
Today, the mobile Web environment is in a period of rapid change, thanks in no small part to Apple’s iPhone. From the phone’s introduction in June, 2007, through March, 2008, 5.4 million iPhones have sold, and to date developers have created more than 17,000 sites or “Web applications” optimized for the device.
But this isn’t a story about the iPhone, per se; it’s a story about designing for the mobile Web. The iPhone was just a catalyst of sorts, bringing buzz, investors, and new technology to the sector. As a result, the mobile Web design and customer experience bar has been raised.
Changing the Game
“Mobile Web used to be WAP,” says Matt Murphy, a partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield Byers, the venture capital firm that has started a $100 million “iFund” to develop applications for the iPhone. “Now you have a real browser and a real device. The iPhone is a game-changer.”
“From a design experience perspective, it’s changing the way people view the Web and the value of the mobile Web,” says Kelly Goto, the founder and CEO of San Francisco-based GotoDesign.
Pre-iPhone, says Cameron Moll, principal interaction designer at LDS Church and author of the influential e-book Mobile Web Design, companies typically took one of four approaches to the mobile Web: 1] do nothing and let mobile users scroll their way around sites designed…
Nokia rocked the wireless industry June 24 with news it would purchase the portion of Symbian, a maker of mobile-phone software, that it didn’t already own — and then give away the software for nothing.
The prospect of free software would surely lure users away from competing cell-phone software makers including Google, which in the past year threw its hat into the cell-phone software ring by spearheading the creation of Android, an operating system for wireless devices. Or so the argument runs.
But Nokia’s move may play right into Google’s hands, by helping to nurture a blossoming of the mobile Web and spur demand for all manner of cell-phone applications — and most important, the ads sold by Google. “There’s nothing to say that this isn’t what Google’s plan was all along,” says Kevin Burden, research director, mobile devices at consultancy ABI Research. “They might have wanted a more open device environment anyway. This might have been Google’s end game.”
Opening the Airwaves
Google, which makes money from ads placed on Web pages and alongside search results, stands to benefit from anything that helps spread the use of the Web — be it on computers or the advanced cell phones known as smartphones that run Symbian software. With the desktop search market showing signs of slowing, the company needs to ramp up usage of its applications from mobile devices. U.S. mobile search ad sales are expected to rise to $1.4 billion in 2012 from $33.2 million in 2007, according to consulting firm Kelsey Group.
But in the U.S. market, Google has long been hampered in getting its applications onto cell phones for a variety of reasons. To now, Web search on phones has been too slow or awkward, mobile data plans and smartphones are often expensive, and carriers and cell-phone makers place restrictions on which…
People buy GPS locators for one major reason — to find out where they are on this big, blue planet of ours.
Gadgets that talk to the network of Global Positioning Satellites orbiting the Earth are becoming cheap and ubiquitous. GPS features are turning up in everything from cell phones to cameras, but the most common use is in cars, where they are used to guide drivers to destinations.
But while most can get you from Points A to B, getting them set up can be a hassle. A new GPS designed for the car tries to fix this problem by connecting to the Internet. The units can virtually collaborate to give near-real-time traffic data, even on side streets.
From the time it was first announced by Dash Navigation in September 2006, the Dash Express automobile GPS system captured geeky drivers’ imagination — even before it was available. Billed as the first Internet-connected car GPS, it promised a slew of cool features borne of connectivity.
Originally scheduled for release last summer, it finally started shipping in late March and sells for $299. In addition, its connected features require a subscription fee to access to network — $12.99 a month, or as low as $9.99 if you pay in advance. The first three months of the service are free.
While the Dash isn’t the most expensive GPS you can buy, it’s also not the cheapest. You can get a perfectly good GPS for less than $200.
The decision you have to make is whether the features made possible by connectivity are worth paying a premium for the hardware, along with subscription charges. If you’ve got the cash to burn, I’d say yes, but with a big caveat.
While the Dash Express is one of the easiest GPS products I’ve tried, when it comes to what you really need…
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