N98: Nokia’s next flagship revealed?
With the iPhone HD/4G looming in the horizon, other manufacturers are now working double time to come out with a formidable challenger.
In the Nokia camp, we thought that the awesome photographic and video recording prowess of the N8 would be able to hold its own with Apple’s upcoming wonder phone. Maybe we thought wrong…
It turns out, Nokia has another card up its sleeve, this time in the form of a kick-flip slider that wears a simillarly shaped suit as the N8.
It’s still early days to tell whether this is just a concept or if it was an earlier proposal for the N8. But then again, an N8 with a full hardware QWERTY keyboard looks llike apretty good proposition to us. Whatever it is, we can’t really be sure but what we know is this. Come June, things are going to get very interesting indeed.
Dropping a pretty penny on your next mobile phone? Make sure you get it from a reputable dealer
Taken from TheStar Online.
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The Federation of Malaysian Consumers Association (Fomca) warned consumers to be careful when buying sophisticated mobile phones as there was an increasing number of complaints that the warranty on the products were not being honoured by agents.
Its secretary-general, Muhammad Shaani Abdullah said Sunday that in the first five months of this year Fomca had received 124 complaints from consumers who were unable to get their sets repaired through the agents although the units were still under warranty.
“This is a worrying trend and consumers should be wary when purchasing such sets,” he told Bernama.
He said such a situation arose because manufacturers were unconcerned about who was selling their products as long as sales increased.
“In such a situation, many unauthorised dealers sell genuine sets cheaper because they did not have to honour the warranty,” he said.
Muhammad Shaani called on mobile manufacturers to be more ethical and deal only with authorised dealers to safeguard the interest of consumers.
Consumers should also deal only with authorised agents, he said.
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Our take: Don’t be “penny wise, pound foolish” guys if you’re plonking over RM2k on a mobile phone what’s a few hundred more to make sure you have it covered with warranty. It just makes sense.
There’s just too many scrupulous mobile phone dealers out there who are experts at taking your money away from you. Best to do your research before hand and make sure you browse before you buy.
You’ve been warned.
[source]
Motorola making money again, thanks to Droid/Milestone
Motorola has just released its first quarter numbers for 2010 and announced that it had turned in a profit somewhat due to strong sales from its Droid smartphone (aka. Motorola Milestone here in Malaysia).
Motorola reported a strong 2.3 million units of the Droid sold, exceeding what it had projected. Despite the strong Droid sales Motorola’s other divisions didn’t do so well with it’s Mobile Devices and Home units still making losses. However, its Enterprise Mobility Solutions and Networks businesses supplied enough profit to prop up the company’s earnings.
In the early 2000s Motorola was amongst the leading mobile phone makers in the world with its iconic Razr line of ultra-thin mobile phones. Now the American company is expected to rank in the seventh or eighth position in global mobile phone market share behind Nokia, Samsung and LG.
What’s the truth behind the whole Gizmodo-iPhone HD/4G thing?
Every fact revealed about this whole lost iPhone story leads to another, and then there’s one that refutes the first fact and then another that proves the first one true but negates the latter two, and so on. The legality of the case is in the murkiest of water, to the point where you can almost choose your own conclusion based on what’s known–and not come out any less accurate than someone with the opposite conclusion.
At the rate things are going, we wouldn’t be surprised if no one ever finds out the truth – perhaps its so big that we can’t handle the truth. But whatever it is, we’ll let the controversy run its course and hope that when all is unveiled come June 7, we’ll also find out the truth.
But in the meantime, checkout this awesome infographic/flowchart that presents the full story, as it’s currently known.
Head on over to after the jump for the bigger picture.
Android’s worse problem is itself
Android is a capable smartphone OS. We consider it as the techie’s smarthone OS of choice. It offers more flexibility and customisation options than the iPhone OS and there are now over 50,000 Android apps with some pretty awesome apps available in the Android market; albeit, the OS not as easy to get use to compared to the iPhone OS.
These are things we can get use to and it’s definitely not hampering Android’s growth as the smartphone OS of choice. In Malaysia we are seeing a number of telcos offering Android devices at very attractive subsidised pricing, like Maxis and DiGi – and this is a good thing.
In fact, analysts are predicting that there will be over 75 million Android smartphones running Android by 2012 making it the #2 most widely used mobile operating system in the world behind – surprise, surprise – Symbian and ahead of – even more surpising – the iPhone OS.
Punters are saying these are optimistic numbers at best but that’s beside the point. Google, the makers of Android has tremendous brand appeal and given the right hardware, the Android OS can definitely give iPhone OS a run for its money.
But what’s stopping it from talking over the world right now?
TuneTalk now with GPRS Mobile Internet!
TuneTalk, Malaysia’s aggressive new prepaid brand now offers mobile Internet via GPRS. The data charges are charged at 10 sen per 10kb which is a standard rate for mobile data on Pay as you use basis. Now TuneTalk prepaid can do more than just talk and SMS.
iPad 3G+WiFi get’s ripped apart
We’re still waiting for the WiFi version to make it over to our shores and already the boys at ifixit are going through the innards of the just released iPad 3G+WiFi.
As always, its beautiful done and in great detail. There are some comparison with the internals of the iPad WiFi as well. If you have one of those, you might want to take a look at this teardown.
If you don’t have an iPad…well this teardown article still makes for a very interesting read.
Interestingly, ifixit notes that the Micro-SIM that’s required in the iPad (and also the upcoming iPhone HD/4G) may look simillar but the contacts points might be different.
We’re inclined to think otherwise. Though we haven’t tried it for ourselves, we think there’s a pretty strong chance that a Micro-SIM is just a smaller SIM card and you could cut up a standard-sized SIM card to fit into a Micro-SIM slot. In fact, it’s been done before.
Head on over to ifixit’s site via the link.
The PalmPilots that never were
A Palm display device that could project 3D images in thin air, a split-keyboard PalmPilot and a clamshell Palm mobile phone that could split into two and be converted into a wireless modem – these are just some of the many patents filed by Palm during its heyday.
With HP’s acquisition of Palm last week, we can now only ponder at what could’ve been. Assembled before are 11 of PalM quirkiest patents.
Going through the list, we’re not even sure if some of them is at all possible.
In any case, click on the link to see all 11 Palm patents.
Revealed: Motorola’s next Android smartphone – the Nexus Two
Are we looking at the next Google Nexus phone?
With over 2.3 million Moto Droid (aka Milestone) sold last quarter, it’s pretty obvious that the Android OS is one of the key components to Motorola’s success and Motorola knows it.
But having just one Android based device ain’t going to cut it in the very crowded smartphone marketplace. Even by today’s standards, with the likes of HTC Desire and Droid Incredible (also built by HTC), Motorola’s Droid is looking rather dated – at in the flagship category.
Motorola need to built a Droid successor and they need to built it and launch it fast. At least in time to counter Apple’s upcoming iPhone HD/4G.