Latest Mobile Phone News

Samsung Electronics is going to presenmt a new Android mobile device: something in the middle of the Samsung Infuse 4G (wich comes with 4.5 inches Super AMOLED Plus Capacitative Touchscreen display, ARM Cortex A8 1.2 GHz processor and runs on Android 2.2 Froyo) and Samsung Galaxy Tab.

I cant understand is this gadget a tabphone, smartlet or phoneblet, I thing this is a hybrid device. They call it Samsung Galaxy Q. This smartphone weights 108G and its dimensions are 120x68x9.3 MM. The phone has Full QWERTY keybord and 3.0 inches Super AMOLED capacitive touchscreen display, with 480 x 720 px resolution. There is a 8.0 Megapixels rear camera on the back of this pretty gadget and a 1.3 MP front camera on the face for video calling. The phone runs on Android OS v2.2 codenamed Froyo. Galaxy Q comes with 1 GHz ARM Cortex-A8 processor, PowerVR SGX540 GPU and Hummingbird chipset, has 16GB internal memory and a memory slot wich gives a chanse for 32GB external memory.

Popularity: 36%

Motorola has launched three slim stylish dual-SIM mobile phones. Motorola EX212, Motorola EX 119 and Motorola EX109 sport different designs and form factors to accommodate the varied taste of consumers. Motorola EX212 is a compact flip phone with a 6.0cm (2.4-inch) graphical display. Motorola EX119 presents both a full QWERTY keyboard and a 6.0cm (2.4-inch) capacitive touchscreen in a super-slim package while Motorola EX109 is a slim mobile phone which offers a full QWERTY keyboard. All three mobile phones come packed with exciting features and enable users to switch between networks effortlessly. “The fast evolving dual-SIM market is a driving force for us. We are glad to bring these innovative, feature-rich mobile phones in varied designs and form factors to the Indian consumer,” said Rajan Chawla, mobile devices business country head for sales and operations, India and South West Asia, Motorola Mobility. “We focus strongly on the consumer and thanks to different form factors, consumers in India can now easily pick between a keyboard experience, a touchscreen experience or both – all in stylish, slim packages.”

Popularity: 27%

One-third of American adults own a smartphone. You see smartphones everywhere and maybe you have one. Whether an iPhone, Blackberry, Android or Windows phone, these devices bring the power of pocketable computing to your phone. Some use them for work, others to connect with friends through social media outlets. Approximately 35% of American adults own a smartphone. Smartphone users tend to be younger, wealthier and better educated than non-smartphone-using Americans. Blacks and Hispanics are more likely to be smartphone users than whites. Android users lead the market with 35%, followed by iPhones (24%), Blackberries (24%), Palm (6%) and Windows (4%).

Popularity: 3%

Samsung has preclaimed this week that it will produce three new Bada smartphones in the coming months. Bada is Samsung ‘s own smartphone OS. It was first launched last year. Today we have very little information about the new gadgets, but one appears to be the Samsung Wave 3, successor to the well known line of Bada devices. The other two mobile devices are the Samsung GT-S5360 and the Samsung GT-S7250D, which will run on Bada 2.0 software. Samsung said last year it would remove some support from Android and Windows Mobile in an effort to try their hand at Bada. The phones are expected to launch in September.

Popularity: 36%

Another addition to Motorola‘s more affordable Android lineup, the Motorola FIRE XT (SPICE XT in South America and XT531 in Asia) certainly isn’t the most powerful Motorola you can buy, but overall the specifications are likely to suit a large number of consumers looking for a first Android phone. The FIRE XT is an Android 2.3 smartphone with a 3.5″ 480 x 320 pixel display, with a 5 megapixel camera on the back plus a VGA resolution camera on the front for video calling. Inside is an 800 MHz processor with 512MB of RAM which isn’t particularly fast but it should cope with most things you might want to run. The FIRE XT has a multimedia player, FM radio and a 3.5mm audio socket. All the standard Android features are here, including GPS and Google Maps Navigation, WiFi, 3.5G support, Bluetooth and access to the Android Market plus Motorola’s SHOP4APPS store. The handset measures 114 x 62 x 12mm and weighs 114 grams. There is 512MB of internal flash memory expandable to 32GB with a microSD card. Physically, it’s not a bad looking device with curved edges and a two-tone finish. In its Asian XT531 version, there will be a dual-SIM variant available in certain markets in, as well as the standard single-SIM model.

Popularity: 7%

Huawei, the manufacturer who brought us the S7 Slim tablet, is getting ready to launch the Huawei Vision in “select markets” this September. Huawei is boasting that their new mobile phone features a 3D UI, but its not the same glasses-free eye popping 3D technology offered by the LG Thrill or EVO 3D. The tweaked 2D display offers a slightly different version of SPB’s Shell 3D software that creates a 3D-like carousel interface. Besides the sneaky 3D UI, the Huawei Vision sounds like your typical Android phone. It packs a 1GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon processor, 1,400 mAh battery and Android 2.3 (Gingerbread). Other features include an aluminum alloy uni-body (in rose gold, silver or charcoal), 5-megapixel camera with auto focus and LED flash, 720P video recording support, Bluetooth 2.1 and 802.11b/g/n WI-FI.

Popularity: 5%

RIM will launch three new BlackBerry smartphones based on the new BB7 OS – the company’s first handset releases since the Bold 9780 last November. Devices will be available later this month. The Bold 9900, Torch 9810 and 9850 were unveiled to journalists at a global launch event held in central London morning August 3. The launch of the handsets will be RIM’s largest ever and more than 225 carriers and distribution partners have already commenced or completed over 500 significant programs for these new devices. All devices will run the BlackBerry 7 software which the company said is its fastest ever and 40 per cent quicker than BlackBerry 6 OS.

The Bold 9900 is the thinnest BlackBerry smartphone ever at 10.5mm thick and the first to offer a keyboard and touch display integrated within the Bold design. It is expected to go on sale in the UK on August 15. The 9900 will be the first from the company to include built-in support for NFC.

The Torch 9810 features a 3.2-inch touchscreen, slide-out keyboard, HD video recording and 8GB of memory. The Torch 9850 features a 3.7-inch touchscreens, the largest ever on a BlackBerry smartphone.

All three phones are powered by a 1.2GHz processor and include ‘liquid graphics’ which RIM claimed offers the smoothest and most responsive BlackBerry user interface to date. A new version of Facebook, Facebook 2.0, will be available and now includes Facebook Chat. A new version of BlackBerry Messenger (BBM), which RIM said has more than 45 million users, will also be made available. The company revealed at the launch there are now 67 million RIM subscribers, with seven million in the UK. It also claimed to have more than 35,000 applications in its Apps World.

Popularity: 11%

Skype has released version 2.1 of its application for Android, which allows more smartphones and tablets based on Google’s operating system to use its video calling feature. The company published a list of 17 devices that can now make video calls. Users with Android 2.2-based smartphones that aren’t on Skype’s list should still be able to make video calls. The feature can be enabled by going into “Skype settings” after launching the application and selecting “enable video calling.” If a user can’t see the video calling settings, it means their Android device does not meet the minimum requirements needed, according to Skype. In addition, the new version of Skype has bug fixes and performance enhancements, which should further improve the user experience of Skype on Android-based smartphones. The updated application can be downloaded from Android Market or Skype’s website.

Popularity: 3%

The iPhone5 would be sold from September 5, but only in the U.S. However, countries outside the U.S. have to wait one more month. It is said that iPhone5 will carry A5 processor, frameless design, higher pixel and larger memory. Subsidy policy remains to be the urgent problem for China Telecom. The company will reduce its terminal subsidy in the forth quarter. It is learned that its talk with Apple Inc. (AAPL) has made some progress but yet to reach agreements in key issues, including profit sharing and buying out iPhone at a high price. Analysts believe that China Telecom’s final subsidy margin is possibly similar to that of China Unicom, because high terminal subsidy may lead to loss risks while low subsidy does not attract consumers.

Popularity: 10%

The Android platform is going great guns, with over 30 million activations in each quarter. It is expected that this number will only increase in the coming days. To give us an idea about the number of devices that run on each version of Android, Google has released a chart showing the percentage of Android versions that have accessed the Android Market. The smartphone numbers are encouraging, though the same cannot be said about the tablet version of Android, Honeycomb 3.x. The report suggests that Froyo (2.2) is still on top with the most number of activations, while Gingerbread (2.3.3 and 2.3.4) is still considerably behind. Gingerbread was launched in December last year with the Google Nexus S. However, other manufacturers were slow in rolling out handsets with the updated OS. This delay could be the reason for Gingerbread’s slow start. Froyo makes up for about 55.9% of Android devices the world over, while 2.3.3 and 2.3.4 make up for a mere 23.7%. Honeycomb, which now includes Android 3.2, has grown from 0.9 to 1.3% – a decent increase from Google’s previous numbers. It is believed that the slow start is mainly due to Android 3.x launching in the non-holiday season.

Popularity: 2%

A new Trojan horse app has emerged to target Android devices, and this one’s particularly creepy. The app records a user’s phone calls and then uploads them to a remote server. While this particular Trojan doesn’t appear to be a threat in the wild–at least not for North American users–it’s a good reminder of the growing threat of mobile malware. New smartphone malware emerges on a weekly–sometimes daily–basis of late, though most users have yet to take the threat as seriously as PC-based malware.  There are more mobile devices today than there were PCs connected to the Internet in 1996. Cybercriminals are realizing that, unlike PCs, mobile devices aren’t very well secured. In addition to outright malware, there are other ways that mobile devices can put your secure information at risk. “Smartphone users should indeed have a certain level of concern, or at least a security conscious mindset, when it comes to mobile malware. There are still other threats facing mobile device users that are a bigger concern than mobile malware, namely the loss or theft of a device.

Popularity: 2%

Back in June, Google announced that Android 3.2 would be arriving beginning this summer for Honeycomb tablets. Motorola, being Google’s launch partner for Honeycomb, was first to get the update. Next on the list was ASUS and as of late last week, Eee Pad users in the US started getting their version of Android 3.2. I updated my Eee Pad over the weekend and the process went seamlessly. As long as you’ve got more than 25% left on your battery you’re good to go. If you haven’t updated your Eee Pad since the launch you’ll need two updates to get to 3.2. The 3.2 update on the Eee Pad brings about a new splashscreen as well as a TegraZone app. TegraZone is NVIDIA’s custom marketplace that leverages the Android Market. TegraZone is used exclusively for games that are optimized for NVIDIA’s Tegra 2 SoC.

Popularity: 4%

The Motorola Photon 4G is an absolute powerhouse of a phone. It ships with Android 2.3 Gingerbread, a dual-core 1GHz Nvidia Tegra 2 processor, 4G WiMax speeds, a 4.3-inch qHD display, and a dual-mode GSM/CDMA chipset. Features include HDMI-out, DLNA support, Wi-Fi, Mobile Hotspot for up to eight devices, 720p HD video capture, 1080p HD video playback, and secure data encryption. We also like the kickstand. Call quality and overall performance were great. The Motorola Photon 4G has a large and bulky design, which might not be to everybody’s taste. The Motoblur interface isn’t for everyone, and we found Sprint ID to be an unnecessary add-on. The Webtop dock functionality is pretty cool, but it requires a $129 accessory. We expected better photo quality out of the 8-megapixel camera.

Popularity: 6%

To update the Xperia X10, which was formerly running Android 2.1 Eclair, users need to connect the device to their computers and employ the company’s PC Companion software. Over-the-air updates are so far not available. According to Sony Ericsson, the availability of Gingerbread for user devices “is dependent on operator and/or country,” so it cannot provide an “exact date for when the update will be available for you.” Sony Ericsson released the Xperia X10 last year. The device comes with a 4-inch display and 1GHz processor.

It has an 8.1-megapixel camera and the ability to record 720p HD video. Last May, Sony Ericsson announced plans to offer Eclair on the device, but that update didn’t start rolling out to handsets until October. At the time, Sony Ericsson didn’t plan on bringing Gingerbread to the X10. However, the company said in March that it had “listened to our consumers,” and would be bringing the update to the handset, after all. With the addition of Gingerbread, Xperia X10 owners get Facebook integration across the platform’s applications, the ability to use the device as a Wi-Fi hot spot, and tethering.

Popularity: 59%

The imminent launch of Samsung’s new Galaxy Tab 10.1 is going to be a rather confusing affair, as the hardware maker is planning to launch an unbelievable TWELVE separate memory/radio versions of the new Android tablet. According to the individual listings, you’ll be able to buy black or white versions of the 10.1, with each model also coming in 3G and wi-fi only options. Which means you can have any of the below configurations:

• 16GB, wi-fi only, black
• 16GB, wi-fi only, white
• 16GB, 3G, black
• 16GB, 3G, white
• 32GB, wi-fi only, black
• 32GB, wi-fi only, white
• 32GB, 3G, black
• 32GB, 3G, white
• 64GB, wi-fi only, black
• 64GB, wi-fi only, white
• 64GB, 3G, black
• 64GB, 3G, white

Absolutely insane. A total logistical nightmare for the boys in the warehouse. The August 4th launch date only applies to the cheaper black & white wi-fi only models, which will arrive on that day for £399. The 3G models and the larger capacity variants will launch throughout August, with the top-spec 64GB 3G model costing a whopping £659.99 and arriving on August 23rd.

Popularity: 37%