What’s new in mobile phones?
Tuesday, January 20th, 2009 by Jo
Well, it’s 2009 and there are a load of exciting phones due to be released this year. We thought we’d concentrate on three that you can get your hands on pretty soon:
Nokia 5800 XpressMusic
The Nokia 5800 XpressMusic (formerly known as the Tube), will be the first Nokia touchscreen and is due for release on Friday.
It has a 3.2″ screen, 3.2 megapixel camera , full HTML access to the web, 8.8 hour talk time, weighs in at 109g but is still a little chubby at 15.5mm thick. As you’d expect, it’s built for music and you get an 8GB SD card (expandable up to 16GB) for all your tracks, photos and videos. It’s capable of 35 hour music playback and 5.2 hour video playback and the video playback has been praised by the guys over at TechRadar who say it’s a “a viable alternative to an iPod touch”.
And if you hate grubby fingerprints all over your screens, Nokia has provided a stylus and the more trendy plectrum for all your pointing pleasure.
Texting is even more fun with a normal keyboard, full QWERTY keyboard, mini QWERTY or handwriting recognition.
You can also pick your top four contacts to follow/stalk on your home screen by getting RSS feeds on their social network activity, all your conversations and photos.
Get down to the Nokia Store on Regent Street on Friday for some extra freebees, including Guitar Rock Tour and Benicassim tickets.
Sim-free handsets will be £249 but look for the deals on various networks. For more info, check out the Nokia website.
Palm Pre
You’ve probably heard that the folks over at Palm HQ have been busy bees trying to bring themselves back into the smartphone game. Their offering, the Palm Pre, is also coming soon.
It’s been dubbed as an iPhone-G1-INQ1 fusion which impresses with its 3.1″ touchscreen, 320×480 resolution HVGA display, 3MP camera, Wi-Fi, 3G, GPS and 8GB storage. But where it really blows the socks off established stars like the iPhone, is with its multiple application viewing. Each app just sits like a deck of cards on the screen so that you can scroll between them and not have to lose things you’re working on to view something else.
It’s curved glass screen adds style and other nice touches are the hidden, slide-out QWERTY keyboard, 360 degree accelerometer and all your contact with your friends and family can be viewed, chat-style.
You can pretty much sync-up your life with this phone with everything from Google, Outlook and Facebook.
We also like the look of its stylish charging dock, the Palm Touchstone. Just place the Pre onto the Touchstone and magnets “quickly align your phone in the correct position for charging”.
The Pre will be out later this year but check out this video for more info on how it’ll work:
Nokia N97
We can also look forward to the Nokia N97. Complete with 3.5″ touchscreen, 5MP camera (with Carl Zeiss Tessar lens) and flash, a huge 32GB of storage with an extra 16GB via the Micro SD slot, GPS with built-in compass and Wi-Fi, will make it a pretty hard-hitting release.
And if you get fed up of having to keep charging up your phone, the N97 has 400 hours of standby time! Along with 37 hours of music and 4.5 hours of video playback.
Add to that a slide-out QWERTY keyboard, fully customisable home screen, Symbian S60 software, N-Gage games and all the syncing you expect from Nokia and you’ve got an impressive piece of kit.
According to Play.com, the N97 will be available at the end of March for £479.99.
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