Cell Phones

The nerds over at Mobile Geek Inc did a nifty investigative piece revealing more details about Nokia’s mid-level C6-01 candybar. After making Symbian^3 OS. A nice alternative to the 5 megapixel C6-00 slider shackled to S60 5th. Look for the new C6 to get official with a very nice price either at, or around, Nokia World 2010 which kicks off September 14th in London. One more front-side pic after the break.

VIA:
SOURCE:Mobile Geek Inc, Mobile Bulgaria

Good news for UK mobile addicts: HD Voice service has officially made it to the Land of Hope and Glory. Starting today, British customers can pick up a HD Voice-enabled handset — including the Nokia 5230, X6, E5 and Samsung Omnia Pro at launch — from Orange, and start buttering their ears with “crystal clear” phone calls while within the carrier’s 3G coverage. Prior to the launch, we were fortunate enough to try out the new service on a couple of Nokia E5 prototypes, and boy, that was some pretty impressive stuff there — the wider speech bandwidth really added a lot of clarity to the caller’s voice, and additionally, the noisy traffic from the caller’s end was well suppressed at where it’d otherwise crackle over a normal call. Perhaps the easiest way to put it is that this is much like jumping from a bad FM radio broadcast to some sweet CD audio, thus making conversations a lot easier to interpret, even if the recipient is in a noisy environment or has hearing problem (as proven by Orange’s public trial). As always, hearing is believing, so do check out our sample audio clips after the break.

While Orange remains a dominant driving force behind this mobile revolution, the carrier assured us that it expects other companies to pick up this open standard. That said, it’s rather disappointing that current owners of the aforementioned handsets won’t be getitng a software patch for the HD upgrade (we were told that no extra hardware is involved), but we can understand — the manufacturers do need to sell new phones to stay alive in this rapidly changing market. Anyhow, here’s hoping that the forthcoming flagship Android and Windows Phone 7 devices will also get a taste of this crystal clear call quality.

Show full PR text

CRYSTAL CLEAR CALLING AS ORANGE REVOLUTIONISES MOBILE PHONE CALLS IN THE UK WITH THE LAUNCH OF HIGH DEFINITION VOICE

· Orange becomes first operator to launch mobile HD Voice in the UK, signalling the dawn of a new era in mobile communications for customers

· HD Voice reduces background noise and decreases perceived distance between callers by providing crystal clear calls

· HD Voice is available from today nationwide at no extra cost for all Orange customers with an HD voice enabled handset

London, 1st September, 2010: Orange today announced the first major advancement in UK mobile voice calling for 20 years with the launch of mobile High Definition (HD) Voice. Providing crystal clear sound quality for calls, mobile users will see the service set a new consumer benchmark, with today’s move testament to Orange’s continuing focus on innovation.

HD Voice offers a proven improvement in the sound quality of traditional mobile voice calls. The service eliminates the distance between friends, relatives and colleagues to make callers voices sound like they do when communicating face to face. Reducing the background noise, hisses and crackles of normal mobile calls, HD Voice also excels in noisy environments, so whether you’re at a football match or concert, on a building site or next to heavy traffic – HD Voice gives louder, clearer, sharper mobile calls. This will come as a relief for a third (32%) of Brits who blame background noise including road works or noisy chatty friends as the biggest disturbance in conversations*.

Orange HD Voice is available at no extra cost to all Orange mobile customers who take a HD Voice enabled handset. From launch, the Nokia 5230, Nokia X6, Nokia E5 and Samsung Omnia Pro will be HD Voice enabled with further manufactures expected to offer HD handsets in the coming months. All HD Voice enabled handsets will be labelled with the Orange HD Voice logo, helping customers to easily recognise those devices that support the new Orange HD Voice service. HD Voice demonstration units will also be available in Orange shops.

Tom Alexander, Chief Executive of Everything Everywhere, the company which runs Orange UK, said: “Although what we use our mobile handsets for has evolved significantly in the past few years – the way we make mobile calls hasn’t changed a great deal since the 1990s. So we’re proud to be the first telecommunications brand in the UK to change this and offer customers a revolutionary new calling experience. With mobile HD Voice – hearing really is believing”.

HD Voice also opens up new opportunities for better ways of working in business. The arrival of HD Voice is hotly anticipated by the broadcasting industry, which believes that the service could reduce its reliance on expensive ISDN lines and the need to ferry guests to studios for interviews. Other industries that will benefit significantly from HD Voice include those with significant background noise like the construction and manufacturing industries.

For more information on HD Voice from Orange, please visit: www.orange.co.uk/HDVoice.

VIA:
SOURCE:

Well, it looks like you can finally get rid of that less-than-stable pre-alpha release of continuous experience as you move between devices. Hit up the link below for the download link, and for a quick video overview of what’s in store.
VIA:
SOURCE:The Mozilla Blog

The NITDroid project has been slogging along this year in an effort to get Android fully ported to Nokia’s N900, and the progress has been promising so far — but wouldn’t it be nice if you could, you know, make calls? Looks like these guys are making some solid progress there with a new video showing both incoming and outgoing calls doing… well, something or another on the N900 side. Cellular data’s coming along nicely, too, as you can see on the video after the break — so here’s the million-dollar question: when this is rock-solid and ready for prime time, are you jumping ship or sticking with Maemo?

VIA:
SOURCE:NITDroid

Nokia is being coy this morning by revealing a trio of pictures of what it only describes as its “new device.” Of course, being a devoted Engadget reader, you’ll instantly recognize the visage above as that of the Nokia 5250 — the already leaked successor to the 5230 ( aka the Nuron). Specs are promised for later today, so contain your excitement until a more civilized hour. For now, you’ll find one more pic — of the bodacious, camera-adorned back — after the break.

[Thanks, Adam B.]

Update: That wasn’t a long wait. Nokia Conversations has S60 5th OS with a mobile version of Guitar Hero 5 pre-installed, along with an FM radio and a media player slap bang in the middle of your 2.8-inch homescreen, all to underline this new phone’s musical inclinations. The touchscreen panel fits 640 x 360 pixels (16:9 display ratio), and battery life is rated for 18 days of standby, seven hours of talktime, or 24 hours of music playback. Not bad at all. Shipping in Q4 [Thanks, Keith!].

VIA:
SOURCE:Nokia (Facebook)

The upcoming Symbian^3 device to date. Unlike the over-the-top N8, Mobile-review comes away concluding that the C7 is an exceptionally well-balanced device for a Nokia — solid specs at a more aggressive price than its Nseries cousin — but acknowledges that it’s still outclassed by the competition and isn’t likely to draw any non-Nokia loyalists into the fold. MeeGo, where art thou?
VIA:
SOURCE:Mobile-review

In a world where smartphone unlock patterns and PINs can be easily gleaned from display muck, and computer passwords can be deciphered from the telltale audible clicks of the keyboard, it’s any wonder that research is funded for alternative identity verification schemes. One promising technology is face verification — technology we’ve already seen implemented in webcams, laptops, and more recently, Microsoft’s Kinect for Xbox 360. Where we haven’t seen it broadly deployed is in the easy-to-lose smartphone, at least not with the level of sophistication achieved by the University of Manchester (UK). Using an N900, the research team developed a prototype that quickly locks and tracks 22 facial features in real time (even when upside down) using the Nokia’s front-facing camera. The Active Appearance modeling technique was developed for the EU-funded Mobile Biometrics (MoBio) project as a means of using face verification to authenticate smartphone access to social media sites. Unfortunately, there’s no mention of how long Manchester’s face-verified login actually takes. Nevertheless, the video, apparently shot in a steam room full of hot man smudge, is worth a peep after the break.

VIA:Slashdot
SOURCE:University of Manchester

Look, if there’s one thing Nokia knows it’s how to build hardware. Say what you want about the S60 user experience, the latch on the N97 is a mechanical masterpiece. But how could we resist sharing this image, posted by a reader in comments, of the presumed Nokia N9 “sitting on” a MacBook Pro? What was it that Anssi Vanjoki said? Something like, “If there is something good in the world then we copy with pride.”
VIA:
SOURCE:@jamesburland (Twitter)

digg_url = ‘http://digg.com/hardware/Nokia_s_QWERTY_slidin_N9_shows_up_in_the_wilds_of_China’;
Remember this scandalous little leak from back in June? It looks to have been validated today, as imagery of Nokia’s MeeGo (or is it Symbian^4?)-powered N9 QWERTY slider has emerged over in China. As usual with these things, we can’t be certain that this device is in fact part of Nokia’s roadmap and not just another creative hardware emulation, but it sure seems to have our old buddy Eldar Murtazin convinced. Seeing it with clear N9 branding, we can now say that the previously unknown Nokia slider was more likely the N8-01, a keyboard-equipped version of the (still) upcoming N8. The source of this N9 leak reports that it’s not in its final retail shape, as it doesn’t match up to “the latest drawings,” but is apparently planned for a release in the 48th week (i.e. beginning of December) of this year. The prototype, built in Finland, is said to have an entirely metallic construction (more aluminum would be our guess), with only the keyboard buttons, USB cover, and a few decorative parts being plastic. See more of it, including a thorough teardown, in the gallery below.

Update: A friendly mole of ours ran this handset’s serial number through an internal Nokia system and has confirmed it as a Nokia prototype. He was also able to uncover an RM-680 product type classification (further distancing this from the RM-626 slider) and a 0595571 product code. Add those to the “Prototype Build B2″ and “Property of Nokia” labeling inside the phone’s battery compartment, and you’ve got yourself a very strong candidate for the real deal here.

Update 2: A closer look at the display reveals that this is running something that bears a heavy resemblance to the MeeGo screens we’ve seen so far — and if you

VIA:Eldar Murtazin
SOURCE:Baidu

And now the cycle is complete. What started as a single mention on a leaked slide has slowly evolved into a full-blown video preview of Nokia’s unannounced C7 handset. The cats at the Chinese site zol.com.cn took the time to fuss over the Symbian^3 candybar’s stereo speakers, 3.5-inch multitouch display, support for Flash banner ads (presumably via Flash Lite 4.0 like the flagship N8), and the ability to charge off Micro USB or Nokia 2-mm connectors (also like the N8). It’s also demonstrated to easily handle a 720p H.264 video file at 2.7Mbps. Without giving reason as to why, the handler speculates that we might see the C7 launch before Nokia’s own N8 finally makes it to retail. Click on through to see a fairly extensive preview replete with a soothing Chinese narration.

VIA:HDBlog.IT
SOURCE:Superchilko (YouTube)