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ipod-touch-dead.jpgSomeone was killed during Steve Jobs's keynotes speech at the WWDC event today. Anyone remember the iPod Touch? He was the little fellow who looked just like an iPhone, but was available in an 8GB, 16GB and 32GB storage choice.

You could do almost everything on an iPod Touch that you could do on an iPhone, apart from that one important factor - that it lacked phone capabilities. Still, it was cheaper, with the 8GB option coming in at £199, whereas the 8GB iPhone was originally £269 before Apple chopped £100 off the price, less than two months ago.

Now however, who'd want an iPod Touch, considering Steve Jobs tonight said 8GB iPhones would cost $199, or £100 up front? Sure, there's still the £30 or so that you have to pay each month for the contract, but most people pay that much for their mobile phone contracts anyway.

yahoo-oneconnect.jpgWhile at Mobile World Congress, I grabbed a demo of oneConnect, Yahoo's innovative new mobile application that draws various social networks and instant messaging apps into one place, including Yahoo's services, but also MySpace, Facebook, Last.fm, LinkedIn, MSN Messenger and AIM.

It's expected to be included in Yahoo's Go 3.0 application by June this year. I was really impressed at how slick it is, and how neatly it presents the different information from all these different Web 2.0 feeds. There's a Pulse feature that lets you see people's profile updates and photo uploads too.

However, it seems the app could be derailed after a complaint from Microsoft, and concern from Facebook over how Yahoo is pulling in information from their services, and whether it's respecting people's privacy.

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It was at last year's 3GSM show in Barcelona that we first clapped eyes on Polymer Vision's Readius e-book display. The show's name may have changed to Mobile World Congress, but Polymer Vision was still there this year, showing the latest version of the device, which is now a fully-fledged mobile phone, as we recently reported.

Naturally, I nosed around the company's stand to find out more. According to Pieter van Lieshout, display R&D manager, what was on show this year is an almost-final version of the device, which is due to go on sale in the second half of 2008.

The screen is lovely, I have to say. It's five inches when unrolled, and QVGA resolution. The photo above gives you a sense of how it displays newspaper pictures and text, but my personal impression is that it's very comfortable for reading indeed.

Oh my. If you thought our first crop of stand slogans was the end of it, you were wrong. Over the last couple of days at Mobile World Congress, we shot a few more, just to ensure fairness to all those companies who plastered a crap motto across their stand. Carrying on from Part One...

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9. Well, lime green certainly is vibrant.

MWC 2008: LG handsets round-up

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Whilst not teeming with various new handsets like Samsung, LG at least focused on quality, with their four handsets all being innovative and desirable. Samsung and Motorola, pay attention.

KF510 - touch-sensitive buttons, with an MP3 player, 3.0-megapixel camera, image stabilisation, LED flash and red-eye reduction it can also record QVGA video. Out mid-March. See details here.

KF700 - three touch-sensitive displays (3.0" screen, alpha-numeric keypad and shortcut dual), HSDPA connectivity, video playback, 3.0-megapixel camera. Out mid-March. See details here and video here.

KF600 - similar to KF700, but with only two displays, one being the InteractPad, 3.0-megapixel camera, MP3 player, FM radio. Out mid-March. See details here and video here.

KT610 - runs on Symbian OS, HSDPA, GPS, QWERTY keyboard. See details here.

LG

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MWC 2008: Motorola handset round-up

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As Gary said when he did the product announcement for Motorola earlier in the week, "their heart's not in it". With just three handsets officially announced, we were decidedly unimpressed.

Z6W - a Wi-Fi version of the Z6, it supports all four GSM bands, and has a 2.0-megapixel camera and microSD slot. See details here.

W161 - very basic handset with black and white display and FM radio. Out Q1 2008. See details here.

W181 - 65k-colour display, FM radio. Out Q1 2008. See details here.

(image via Engadget)

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MWC 2008: Samsung handsets round-up

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Samsung had the longest line-up of all the manufacturers, with 12 models displayed at the Mobile World Congress show. It's enough to give anyone Samsung fatigue!

Here's a recap on all the new handsets...

U900 Soul - 5.0-megapixel camera, 4x zoom, image stabilisation, HSDPA, mobile blogging, RSS feeds, music library, and microSD slot. Out March, for €400. See details here and video here.

J700 - 1.3-megapixel camera, microSD slot, FM radio, music player, and 2.0" display. Out in March, for €130. See details here.

J150 - slim candybar with a 1.9" display, 1.3-megapixel camera, FM radio and microSD slot. Out in March, for €120. See details here.

Look under the jump for the rest of the line-up...

MWC 2008: Nokia handsets round-up

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We've taken a look at Sony Ericsson's showing for MWC this year, but what of Nokia? Let's look below at the four handsets announced...

N78 - dubbed Nokia's 'multimedia' phone, not only does it have a 3.2-megapixel camera, Nokia Maps and A-GPS, it also enables you to geo-tag your photos. Out mid-2008, for €350. See details here and video here.

N96 - a new flagship handset, the N96 has a 16GB storage capacity, plus microSD slot. As you'd expect, it has HSDPA, a 5-megapixel camera, Maps and City Guides, plus 3D stereo speakers and DVB-H TV tuner. Out Autumn for €550. See details here and video here.

6210 Navigator - GPS, an integrated compass, Nokia Maps 2.0, accelerometer, it's also got 3.5G connectivity, A-GPS, 3.2-megapixel camera, MP3 player and 1GB memory card. Out in Autumn, for €300. See details here.

6220 Classic - 5.0-megapixel camera, Carl-Zeiss lens, Xenon flash, autofocus, A-GPS, 3.5G, and Nokia Maps 2.0. Out Autumn, for €300. See details here.

Nokia

Find more mobile news in our Mobile World Congress 2008 category

MWC 2008: Sony Ericsson handsets round-up

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The Mobile World Congress show has ended for another year, Stuart, Ashley and Susi are on flights home as we speak, and so it's now time to look at all the major manufacturers' new models.

Sony Ericsson announced the arrival of seven new handsets for the masses this week, the Xperia X1, G700, G900, C702, C902, Z770 and W980i phones. Here's the CliffsNotes for each handset, from the left to right -

Z770 - HSDPA, push email, Google Maps, RSS reader, 2-megapixel camera, media player, can be used as modem via USB. Out mid-2008. See details here.

Xperia X1 - first model from the Xperia range, the 'arc' slider phone runs on Windows Mobile 6, has a QWERTY keyboard, 3-inch wide VGA display, 3.2-megapixel camera, Wi-Fi, aGPS, 400MB of storage and microSD slot. Out mid-2008. See details here or video here.

W980i - adding to their Walkman range, the HSDPA-enabled phone has storage for up to 8,000 tracks, a built-in FM transmitter, access to Sony Ericsson's PlayNow web download service, 3.2-megapixel camera and it can record videos too. Out Q3 2008. See details here or video here.

See below the jump for the G700, G900, C702 and C902.

We've been getting excited about Taptu for months now, so it's fantastic to see they won the Global Community Award at the MoMo Peer Awards last night at the Mobile World Congress, rewarding our confidence in this small English start-up to no end.

No doubt you've forgotten exactly what they're made of, and how exactly they can revolutionise the way you use your mobile phone. Taptu is a search engine for your mobile, allowing you to gain content categorised into the various forms it exists - video, image, song, wiki, etc, then after you've discovered the perfect page deconstructing Morrissey's lyrics, you can send it to your friend via the 1-Tap function.

Plus, it's free. *swoon*

Taptu (via Shiny Shiny)

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Remember the big news yesterday about LG's MusicStation Max handset, which they're working on with Omnifone? You know, the one that you buy, sign up to a monthly contract, and then get unlimited music downloads for the duration of your contract? Pretty cool, eh?

Omnifone has the handset at Mobile World Congress, and you can play with it, but they're not letting anyone photograph it. It's to build mystique, apparently. When I interviewed Omnifone's Rob Lewis, these were his exact words: "You can describe it. You can draw it..."

So I did. See above. It really is that minimalist, too. Check over the jump for another WORLD EXCLUSIVE picture of the handset, from my own fair hand.

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Yes, 9@9j really is the name of Philips' upcoming mobile phone. It'll be fun going into Carphone Warehouse asking for that... But the candybar handset does have one innovation - there's a slot for a AAA battery in the bottom.

The technology comes from Israeli firm Techtium, and it's called Backupower. The 9@9j is the first phone to have it inside. Battery firm Energizer is involved too - I grabbed Moti Puran - its Manager OEM Europe - to explain it.

"It has a standard lithium ion rechargeable battery, but it has the option to put a AAA battery in, and it'll give you three hours extra talktime," he says. "If your lithium ion battery goes dead, the backup battery kicks in, and starts to charge the lithium ion battery, so you can start using the phone straight away."

MWC 2008: Meet the mobile Calendarettes

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calendarettes.jpgI have seen the future of mobile TV, and it's a reality show featuring a bunch of models in bikinis fighting it out to become the star of a glamour calendar. Possibly. And if it's not that, it's a sitcom about pasta.

Both are the work of Italian startup Small Formats, which is showing off various TV formats at Mobile World Congress. The Calendarettes is an 8-10 episode reality show featuring said models, which has been produced with mobile in mind. So, there'll be the basic TV show, but also 2-3 minute mobile clips and a website tied in.

Meanwhile, Pasta Is Fun is the sitcom, which stars three characters cooking pasta in their kitchen, and is split up into 3-5-minute bitesize episodes, and a companion website with recipes. Genius. Small Formats CEO Marco Ottolini says the company's aim is to become "the Endemol of mobile".

MWC 2008 Video Preview: LG's new HSPA Horizon phones

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Here's something to confuse you - Ashley displays his geek credentials in this video, by explaining the differences between HSDPA, HSPA, HSUPA and other 3G formats. Believe it or not, he claims the various companies adopting these new 3G acronyms is the most exciting thing to come out of the MWC show.

LG has a couple of Horizon handsets adopting these high-speed internet connections, check it out above.

LG

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LG's KF700 handset gets a run-through from Susi in the latest video direct from MWC. You'll remember this one, it has the unique three touch-sensitive input methods, plus HSDPA and a 3-megapixel camera.

LG

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lg_shine-follow-up.jpgHere's a nugget from my interview with LG's Jeremy Newing that I thought was worth spinning off as a separate story. It seems it'll only be a matter of months before LG releases the next phone in its Black Label series, following the Chocolate and Shine handsets (latter pictured).

"We have the third Black Label handset coming in May, which we can't tell you about just yet," he says. "And there'll be the successor to Viewty, obviously, which has exceeded our expectations so far."

Newing also said LG is keen to build on its momentum with the two previous Black Label handsets, with those who bought a Shine last year likely to be looking for an upgrade during the next six months. With that in mind, the third Black Label phone is guaranteed a keen reception.

Find more mobile news in our Mobile World Congress 2008 category


Nokia's N78 - the recently announced 'multimedia' handset which gives users easy access to Nokia's Music Store, and contains FM radio functionality in case you're a cheap-skate and just want to stream your choons instead.

Discover Susi's thoughts on the 3.2-megapixel toting mobile, above.

Nokia

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lg-jeremy-newing.jpgAfter launching the touchscreen-only Viewty and Prada phones, you might think LG is keen to kill off the humble mobile keypad. But it seems consumers have said 'not so fast!' to the company, with the result that LG is now including slide-out keypads into a number of its touchscreen phones.

"We did a lot of research into consumers' reactions to touchscreen technology, and some are a little bit nervous," Jeremy Newing, head of marketing for UK and Ireland at LG, told me yesterday. "People still want to have a keypad, whether it's for texting or dialling numbers. So we're doing that."

He cites LG's new KF600 phone as an example of this policy in action, with its slide-out keypad, but also the way it splits its display into a non-touchscreen main screen, and a touchscreen 'InteractPad' which has virtual buttons that change according to what you're doing on the phone - texting, playing music, taking photos or whatever.

Despite a recall of the first batch, the Sony Ericsson W910 handset has still won Best Handset at the GSM Association's 13th Global Mobile Awards 2008.

Check out a hands-on here or let me sum up by telling you it features HSDPA connectivity, Shake Control to skip between music tracks, 1GB of storage (via Memory Stick Micro), 3D gaming and colour-co-ordinated accessories.

"We are very proud to receive such a prestigious award for what has proved to be a very popular product," says Dick Komiyama, Sony Ericsson President. "The W910 Walkman makes it quicker and easier to transfer or download music. It's also about thinking beyond music, to games, videos and the Web."

Sony Ericsson

Find more mobile news in our Mobile World Congress 2008 category

Google Android laid bare: The Truth!

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One of the more exciting things at this year's Mobile World Congress has been the appearance of several Google Android prototype handsets on technology firms' stands. Included among them is Qualcomm, which has this behemoth of circuitry showing an early version of Android.

As a fearless investigative blogger, I have got to the bottom of exactly what all those bits do. Click on the image above for the full picture.

Find more mobile news in our Mobile World Congress 2008 category

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