The only aspect of the devices launched at the Mobile World Congress show in Barcelona this week which interest Faultline readers, are the extent to which they can carry, play or receive video and audio files, but there were a considerable amount of new devices, and each of those we are reportingon had an aspect of that.
One of the main awards for the show, the GSM Association’s Best Handset 2008, went to a previous Sony Ericsson Walkman phone, which was thought to have brought most to the audio scene. The mobile community will give such an award to Apple over its collective dead body. It must be remembered, that even with the iPhone, most people currently do not use their handset for music, and while we accept that virtually everyone should, that means that the reality of audio on handsets remains a key issue to the wireless community, as opposed to the ‘promise’ of video and mobile TV, which is seen as a war to be fought in the future.
So Sony Ericsson, Nokia and Samsung, three of the top five handset makers all released a clutch of new devices at the show, many anticipated, attacking three main themes; location through GPS chips; music and internet access. Motorola is perhaps too busy worrying about its future to bring too many new devices to market and LG perhaps has a perceived lead in that it has had a series of major launches during the latter half of last year.
There were of course a clutch of Google Android prototypes on the floor too, but these looked like yet another war to be fought in the future, and attracted far less envious stares than the ‘finished’ handsets that the majors introduced.
Sony Ericsson continue to leverage on Sony brands, and the Cyber Shot camera range, which is globally dominant, saw two new handsets introduced bearing the name, and of course a new Walkman, the W980, which it says is the first phone to deliver a clear audio experience – not sure what the others have been doing all this time.
It also added a new web enabled clamshell, the Z770, and brought a new brand range the Xperia (not to be confused with the NXP Nexperia chips) which are a kind of hybrid device between web connectivity and a multimedia phone.
Sony Ericsson also added its first HSPA 2.0 devices branded as ExpressCards, the EC400 and EC400g which can be used either with your phone or which connect to a laptop via USB. Most of these devices will be out in the second quarter.
The new Cyber shots come in two models the C702 (Edge) and C902 (3G and Edge) which are both touch screen and have built in GPS, and software to sort photos by where they were taken, and they work with Google Maps. The C902 has a 5 megapixel camera with face detection and auto focus, so faces are always in focus, even at different depths, and it offers night shooting with a flash and comes with software to add music to a gallery of photos
The Z770 has a magnetic mouse pointer controlled by the navigation key and offers plus, pan and zoom into any area of a web page you want to see more of, but only a 2.2 inch screen.
The Xperia X1 is an HSDPA slider with a 3-inch VGA display and full Qwerty keyboard under it or you can use touch controls. It runs Windows Mobile and really looks like this season’s Sony Ericsson enterprise offering.
The new Walkman 980 has 8GB memory and stores 8,000 songs, and will communicate with the PlayNow arena, the Sony Ericsson music store. It has premium headphones, a built-in FM transmitter, which allows you to send whatever’s playing on your phone to other devices with a built-in FM radio to share music with all those around you or you can do the same through its integrated stereo speakers.
The talk in the run up to the show was the Nokia N96 and it is the latest in the Nokia line to offer DVB-H, along with all the N95 capabilities, plus a bit. It has a 2.8 screen, 16 GB memory, the N95 two way slider and will ship in Q3.
Nokia also added the N78, another Nokia Music Store phone, with Nokia Maps and access to ‘Share’ the UGC site on its Ovi portal. This will ship in the second quarter.
Nokia also added the 6220 combining a 5 megapixel camera with GPS, ships 3rd quarter and the 6210 Navigator with GPS plus an integrated compass for pedestrian guidance, also third quarter.
Samsung showed nine new handsets ranging from high-end camera phones to entry-level, most of them using the famous Samsung slider mechanism, but one or two not. We won’t go through all of them, but the selection below gives a flavor.
Samsung’s new flagship phone was on show the SGH-U900 nicknamed the “Soul,” which is the star of the show in Barcelona, a massive stand backed up by a colossal advertising spend which seems to advertise the Soul everywhere. In shows gone by its was the Motorola RAZR and derivations that took that position. The U900 is a thin slider, with a touch screen and is being compared to earlier LG phones. It has fast networking, a 5 megapixel camera, and supports the 7.2 Mbps version of HSDPA.
The G810 is a Symbian based 3G HSDPA slider and has a 2.6 inch QVGA display with a 5 megapixel auto-focus (that specification is sounding familiar by now) but this has flash and 3x optical zoom, and guess what? an integrated GPS receiver for picture geotagging. It also has an output to plug pics and video straight into TVs. Commentators see this as an N95 killer with a similar feature set.
The Samsung F480 is styled like an iPhone with no slider in sight, a 2.8 inch touchscreen and only 11.5mm thick. Add a 5 Megapixel auto-focus camera with flash, image stabilization (where the camera gets rid of handshake) and basic video editing. It has a music player and FM radio
The device with the DVB-H support is the P960 with a 2.6 inch display 3MP auto-focus camera, music player and FM radio and document viewer.
The Samsung F400 offers the dual slider arrangement in the Noki N95 and N96, but it only slides open a speaker in one direction, offering Bang & Olufsen audio, integrated FM radio, 3MP auto-focus camera and a video player.
The themes are clear for anyone to see, and nothing much surprising. Many of these devices are convergent and have wi-fi, all have a boost to the quality of camera and audio, some have touch screens, and virtually all have GPS built in.