Slashdot Mirror
New Mobile Phones Showcased
An anonymous reader writes: "This is a report at VR-Zone
showing many new and upcoming models of mobile phones with features like color
LCDs, GPRS and digital cameras built-in from major Telco companies like NTT
DoCoMo, Panasonic, Kyocera, Samsung and Sony Ericsson. 3D Graphics animation
software design houses for example discreet, NewTek and Alias|Wavefront and
video editing card manufacturers like Pinnacle and Canopus have their booths
there too." There are too many links to list here separately, but I especially liked the pictures of products from NTT DoCoMo and Sony Ericsson.
looks shiny !! ooOoOOoOOooo
*drools*
Who is this Karma guy and why is he bad ??
At last my life has meaning again. No I can get a phone that plays MP3s, video clips and warns me if my fly is down.
Sorry, I just drank five too many Jolts.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
now we're going to have to worry about people looking at porn while driving.
Only hands-free porn viewing allowed in Santa Fe.
Linux is dead.
LU
Since it has so many features these phone are obvously tailored to lazy people. So I'm just wondering will they give me a shock to try and resuscitate my heart incase I have a heart attack?
"...from major Telco companies like NTT DoCoMo, Panasonic, Kyocera, Samsung and Sony Ericsson." what about smaller telco companies, like midwest wireless?
--fetch daddy's blue fright wig, i must be handsome when i release my rage
but I just don't feel justified in buying one. It's not that I don't need it--my wife's locked herself out of the car more times than I count, sometimes leaving a baby inside. Also, I'm on the road a lot attending conferences and whatnot and I like to keep in touch. The trouble is, none of the cellphones on the market provide source-code for the binaries that run on the phones. While I may feel a modicum of temporary relief over the safety of my family, I know that in the larger picture I'd just harming them trading away their freedom.
There is nothing like drivin down the road while talking on your phone while being able to take digital pictures....
Great Linux Site
For once I have heard a tech story on the radio (driving to the train station this morning) several hours before it reached slashdot. Wow.
Imagine how much they'll charge for it if they provide a video feed, too!
This is going to give good old-fashioned Internet porn a run for its money. ;)
Not surprising, all of the new phones have a mouthpiece, a speaker, and numbers inbetween with which to dial. I feel that the phone industry needs to be revolutionized, and I think that a phone inserted in the rectum would do just that.
Is your browser retarded?
*ring* *ring* "Um, Hello?" "Hi son, how are you?" "Um, Hi Mom!" "Son, what are you doing?" "um, nothing, just (alt-F4 alt-F4 alt-F4)looking at the 'internet', don't worry it wasn't pr0n" Oh that would be hard to explain...
"The large print giveth, and the small print taketh away" -Tom Waits
Huge freakin' phones that do way more than I want a phone to do. Video/pictures/color...etc.
Give me a phone that calls someone with great sound/voice quality, and can fit in my pocket without me knowing it's there. That's all I want.
It makes julien fries in 3.2 seconds! It can make coffee, take out the trash, watch your kids, and surf the internet. It has approximately 3,256,982 ring tones, can sing 5 songs at once, vibrate, flash, and jump up and down when someone calls. It has SMS, PMS, EMS, EPT, DMCA, and ET! You can connect via cellular modem, wireless internet, bluetooth, sabertooth, and root canal! All this and more for only $500!
But I phone that lets you talk to someone.
I've been looking forward to seeing some of the Japanese style phones in the US. I'm really sick of the large and plain looking phones, perhaps American companies will take a hint.
Generic Phone Role Playing System?
my associative arrays can kick your hash - TCL
she's one hot little elf!
and she can cook, too!
safety reports on these things? Pagers are safer!
Yes, it's a joke.
tcd004
I click on the link for Sony Ericsson, I get the page for DoCoMo. I click on the link for DoCoMo, I get something on overclocking. IF'N THAT AIN'T WACKY.
One of the many things I hate. thingsihate.org
I don't know, I think most of these fancy new phones are ridiculous. Do you really need a PDA in your phone? No. Text messaging? Nope. The *only* thing a good cellular phone needs to do is transmit voice and color video. Anything else is just fluff.
Karma: Good (despite my invention of the Karma: sig)
many new and upcoming models of mobile phones with features like color LCDs, GPRS and digital cameras built-in from major Telco companies like NTT DoCoMo, Panasonic, Kyocera, Samsung and Sony Ericsson.
Hey guys, how bout we get the 3g network deployed a little more before bombarding us with useless reasons to buy a new cell phone? You'll get more business out of me with a nice 3g network than you will with color LCD's.
In college, really poor, need a flatscreen.
Try European stuff! Nokia 9210 is HUGE and plain (although features an electronic notebook). Nokia 8990 is really small and pretty good in it's metal case. And Nokia 8310 looks realy stylish.
So yeah, they're new phones with a speaker on one end and a microphone on the other and some buttons between -- what's the BFD?
Well, as a wireless developer, I'll tell you:
2.5/3G -- almost all of the phone designes showcased support some sort of high speed wireless connection (high speed as a releative term to what came before). I-mode, M-Mode, GPRS, whatever, it all translates into "get data to the the phone faster than before".
Displays -- lot of them also offer colour displays, and those that don't are at least super-size STN screens. While you're right in assuming that colour screens are overkill, having a screen that can display at least 8+ lines is always good.
bluetooth -- even though bluetooth is a bit of a "lame duck", it's still more convenient then directional IR or tethering the phone to the laptop with a cable.
GPS -- while the "big brother" factor is pretty big here, as well as location-dependent SMS advertising, it's also useful for your average user -- like, say, telling your phone to use BLuetooth to sync only when you're a certain computer at XY coords, or a yellow-pages/direction system that can tell "you are here".
Polyphonic Sound -- I lied, this is not one of the reasons they're cool. This is one of the reasons why I will get pissed at people who have a CD quality Britney Spears sample as their ring tone while in a theatre while I'm trying to watch Matrix 2 and Matrix 0.
Hilary Rosen's speech was about her love of money and her desire to roll around naked in a pile of money.
The site was a bit on the slashdotted side... but i insisted. And guess what. The guys actually took pictures of the phones! of the silly phones! Now who on earth goes all the way to Asia to get pictures of phones? Boy, I sure liked E3 better than this fair...
</kidding>
free the mallocs!
Are they hosting their site on one of these new phones????
if common sense was common, wouldn't everyone have it?
Looking at all the cool phones that are available in Asia and Europe make an American like me feel saddened. Sure, that cool new phone that can take digital photos and download Java apps looks mighty fine: too bad it will be another two years before they even make it to my home state. By the time these phones are available locally, Asians and Europeans will have earbud cellphones with three-dimensional holographic heads-up displays. Meanwhile, I will be stuck with my plastic brick. Won't someone think of the American children!
jeez, are they running the web server on one of the new nokias?
MARIJUANA, SHROOMS, X: ONLINE?! - E
Web, e-mail, voice, wap, lan, dvd, wetbar, cd...please enough already.
Give me a wireless phone that will fit on my ear with a small 1/2 sized boom mic. that will allow me to plug it into my pda/computer to upload phone lists and you have a big time sale. "Dial, 555-5555 connect" would be wonderful for voice dialing. Something that will be light enough to leave on while I sit at my computer, drive, pull hotswap drives, would be wonderful. I have seen these for short distances that you plug into your phone on your desk. Why not go ahead and shrink the portable phone down enough that you wear it like your would a hat, or a watch. It seems the most logical step.
Neck_of_the_Woods
#/usr/local/surf/glassy/overhead
I guess that all those idiots driving around with a phone glued to their ear are not obnoxious enough. We are now have to put up with more idiots looking into ridiculous, teeny-weeny screens instead of watching the way they go.
As a bike commuter and road user, i hate these things. Anything that takes away a drivers concentration from what he is supposed to be doing (piloting a vehicle with more kinetic energy than a bullet) is generally not a GoodThing(tm).
Adding more features simply adds to the problem.
And for all you too cool users that say "Oh, *I* can drive just as good with my SuperZoomie hands free thing"...try it with a driving simulator sometime. Crank up a NASCAR game, and try to have a meaningful phone conversation while winning the race. Which happens first? Either you give up the phone conversation, or you crash.
Problem is, on the road, there is no reset. You merely die.
I understnd your point, but NASCAR? C'mon, how many people drive to work at 180MPH and only make left hand turns?
Michael Loves Me!
Most posts so far are flippant and/or fairly unimaginative, belying a deep (perhaps US-centric), indifference to how pervasive this tech really is (or might become) in northern Europe and Japan.
.sig). Think Tamagotchi's that never die and always acquire new behavior.
Think stuff like identification, automatic billing, and perhaps the advent of the long heralded videophone. Think automatic discovery of neighboring phones, perhaps autonegotiation of information (your portable
The utility of these things grows proportionally with the number of people using them.
Well, in this situation, I get the feeling the best you are going to get is 1 hand free...
I've had the Sony Ericsson T68i (pictured in there somewhere) for a couple of weeks, and it's a great little number. Apart from being very small and light, and having infrared and Bluetooth, it's got a tiny clip-on digital camera, which takes relatively good quality pix - you can then email them from the phone or send them as a MMS message in about 5 seconds. Older phones that can't take the JPG get a message directing them to a website, with logon and password, to view the photo. It's fun for a while, and surprisingly useful (while furniture shopping last week I could mail my wife a photo of the proposed purchase for approval).
Speaking of which, took delivery of a new convergence device, the XDA, about to come on the market in the UK (and Germany to follow), from British phone company O2. Looks great ( see it here) and works very smoothly, a GPRS phone combined with a Pocket PC... that's the downside, Microsoft. Otherwise it does all the things you'd want something like this to do: always on email, web surfing, MP3 player, phone, the whole caboodle.
im still waiting for the new ones they showed three years ago.
four-oh-four
From what I've seen in Japan, they're not being marketed to the business man sitting in traffic, nor the mom in the minivan rushing to do chores.
All these cool features are aimed right at the young, hip, high school and college aged kids. I have a dozen female high school aged cousins, and they all had the latest and greatest phone that had every feature you could imagine.
The parents, on the other hand, being much more conservative, had the standard plain vanilla phones... which means they had eight times more features than my US Sprint phone and weighted 50% less.
The greatest feature I've seen with their phones is the lightweight battery chargers- size of a matchbox. The one thing I really hate when I travel is having to carry around 20 pounds of bricks to charge all my appliances. Oh, and the LCD clock, the screen turned into a nice, analog clock when the phone was on standby. That was nice touch.
-- If god wanted me to have a sig, he'd have given me a sense of humor.
I want a PDA and a camera in my phone, rather than have to lug around 3 pieces (or more) in my pocket. For my next phone, here are the features I want:
* _small_
* calendar with alarms, synchs with my desktop
* camera that takes at least 640x480
* good contacts section, inc notes with each contact
* voice memo
* on-set answerphone ala Sony Z5 [1]
Phillip.
[1] This is something you don't appreciate until you go abroad, where retrieving voicemail is £2.50/min with T-Mobile but £0.20/min paying to receive the call that gets recorded instead.
Property for sale in Nice, France
Please tell me Sony has not joined the legions of companies that innovate by buying others. Is capitalism a zero-sum game? Will there only be one company left?
New toys - hey, isn't there a /. category for that?
db
Cig:
ôô
I have two phones, and between them they are everything I need. When I'm working, I carry a Nokia 9210, and when I'm out chilling with friends or clubbing, I carry a Sony Ericsson T66.
The 9210 is a real powerhouse of a phone, with a word processor, spreadsheet, internet access, excellent messaging facilities, massive contact database, etc - but it's a bit much to carry around. The T66 is tiny, and yet fully functional as a phone - it weighs in at around 60g (2oz).
I have all but given up on finding the perfect phone for all occasions, I listed what I thought might be my perfect PDA on slashdot a while back, but I can't see it happening any time soon. The only solution to me is to vary my device depending on the circumstances - each device does what it's designed for very well indeed, but one device trying to do everything invariably fails completely.
-- Pete.
Monochrome - Probably the UK's largest internet BBS
Give me a phone that will:
- work anywhere on earth
- good sound
- have at least 8 hours active battery life (and more standby)
- is small, light and durable
- and cost 20$ a month unlimited connection.
If you give me that I'll drop my regular phone line and you have me as a customer for the rest of my life...
If I want to see moving pictures in color I'll turn my TV on... you wanna bet that those features are there to bombard you with shiny colorful advertisement!!!
Try it! Library of Babel
MMS: Multimedia Messaging System -- this allows you to send email with audio/amr attachments, so you can play them with open source code from public 3GPP technical standards TS 26.071, TS 26.073, TS 26.101 and TS 26.074.
AMR is a truly great vocodec technology, which stands for "Adaptive Multi Rate." Accordingly, it takes less bandwidth and battery time because when the microphone isn't picking up sound (from, e.g., your speech) your phone isn't sending as much information. Just the way it ought to be. Why spend 4 kbps to send comfort noise when 20 bps can do just as well? Execellent code!
Posting the source code is important, because people are going to start seeing these in their inboxes and there are virtually no parents out there. If had mod points I would crank the parent post way up as informative and insightful.
GPS -- while the "big brother" factor is pretty big here, as well as location-dependent SMS advertising, it's also useful for your average user -- like, say, telling your phone to use BLuetooth to sync only when you're a certain computer at XY coords, or a yellow-pages/direction system that can tell "you are here".
I just rented a mobile phone while in the UK, and it knew where I was plenty well enough to tell me local weather and where to find the closest ATM. Towers aren't that far apart.....you don't need the phone to report your position down to a resolution of a few inches to get that kind of information.
Anything else is just too big brother for me.
Do not fold, spindle or mutilate.
Sorry I've missed the discussion, but I have to point out something.
Most posts are along the lines of criticising "useless" features, however most slashdotters are American and therefore this does not surprise me.
In other areas of the world, a mobile phone is much more than a simple communications tool. In places like Europe, Asia and Australia, EVERYONE has one as mobile phones are deeply embedded now in the cultures of these countries. In the US however, many of these new features will never work, because the US networks are far behind the rest of the world.
I'm not trying to flame, I just am trying to explain that the situation is different in other countries, and therefore although some of you might think video/text messaging/mobile internet is a waste of time others really do appreciate these innovations.
I agree there are a few useless features I find on mobile phones, though, although they may be useful to someone else.
The typical american response when it comes to 'cell phones' (or as we prefer to call them, mobiles.)
From the average response, containing "Who needs text messaging?" and the like, it is quite clear that you don't know what your missing. Imagine being in a crowded building, at a party, at a concert or something of that nature. There is no hope in hell you could possibly *HEAR* the person on the other end of the phone if u were to talk to them (using voice), nor would they be able to make sense of what you had to say (All they'd hear would be a collection of loud noise).
For those of us outside the US, this poses no great threat to our party lifestyle. Never fear! GSM is here... "GSM?" i hear you say... "What's that?!?" Well you see many countries OUTSIDE the US use a cellular system called GSM (Global System for Mobiles), operating on the 900Mhz and 1800Mhz band. Not only does GSM permit nifty "useless" features like TEXT MESSAGING, but it also means that your phone has the potential to work pretty much anywhere in the world (once again, except the US).
Here in australia, when i want to talk to someone but don't have the opportunity to, i can send them a message! I can still talk to my friends even when i'm at a party (or similar)!!
Now i hear you say "Why on earth would you want to carry your phone around at a party? Certainly that'd cramp your style." Once again, outside the US, we have compact, pocket sized phones! My phone (a Nokia 8250) weighs ~ 83grams and guess what, it *EVEN* fits in my pocket!
Read the whole article on ft.com
Avantslash - View Slashdot cleanly on your mobile phone.
All this fancy stuff can best be done with a PDA.
Honestly, do you *need* a color-screen on your phone? It's harder to read, and drinks more battery juice.
Do you need an MP3 player in there? A radio? A camera? I know I don't. For the simple reason that I already have these things, and they work much better than an all-in-one solution.
Me, I want three things:
* Small size
* Long battery life
* Good voice quality
Got all that in a tiny Nokia - I use it via a headset (voice dialling), never notice it's in my pocket, and it has an uptime of about two weeks before I have to recharge it.
Good enough. I don't like bloat in my code, and don't like it in my phone, either.
Ciao,
Klaus
Free PC version of ChipWits at http://www.breueronline.de/klaus/chipwits/