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.
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?"
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.
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?
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.
safety reports on these things? Pagers are safer!
Yes, it's a joke.
tcd004
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)
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!
Nokia 9210i Nokia 8890 Nokia 8310
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
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.
Yeah, I hate getting phone calls in the middle of a good match of Counter-Strike, holding the phone under your ear while using both hands to play a game is not easy.
What?
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.
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
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
What the FUCK are you fucking smoking? for $20/mo, I probably couldnt get all the standard services I get on my cell phone on my home phone line.
$15 Line Charge
$1 Touch Tone (I believe)
$4 taxes
$5/mo Caller ID
$3/mo call waiting
etc, etc. If you want free long distance, it's gonna be $20 more on top of that, and then only to ATT customers.
For $35/mo, I get 450 anytime, 1000n/w (start at 8PM), call waiting, 3 way calling, caller ID, free LD to the US from my home calling area. You're not going to get unlimited, even from a land line for $20.
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.
Read the whole article on ft.com
Avantslash - View Slashdot cleanly on your mobile phone.