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.
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.
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.
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'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.