Yeah, I have a cellphone. I use it in public to look like I’m busy and important, and in private for the occasional phone call. Not much else. It would take, I dunno, three mildly interesting cellphone designs appearing all at once for me to actually get off my ass and write a cellphone post… And guess what happened today:
Sky IM-U200 Released in Korea
You’ve gotta give some credit to Sky for producing a more or less original cellphone design; it looks like wedge shaped flip phone but instead rotates open, sorta like the Helio Kickflip, but with a much more graceful end result. The phone itself doesn’t seem to offer any stunning features, and you have to wonder how comfortable it actually is to hold against your head. Plus, the space in the middle when the phone is closed is effectively wasted.
Back during CES we talked a bit about the Pico Projector from Microvision and how cool it would be to project your content from your phone onto a wall or other surface for big screen viewing. At the time the Pico Projector wasn’t slated to go into a phone, but today Microvision has announced that they have signed an agreement with Motorola to integrate the Pico Projector into future Motorola products. The PicoP is an ultra-miniature laser based display engine that will enable big screen viewing for mobile devices.
While the details of the agreement weren’t disclosed, the two companies did say that they were working together to integrate the PicoP into a working handset for demo purposes. The prototype phone will use the new WVGA, 854 x 480 pixel wide angle scanner that Microvision introduced at the May 2007 Society of Information Display conference. Looks like we are one step closer to throwing the streaming TV some cellular providers offer onto a screen actually big enough to enjoy.
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Here’s to being somewhat unconvinced Japan’s Sophia Nani will make the same sort of impact as the iPhone. Yet, there it is: a smartphone set to be unveiled today at Wireless Japan 2007 with a full 4.3 inches of screen real estate and 800 x 400 pixels of resolution (beating the iPhone’s 480 x 320). That’s an entire inch on the iPhone, which is great. But unfortunately that’s just about where the greatness ends.
[It's got a ] 600MHz processor and there’s Wi-Fi, dual cameras and a digital terrestrial tuner. Memory comes in the form of a microSD card with no internal user storage at all. On the software front, Windows CE seems an unlikely choice.
The kicker? For media management, the Japanese firm has opted for Windows Media Player.
It’s only a matter of time before this becomes a reality, but whose side will they be on?
Oh, and for those of you who can’t see YouTube stuff, you just got to know that it’s a really short video of some cellphone transforming into a demented RoboCop mech machine with Gatling guns, shooting a company name into the table its sitting on.
Not news by any stretch of the word, but fun little video on a Friday.
We think that no video in recent memory has evoked simultaneous feelings of utter glee and excruciating pain as the one embedded above. BlendTec has become famous in the last few months for its brilliant marketing campaign named Will It Blend. In it, the company has fun blending everyday objects, from marbles, to brooms, to hockey pucks… and now, they’ve done the unthinkable and blended an iPhone.
Yeah, it blends. And damn if seeing that black cloud of freshly misted electronics spewing from the blender at the end of the video isn’t one of the most techno-eerie moments in marketing history. It’s also interesting to see how long the device keeps on playing before it gets shattered to dust.
What you’re looking at is in fact a cellphone; or maybe it’s better to look at it as a tablet PC with cellular capabilities (something like what the Nokia N800 should have been, perhaps?). The Flet Phone VP2000 comes from Japan’s NTT, and features a
12.1″ XGA display, enabling users to access email, surf the Internet, and even hold a video conference via the VGA camera located in front. You can hold video calls with other webcam users or owners of 3G handsets [as well].
It’s a logical step, really, to add cellular connectivity to something we’re likely to spend hours sitting in front of. There’s unfortunately no word on availability outside Japan, though if you’re in the area, you can expect to shell out a cool €410.
The iPhone’s been out for a little over a week now. The world keeps on spinning. It’s nice, but hey, can it really ever live up to the monumental hype that preceded its launch? We don’t know, but here’s someone’s version of the perfect iPhone.
Yeah, it’s iDay. iPhone Day. The Day The World Comes To An End In An iPhone Singularity. Or something. While everyone is covering the mass hysteria in some degree of seriousness, we bring you a fantastic parody video, from the good folk at Collegehumour.
This little gem’s got our WTF-Department’s panties in a bunch. See, there’s a number of headphones/earbuds/headsets out there that help you filter out ambient noise, so that the person you’re talking to can hear you clearly. Some of these use bone conduction to zero-in on your words, instead of the jackhammer to your left. But this guy, the “InCore” from company Nap Enterprise Co. claims to pick up your spoken words… through your ear. Yeah, sounds weird to us to, and we’re not sure just how this would work. They even claim a 30dB reduction in ambient noise, through
a pad made from five layers of silicone rubber that are gathered together in a fluted shape so that sounds need to travel in air between layers of silicone.
Even this description’s got us scratching our heads, though we think they just mean it’s a regular rubber pad that slides into your ear. But we’re paying attention anyway, because if this works, it would mean that we could get our callers to hear us in noise environments, without us having to stick something or other to our skulls.
We’re hearing that these are set to come out next month, at prices ranging from $160 to $225, depending on whether it’s wired or not. Oh, and it’s in Japan.
Related Tags: Cellphones
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By David Ponce
