By Evan Ackerman

Generally, a Nokia mobile application isn’t something we’d cover around here. So I think first, I should give you a full disclosure: I got a demo of Nokia’s new Ovi Maps app at a breakfast event yesterday morning that may have included bacon. I am reasonably confident that said bacon didn’t influence my opinion more than a modest amount, but I just thought I’d let you know.

Anyway, let me cut directly to the chase and say that the biggest deal with Ovi Maps, as opposed to something like Google Maps, is that Ovi Maps (which is totally free, btw) does not require a data connection for turn-by-turn voice directions. When you buy a Nokia phone that has GPS and Ovi Maps, it’ll come preloaded with a map of whatever country you’re in. From that point, you don’t need a data plan (or even a SIM card, for that matter) for the phone to provide you with driving directions, walking directions, and points of interest… It’s a great solution if you want a phone, and a GPS, but can’t otherwise justify the staggering expense of a monthly data plan.

The maps are vector based (stored as numbers, not graphics) so 74 countries worth of mapping data takes up less than 5 gigs of space, and whatever country you have loaded onto the phone is of course only a fraction of that. If you want the satellite backgrounds, Ovi Maps does that too, but you’ll have to have a data connection. Also requiring a data connection are integrated features like Lonely Planet and Michelin guides, but to reiterate, if you’re just looking for directions and points of interest, you don’t need to pay for data.

Here are some other tidbits worth pointing out:

-74 countries have turn by turn directions, 180 have road maps… Google Maps only does directions in the US

-New country maps can be downloaded to the phone through a PC free of charge, still without a data connection

-Turn by turn directions include lane assistance, and walking directions include paths through parks and will direct you through the lobby of a building if it’s faster (!), and you can turn on 3D landmarks

Currently, Ovi Maps is available on the following unsexily named Nokia phones: the N97, 5800, E52, E55, E72, 5230, 6710, 6730, and X6. The rest of Nokia’s family of GPS enabled smartphones should get Ovi Maps by March.

[ Ovi Maps ]

By Evan Ackerman

The ZOMM is apparently the “world’s first wireless leash” for cell phones. It’s a little disky thing that you attach to your keychain, and it tethers itself to your cell phone via Bluetooth. If it gets separated from your phone by more than a preset distance, it beeps at you, which is its primary feature. It also works as a wireless speaker phone, and if you push the single button on the front, it will start shrieking and auto-dial emergency services.

In general, the ZOMM seems like a handy thing to carry around. It’s reasonably small (about the size of a poker chip) and offers a few handy features (although it really should have come with a flashlight button). The biggest problem is obvious: you have to remember to plug it in every few days (it charges via microUSB) or it won’t do you any good. This isn’t really a flaw in the device itself, unless you think it should be somehow solar powered, but when you’ve got a whole bunch of things to charge, the one that has a primarily passive function is going to inevitably get neglected. Also, the reason you’d get one of these (the anti phone loss leash bit) depends on your phone and your keys being very near each other all the time… This could be a problem unless it uses a class 3 receiver with a 100m range or something.

There are probably a bunch of details on this that aren’t apparent from the press release, but we should get a hands-on look at the ZOMM at CES which is OMG this week. The ZOMM is rumored to be priced at about $80.

[ ZOMM ] VIA [ Technabob ]

Logic Wireless’ Bolt projector phone, which we were first introduced to at CES last year, has gotten an update to version 1.5. Not that version 1.0 ever seemed to really get to market, but still… We heard rumors of this update at CES that mentioned a smaller prototype, as version 1.0 of the Bolt was pretty darn chunky, and this new model has definitely slimmed down, among other improvements. The flagship feature of the Bolt is, of course, the integrated projector, which is capable of throwing a VGA (640 x 480) image up to 64 inches wide. Otherwise, you’re getting a smartphone that runs Symbian, has a touchscreen, two cameras (one on the front and one on the back), and slots for two SIM cards. Oh, and there’s no 3G.

It’s certainly a strange set of features, which makes it entirely appropriate that the Logic Bolt 1.5 is currently for sale through Skymall (!) and not T-Mobile as we heard was likely to be the case. It’s $500 unlocked, which pretty much restricts interest in this thing to people who for whatever reason find that they absolutely need a phone that can do all of the weird things that the Logic Bolt can.

We’ll get a look at it in person at CES in a week or so (!!!), and hopefully we’ll be able to tell you whether there’s the remotest chance that it’s worth half a grand.

[ Skymall ] VIA [ Gearlog ]

By Evan Ackerman

We’ve seen our fair share of evil fish tanks, but this one is certainly a contender for the top three. The LG GD900 cell phone has a slide-out keypad that happens to be transparent. Some guy with a little bit of creativity and either a passionate love for, or an intense dislike of, his pet fish decided that it would be fun to stick a little compartment on the back of the keypad and turn it into a fish tank. The phone still works, but I’m not sure the fish do. There’s a video:

Please, don’t try this at home. Or anywhere else.

VIA [ Engadget ]

You can make a cell phone call from the top of Mt. Everest. They’ve got internet on the ISS and even further. So it seems like the only places left that you can’t have something more important that you should be doing are caves, and the ocean, but Ocean Reef has gone and ruined a whole bunch of that with their underwater cell phone. Learn how, after the jump.

I mean, seriously now. An underwater cell phone? Why on earth in the water would you want or need something like this? Okay, I can understand that maybe it would be nice to be able to talk to another diver, assuming you bought a couple of these systems and got decent cell reception wherever you happened to be diving. But what do you really need to say besides, “come look at this fish!” Or “wet enough down here for ya?” Or “gadzooks, I seem to have been eaten by a shark!” ‘Course, if that last one had happened, it probably would have severed the cable that connects you to your phone, which sits safely on the surface. Yeah, there’s no super cool technology here, just a glorified underwater Bluetooth headset that’s attached to your cell phone (voice dialing only) with a 40 meter long cable. Your phone, meanwhile, gets its own little waterproof case and life preserver and floats comfortably on the surface, where it’s likely to get seasick and throw up its SIM card.

This convenience (or whatever) doesn’t come cheap at about $1800, which doesn’t include the cost of the phone itself. If I were you, I’d spend that amount on a sweet BCD, regs, and wetsuit… Or for that matter, a trip to someplace like Fiji.

[ Ocean Reef ]
[ Skymall ] VIA [ RGS ]

By Evan Ackerman

You don’t generally expect much from a cell phone that costs less than sixty bucks, and with the Samsung E1107, you don’t get much. It’s got a 128 x 128 display, an FM radio, and a built-in flashlight. The reason that you’d buy it is the solar panel the takes up the entire back of the phone, promising up to 10 minutes of call time per hour in the sun. While not the most efficient way of charging your phone, it’s a million times better than an iPhone 3GS at out of power performance, and at least gives you an option for mobile charging.

The other reason to get this phone is that it’s good for the Earth: it helps reduce global warming. Not in the way you’re thinking, that would be too obvious. No, I’m talking about how having a solar panel out in the sun absorbs photons, preventing them from imparting their horrible energy into the ground and making everything just a little bit cooler. If everybody was using solar powered cell phones, not only would we be saving energy charging them, but charging them would actually cool the planet by some fraction of a degree that I’m just going to go ahead and call significant and important! Yay solar power!

So far, the E1107 is available pretty much everywhere except the US. Why must they taunt us so?

[ Newswire ] VIA [ Samsung Hub ]

By Evan Ackerman

Cell phones are arguably separated into three categories: iPhone / Palm Pre / BlackBerry, phones that suck are functional for people who don’t care, and everything else. In the everything else category, what distinguishes one phone from another is often (for better or worse) looks, and a company called Kent Displays may have trumped that category with a phone that changes color.

The entire outer surface of this prototype phone is actually a display, called a cholesteric liquid crystal display. Sounds tasty, right? It is tasty… The display is durable, can be molded into any shape, and (eventually) will display 4,000 colors at a high (but unspecified) resolution. A jolt of electricity changes the color, and that’s all it takes: once the color is set, no power is required to keep it up.

This is, of course, the type of thing that you’re not likely to see anytime soon, but it does exist. Is it cheap? No idea about that either, but I’d be willing to pay a premium for a phone that I could set to match my mood. I’m feeling mauve today, how ’bout you?

[ Tech-On ] VIA [ Ubergizmo ]

By Evan Ackerman

We don’t generally go all bananas about rumors and hearsay, but when someone whips up a handy color-coded graphic that explains everything that might show up on the next generation iPhone, it provides a concise way to summarize what you might have to look forward to if you’re one of those people who feels sad and lonely and inferior without an Apple logo embossed on something expensive within immediate groping range.

This graphic was put together from many different rumors by TGR; the numbers next to the features denote a source for the rumor and there’s a key available here.

[ The Green Room ] VIA [ CrunchGear ]

Everybody knows that girls are attracted to guys with dogs. This is why, if you’re desperate, you can rent dogs by the hour. But what kind of dog is most effective at picking up chicks? This is the burning question that the Puppy Pulling Power experiment was designed to answer. Five different breeds of dogs (a Border Collie, a Pug, a Samoyed, a Staffy, and a Yorkie) were outfitted with a Sony Ericsson C510 camera phone (with smile detection software) on their collars, and whenever the dog lifted up its head to receive the attentions of an adoring female, the phone would snap a picture when (or if) she smiled. As you might expect, the dogs had a rather, uh, advantageous angle, so I’m going to go ahead and call the following trailer slightly NSFW due to cleavageness.

Yeah, it seems pretty fake to me too (they were sponsored by Sony Ericsson), but I don’t think that necessarily invalidates the results. Have a look at those after the jump (including some of the pics that you really want to see), but here’s a spoiler: the Samoyed wins by a cute widdle nose.

There’s a gallery of the “best of puppycam” girls here.

[ Puppy Pulling Power ] VIA [ Hacked Gadgets ]

By Evan Ackerman

This video might not mean much to you if you’ve never played Myst. But if like me you were one of the early adopters of the CD-ROM drive, this footage probably brings back a heady mix of nostalgia and frustration. Myst is now available in re-rendered (but still old school) glory for the iPhone and iPod Touch, packaged in a 700 mb download that requires a massive 1.5 gigs of free space to install. It’s been long enough since the original that I’ve reliably forgotten how to solve most of the puzzles, meaning that this is an opportunity to pay $6 for the privilege of wasting countless more hours trying to figure out how to activate the damn rocket ship.

[ Myst ] VIA [ BBG ]