News

T-Mobile G1 (HTC Dream) – More Live Photos

Ok so here are some photo’s live from the press conference in New York:

More photos to come soon.

Posted by: John

Nokia promo video shows off the Nokia E72 and E75

A demo video of the latest and greatest business messaging devices by Nokia leaked online revealing the yet unannounced Nokia E72 and Nokia E75.

The Nokia E72 is a full-QWERTY successor of the E71, while the E75 features a hybrid form factor incorporating both a normal keypad and a slide-out side QWERTY.

Nokia E75

Both the Nokia E72 and E75 seem to have built-in GPS receivers and advanced email capabilities. We guess the other specs will be high-end as usual.

Nokia E72

Posted by: John

Pantech OZ2 / Helio Ocean 2 approved by the FCC

Whilst it’s not siting at the top of the Mobile Phone market Pantech’s new OZ2 has sailed through the FCC’s testing process, sporting Helio branding that suggests this is the much-anticipated Helio Ocean 2. Since Helio was acquired by Virgin Mobile, it’s not unreasonable to expect to see this cell phone hit Virgin Mobile’s lineup shortly.

You may wonder why I am posting such a low end device well the answer lies in the Dual Slide function which is explained below. I thought this was kind of neat!

The Pantech OZ2 packs a QVGA display and dual-slider form factor, with a numeric keypad sliding out from the bottom and a QWERTY keyboard sliding out from the side. The stats look like:

* 3 megapixel camera

* Dual slider, just like the original

* microSDHC support

* 1GB internal storage

* In-browser Flash support

* 30fps video recording

* Touch-sensitive directional pad

* PC sync capability

Posted by: John

No HTC Touch Viva in the UK?

The guys over at Devicewire just dropped me a line to say that they’d heard from HTC about the Touch Viva and it’s been confirmed that this particular model will not be available in the UK!

Now I guess that the plans could change in the future but it does seem a bit of a shame as I suspect that this little Touch model would have been pretty popular.

Posted by: Matt

New Samsung Bresson M8800

I’ve seen a lot of rumours in the past few hours regarding the above phone and now it seems to be popping up everywhere.

As yet there are no photo’s for the device and all I can tell you is that it has an impressive 8 MP camera, quad-band GSM support, tri-band HSDPA and a Touch Screen with swipe technology similar to that seen on the HTC Touch series & iPhone.

I’ve googled till my fingers and eyes are sore trying to get more info on this handset but alas all I could find is that Phones4U the UK based mobile phone seller had indeed created pages for this around 12 hours ago but they look to have been brought offline or deleted.

The actual market name for the Samsung Bresson M8800 is still to be confirmed, due to the low profile surrounding the expected explosive launch. The M8800 is the product code, whilst the Bresson project title is rumoured to be associated with Henri Cartier-Bresson, a French photographer considered the father of modern photojournalism. Which given the handsets purpose and appeal, is very fitting.

Keep watching this space for more details

Posted by: John

HTC Touch HD, Viva & 3G Prices Released

Good morning all, we have finally managed to get our hands on pricing for the three brand new handsets in the HTC range.

All three handsets are priced as "Handset Only" which means no contract, unlocked and no icky network operator apps loaded loaded in the ROM.

OK so without further delay here they are:

Posted by: John

Sony Ericsson Xperia X1 global media launch

This evening we’re off to another Sony Ericsson event in London. This time we’re attending the ‘Global Media Launch’ of the Xperia X1 being held at Tent London.

I’m not sure what the format of the event will be but I’ll definitely be reporting back to you with any news that I can get my hands on. Hopefully there will be a few video ops. too!

If there is anything specific you would like me to find out about the Xperia X1 or anything else to do with Sony Ericsson, drop me a line and I’ll try and get some answers!

EDIT: Just on my way back from the event now. It was a good evening and we had some excellent oportunities to talk to Magnus Andersson as well as a number of other people from SE. I’ll have a post with some news and video for you tomorrow.

Posted by: Matt

Windows Mobile 6.1 SMTP issues

Do you have a Windows Mobile 6.1 powered device and use either POP3 or IMAP4 with SMTP? Have you encountered problems sending email or seen the error message below?

If the answer to either of the questions above is yes then read on as what you are seeing is actually a bug that affects all WM 6.1 powered handsets!

Background

I first discovered this problem a few months ago while using my HTC TyTN II. I have access to two Exchange servers but, as you’ll probably know, you can only set up one Exchange activesync partnership per device. So for the other account I have to use IMAP4 and send over SMTP.

I’ve been using the setup for about 18 months and it works perfectly well for me, well until HTC released the WM 6.1 update for the TyTN II it did.

I installed the 6.1 update on the TyTN II and set up my Exchange and IMAP4 accounts. Was able to receive email with both accounts, no problem. All was well until I tried to send an email from my IMAP4 account (through SMTP). Upon trying to send mail I simply got presented with the error message above. I checked the account settings, they were all correct, but still unable to send mail.

I then restored the original WM 6.0 ROM to the TyTN II and the problem went away! This lead me to think that there was a problem with HTC’s implementation of the 6.1 ROM. However later test revealed this to not be the case.

I set up my IMAP4 email on my new HTC Touch Diamond and was able to send one email, but subsequent emails then failed with the same error message. Deleting and recreating the account allowed me to send one or two more emails before it then failed again. One sending failed the account never works again!

So I contacted one of our friends at Microsoft to try and work through the problem.

Having worked with the guys at Microsoft for the past 6 weeks or so (including the top Outlook Mobile chap in the US) and having sent them my TyTN II to test we have discovered the following bug affecting ALL Windows Mobile 6.1 devices.

You can see more in the email excerpt from Microsoft below:

We are done with it and just checked in a bug fix last week to address what turned out to be a severe product bug that will affect all WM 6.1.x devices until they receive a fix or upgrade to WM 6.1.4. Your help both made us aware of the issue before it bubbled up through the forums and your device actually did help us debug the issue.
 
We are driving the issue with our response team and pushing to make a fix more broadly available independent of a device update.
 
More details on this bug:
Symptoms:
At some point sending e-mail stops working for a given e-mail account.
This will happen if the there is *any* failure to connect to the SMTP server – ever. After that point the user cannot send mail with that account again.
 
Recovery:
The user must delete their e-mail account and recreate it each time this happens.
There is no way to prevent this from reoccurring.

So as you can see, the problem is pretty severe and affects all devices with WM 6.1. The work around, if you can call it that, is to delete the affected account and recreate it.

I also suspect that this bug is related to the problem that many people report with GMail on their mobile and the reason why you must delete and recreate an email account if any of the account credentials change.

Microsoft are working on the problem at the moment and are hoping to make an independent update available. Let’s hope that it will be available in that format rather than part of a full ROM update as I suspect that it will take time to filter through the manufacturers and the operator supply channels.

If you are affected by this issue then do drop me a line and I’ll endeavour to keep you updated with the progress of the fix.

EDIT: Please see this post for a potential fix to the problem!

Posted by: Matt

The unveiling of the worlds first Google based Android handset

With Google showing off an HTC Dream like handset at the recent Google Developer Day in London it now looks set to be officially released.

Google Developer Day

OK so it not such a secret now as it was a few months ago but it does look like the official release and press day will be this coming Tuesday at a press event in New York City. Just what this device is we can only assume (HTC Dream)?

Anyone Seeing the Resemblance?

It will be the usual day out at the press release with Google & T-Mobile being there since it was decided that T-Mobile should be the first network to get their hands on the Android based handset.

Unfortunately I have no passport or an invite to the press event but I do promise to keep you updated through the wee hours of the UK morning with updates on the 23rd.

As for the hands on treatment I am going to try working my Scottish charm on the guys over at HTC to see what they can offer us in way of a shot of this device. I will be sure to keep you all updated.

Posted by: John

Over 2 Million views on YouTube!

I just went over to have a look at our YouTube channel and videos and was surprised to discover that our collective 99 videos have been viewed over 2 million times! Apparently that puts us in the top 40 YouTuber’s in the UK. I’m sure it wont be too long before we exceed the 100 videos mark as well!

So a quick thank you to everyone that has watched our videos, we definitely appreciate your feedback so if there is anything that you think we should be doing differently then please do let us know.

If you haven’t seen our YouTube channel then you can find it here, some of the videos go back almost two years already!

Posted by: Matt