Archive for June, 2008
Here’s a post that definitely comes under the mega-bargain category.
I just received an email from eXpansys informing me of an amazing price drop on the Samsung SGH-i320. You may recall we reviewed the i320 about a year or so ago and for a while it was my device of choice. It’s a really neat design and a small, easily pocket-able form factor. Battery life is pretty decent and what’s more it weighs a mere 95grams which is unheard of for a Windows Mobile Smartphone.
Ok so the i320 isn’t cutting edge technology any more, it’s WM5 and there’s no 3G BUT for under £100 you probably cant go far wrong. On top of that, if you’ve bought anything from eXpansys in the past and have a £10 discount voucher you can use that on this purchase too!
Go and check it out for yourself on the eXpansys website and bag yourself a bargain!
Samsung SGH-i320 Specification
Posted by: Matt
[Post tag(s): smartphone, Pocket PC, Tracy & Matt, Samsung SGH-i320, expansys, Samsung]
We have heard quite a few rumblings about Dashwire recently and thought we would give it a whirl and find out what it’s all about, Dashwire automatically mirrors the content on your phone to the web, helping you access, manage, and share your mobile experiences. We will be doing a full review of this service soon, until then here is an overview.
Just as a quick follow up to my pst a few weeks ago about the HTC Touch Diamond appearing in the June eddition of the Orange catalog in the ‘Coming Soon’ section (see below) I’ve just been told by one of the Orange business account managers that the Diamond will be released by Orange on Monday 30th June.
We believe that, as with other popular new handsets, Orange will only offer the Diamond to business customers initially. Although this is as yet unconfirmed it does sound about right as previous HTC handsets, the Orange M700 and HTC TyTN II were only offered to business customers for about the first month after launch.
I’m seeking confirmation at the moment and will share further news as I get it.
Posted by: Matt
[Post tag(s): smartphone news, Pocket PC news, Tracy & Matt, orange, HTC, HTC Touch Diamond]
In our previous post about the sound quality of the HTC Diamond, we used Vito Audio Notes software to record both sides of a telephone conversation between ourselves and MSMobiles, so moving on from that we thought it would be a good idea to have a quick overview of the software.
Wave your arms in the air and charge your phone
Orange today announced the launch of a mobile phone charger prototype that is powered by dance energy. The Orange Dance Charge is the result of months of research into alternate, sustainable energy sources to power mobile phones during summer music festivals.
Nokia, Sony Ericsson, Motorola and NTT DOCOMO announced today their intent to unite Symbian OS(TM), S60, UIQ and MOAP(S) to create one open mobile software platform. Together with AT&T, LG Electronics, Samsung Electronics, STMicroelectronics, Texas Instruments and Vodafone they plan to establish the Symbian Foundation to extend the appeal of this unified software platform. Membership of this non-profit Foundation will be open to all organizations.
There has been a lot of reports recently about the very poor sound quality when using the HTC Diamond for voice calls, particularly from user in the US. We decided to carry out some tests with Edward from MSMobiles to see how the HTC Diamond sounds. To carry out the test we ran the Vito Audio Notes software on the Samsung i780 at the UK end of the conversation and Edward called me from his HTC Diamond.
In the past I have mentioned using the Citrix client on Windows Mobile devices. I’ve had a great deal of success using it on the HTC Advantage, both the X7500 and X7510.
The Client will install and run on most Windows Mobile devices (devices running Windows CE Smartphone Edition or Windows Mobile 6 Standard Edition are not supported) but it’s not terribly useful on 320×240 screen devices as there really isn’t enough screen real estate. So this got me to thinking – how well will Citrix run on the HTC Touch Diamond and is the screen big enough to be useful?
The client can be downloaded from the Citrix Website and is easily installed with activesync from your desktop PC.
I’ve been experimenting with the Citrix client today and managed to get connected to my Citrix farm and run several applications quite easily. The VGA display on the Diamond is just about large enough to use a few basic applications (Word, Excel some bespoke apps.) and an HSDPA connection is fast enough to be useful.
A few things that I had to do before getting it to work properly was to use Internet Explorer to connect to the application server rather than Opera. Opera wont launch the Citrix Client and attempts to use Java instead, whereas Internet Explorer launches properly. You can find Internet Explorer in the Windows folder on the Diamond and you can run it from File Explorer.
Secondly I had to install the Equifax Secure eBusiness root certificate as these are not trusted by default on WM devices.
So those few things out of the way it was easy to connect to my application server and fire up the apps I needed. I really wish that Citrix would develop the client a bit more though. I’d like to see options to run full screen and easily minimise and zoom etc. I think on of the biggest things that it’s missing is the ability to rotate the screen on the client. Perhaps it’ll get more attention as more people use it?!
Posted by: Matt
[Post tag(s): smartphone blog, Pocket PC blog, HTC Touch Diamond, Citrix, Tracy & Matt]
As part of Vodafone UK’s commitment to making it easier to use Vodafone’s high speed network to access internet, email and popular music and TV services on the mobile, Vodafone is offering customers selecting an 18 or 24 month contract a variety of all inclusive bundles.
We were lucky enough to be invited to do a segment with the MSMobiles podcast last night where we discussed the Samsung i780 and the HTC Diamond among other things. You can check out and download the podcast at http://podcasts.msmobiles.com/?p=233.
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