Phones

Sprint get Treo Pro with IE6 on March 15th

The Treo Pro will make its debut on Sprint’s Mobile Broadband Network on March 15. The Treo Pro — running on Microsoft Windows Mobile 6.1 — is a proven and reliable tool for mobile enterprise customers. And the Sprint Treo Pro adds some new elements that make it even more powerful.

The Sprint Treo Pro is the first Palm phone available with Internet Explorer Mobile 6, providing users with a more robust mobile browser. With Wi-Fi, GPS, a full keyboard and touch screen, all available for $199 (after the requisite rebates and agreements), the Treo Pro packs about as much bang for its buck as you can fit into a sleek form factor. Perhaps that’s why Tom Swift, EVP at Primerica, a financial services company, encourages his over 100,000 agents to adopt the Treo Pro:

HTC product roadmap gets some specs at last

We have managed to get hold of some specifications at long last of the leaked HTC Roadmap images that we saw way back in the beginning of January. Some interesting devices but nothing too amazing to get us fired up. The Thor which will be the successor to the large Athena will sport a 1Ghz Qualcomm processor which is quite interesting but not much else. Take a look for yourself after the break.

IE6 Mobile video preview

Brandon over at Pocketnow has got a Windows Mobile 6.5 Rom running on a HTC Touch HD and has put together a short video looking at the new IE6 for mobile. This new browser will ship with future Windows Mobile 6.5 devices and should provide a much richer web browsing experience on Windows Mobile devices. The current version of Pocket Internet Explorer is a fast browsing experience and is good for quickly finding bits of information however the rendering and page layouts is a joke.

The new version Microsoft claim will offer desktop class rendering with full flash support all designed for finger use, we will see if it lives up to that. For now though you can have a look at the video after the break but bare in mind this is not the finished version.

Nokia N97 launch date slips and price increases dramatically.

According to The Register who reported back in January that Play.com stated on its website that the N97 would be released on 31 March for the SIM-free price of £480.00, the same retailer has now put its shipping date for the phone back until 23 June, while simultaneously upping the price to a whopping £650.00. Now this is a very well specified phone but £650.00 can buy you a lot of computing power or the highest end phone from HTC and still have over £ 100.00 left over. Another retailer Expansys are also now showing the revised shipping date of 23rd June and their price is even higher than Play.com.

So there you go, if you want the latest Nokia flagship device you going to have to wait a little while longer, at least it will give you more time to save up for it.

via The Register

Mio announce the K70 Windows Mobile GPS Phone

Mio have shown us via an online virtual roadshow, their latest Windows Mobile handset the K70. It has has a 3.5-inch screen of WQVGA resolution, you know the strange resolution seen first on the Samsung Omnia, a 3 megapixel auto focus camera and runs on Windows Mobile 6.1 Professional. Also included are worldwide 3.5G / HSUPA bands, WiFi, built in GPS , 128 MB Ram and 256 MB Rom, and a rotation sensor. Dimensions are 115.3mm x 61.5mm x 11.9mm. No mention on availability so far.

Full details at Mio Roadshow 

Woman finds phone in bag of chips, completely overreacts

In the US, there is a chain of stores known as Aldi. Aldi specializes in selling off brand food in large packages at very cheap prices. Recently a woman in Wisconsin  bought a bag of chips (crisps for our English readers) at an Aldi, and got a surprise. In the bag she found an old used cell phone, for the record it was a Nokia, but it doesn’t really matter. Her reaction is probably the most interesting thing about the situation. This poor lady over completely overreacted, instead of tossing out the offending bag, or returning it to the store, she filed a complaint with the FDA.

Now I know that finding anything inside a bag of chips, besides the chips themselves, can be unappetizing, but it isn’t like she found a severed finger or a mouse carcass in there. I really don’t think wayward electronics in food is that big a problem in the United States. In fact out of the hundreds of millions of pounds of food consumed in the US every week, and this is the first time I have ever heard of an incident like this happening.

Memphis Police Department embraces Celio Redfly and the future

For years, police departments have been installing laptop computers in their patrol cars to give officers in the field access to critical information. The police in  Memphis Tennessee have been using smartphones for a while now to supplement their in car laptops, but there was a problem, the officers were having a hard time with data input on the small devices. Enter the Celio Redfly, which is a laptop shaped machine that tethers to a smartphone and allows the police to use the smartphones in conjunction with a larger screen and keyboard. This allows the police to continue taking advantage of the flexibility and portability of a smartphone when out of the patrol car, but the more ergonomic advantages of a laptop while in the car. The Memphis Police Department have deployed 1200 of the Redflys, and I’m sure this will be a big help to the officers on patrol.

HTC Maple caught on camera

The successor to the hugely popular HTC Excalibur or T-Mobile Dash has been a long time coming since the Cavalier never really came about and Engadgetmobile have spotted a picture of it which originates from Cnet. Looking at the picture the QWERTY keyboard looks a dream to use with nice big well spaced keys. Also we can see a trackball type interface and a the device will apparently feature a cool new feature HTC is calling "Inner Circle," which seems to aggregate communication with people you care about depending on the time of day and day of week whatever that means. The screen looks like the standard 320 x 240 QVGA landscape resolution running Windows Mobile 6.1 Standard. That’s all we know so far, but its sure to be a 3G phone at the very least.

via Engadgetmobile

Windows Mobile 6.5 honeycomb menu, brilliant by design

Lots of blogs and media sources were quick to cast doubt over the recently announced Windows Mobile 6.5 update especially the rather strange honeycomb layout of the new start menu. Well the guys at istartedsomething have analysed the structure of the honeycomb and come up with some interesting facts. The truth is, the honeycomb from a usability perspective is superior than traditional square grids for a touch interface. Here’s why.

Windows Mobile 6.5 video on a Diamond2

We had a brief glimpse of Windows Mobile 6.5 during MWC a couple of weeks back, now the guys at Areamobile have managed to get hold of an HTC Diamond2 running 6.5. The video is in German however you can still enjoy the demo as they show you the home screen, honeycomb launcher, the new contact application, web browser and the unlock screen. Take a look at the video after the break.