Sony Ericsson has quickly followed up the recently-announced Vivaz with a QWERTY enabled version: the Sony Ericsson Vivaz Pro running Symbian S60 5th.
The Vivaz Pro, which adds a full QWERTY keyboard to the original Vivaz that was announced last month. The Vivaz Pro offers some impressive specs – 3.2-inch screen, HD video recording, GPS, WiFi, 3.5mm headphone jack - and the slide-out QWERTY keyboard looks fairly comfortable. Unfortunately, SE took the original’s 8-megapixel camera, and shaved it down to 5.1-megapixels. That shouldn’t make someone want to stray from the S60 device, the pro version comes with a VGA port, which you will find not on the original, so you can show off your amateur photography and video on your TV.
Hit up the read link to get the full specs and if it peaks your interest, its due Q2 2010.
Samsung has quietly announced a new projector phone based on the Android OS at Mobile World Congress.
The i8520 or Samsung Beam is packing some tip-top technology that Samsung is promising to show off at the mobile phone event this week. The Beam has a huge 3.7-inch OLED screen, running Android with a special overlay to make it look like one if its Bada range and a DLP projector!
It’s a rockin’ awesome device with features that impress!
- Quad-band GSM coupled with tri-band HSPA connectivity
- 3.7-inch WVGA Super AMOLED touchscreen
- 8-megapixel camera (720p / 30fps video recording), plus front-facing VGA camera
- Android 2.1 with TouchWIZ running on top of it
- DivX/Xvid-enabled media player
- A-GPS, WiFi (b/g/n), Bluetooth 2.1, DLNA support
- Integrated DLP pico projector!!
- FM Radio with RDS, 3.5mm headset jack, stereo speakers with 3D sound effect
- 2GB (or more) of internal memory + microSD memory card slot
- 1800 mAh battery !
- Size: 123×59.8×14.9 mm
In a nutshell, the I8520 is potentially the best Android smartphone announced to date. Too bad we’ll have to wait for Q3 to see it released in Europe and Asia, and possibly U.S. soon afterwards.
The N900’s media player application has an internet radio section which contains lots of radio station bookmarks, but no obvious way of adding more. The video below by All About Maemo gives an example of how to add more stations to the list, and how to remove stations too.
The video uses Shoutcast as an example, but there are other sites that will work with this method too. Unfortunately there are many technical and legal reasons why some sites work and others don’t, so perhaps the best thing to do is simply try radio station streaming links to see if they work. Any station which streams successfully can be saved as a bookmark using the method in the video.
Incidentally, if the Shoutcast site asks about player types, choose the option for using your own player.
The N900 has instant messaging and VOIP totally integrated into the interface, but officially it only supports this integration with Skype, Google Talk, Jabber/Facebook and Ovi. However, by installing a plugin you can actually add integrated support for many more services including MSN / Live, AIM, Yahoo Messenger, ICQ, QQ, Gadu Gadu, GroupWise and Sametime.
This excellent video below by All About Maemo shows the complete installation process for this plugin:
Once you’ve installed a service your service’s contacts may be added your N900’s Contacts application. If there’s duplication, you can merge contacts by selecting them until a “Merge” option appears, then select the contact you want to merge it with. If it talks about naming conflicts during the merging, just enter the name that you want the contact to be known as.
All eyes were on Sony Ericsson last night with the announcement of a string of new devices, all that look jolly nice.
Samsung too held a press conference with some good stuff of there own.
"A smartphone revolution is underway"
First off was the unveiling of the new operating system, Bada, which as we expected focuses on integrating contacts from various sources such as Facebook and Gmail. It all looked very nice on video but the real test will be when we can use the OS.
Along with Bada, they also talked about Samsung Apps which they intend to roll out in 50 countries over the next few months.
We already knew that the Vivaz was coming but what we didnt expect was this sliding QWERTY keyboarded version, the Vizaz Pro.
Yet another good looking and exciting handset coming from Sony Ericsson and not one that we are going to have to wait until the end of the year for, the Vivaz Pro will be yours to own the first half of 2010!
Perhaps one of the most impressive facts about the Vivaz Pro is that it’s going to be just 2mm thicker than the Vivaz, amazing that the keyboard mechanism adds so little to the overall size!
Full spec follows:
Sony Ericsson have been busy today announcing 5 new handsets at MWC. Several of these handsets came totally out of the blue and it’s very unusual not to know about these things before they are announced. I think that the X10 mini and mini pro are going to be awesome!
The X10 mini rather reminds me of the Neonode N2. It’s great to see something exciting from Sony Ericsson and it’s now quite clear why they dropped the X2!
The full press release follows after the break.
We thought we would hear about 3 new handsets today but it turns out that Sony Ericsson have 5 new handsets in store for us.
We already knew about the Xperia X10 and the Vivaz but we also learn of the Vivaz PRO, X10 Mini and the X10 Mini Pro(!) all of these will be available in the first half of 2010, the X10 and the Vivaz in Q1.
Lots of talk about organic design and the human element of design, combining emotional and logical design.
We’ll have images of the devices announced as soon as we can!
Also discussed was the GreenHeart philosophy with the Sony Ericsson Aspen being the first ‘green’ or ‘sustainable’ Windows Mobile phone. Bert Nordberg, President of Sony Ericsson also stated that they aim to have ALL handset be sustainable by 2011.
Posted by: Matt
Well you might think that MWC doesn’t start until tomorrow but that’s not going to stop Sony Ericsson! They’ve scheduled a press conference this evening and it’s all set to start at 6PM UK time – 7PM in Spain.
We’re expecting to see a number of devices officially announced. The Sony Ericsson Aspen, the Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 and the Sony Ericsson Vivaz. I’m sure that there will also be some comments about the GreenHeart philosophy too.
The live video steam starts at 6PM (or probably a little before) and you can find the video embedded after the jump below. I’ll also be monitoring the event and will post any press releases etc. that Sony Ericsson send me, I’m pretty sure there will be something official about the handsets.
James also has a one-to-one meeting with someone from Sony Ericsson tomorrow so please let us know if you would like him to ask any specific questions!
On Thursday last week Matt mentioned that he had heard rumours of the HTC HD Mini and wondered if we’d see it launched by HTC at MWC. Now it would seem that there are a shed load more rumours about the device we expect to be the HD Mini and we expect that it may well be the device we knew as codenamed HTC Photon.
We first ‘saw’ the HTC Photon in the HTC 2010 roadmap leak back in December last year. In fact it was one of the few Windows Mobile handsets to be mentioned on the roadmap.
Check out the spec of the HTC Photon and possibly the HD Mini after the jump:
Connect
Connect with us on the following social media platforms.