Nokia's First Touchscreen Smartphone May Debut Next Week
BY: Ed Hardy, Brighthand.com Editor
Nokia will take the wraps off the first ever S60 smartphone with a touchscreen next week, if an unconfirmed report is correct.
Nokia XpressMusic 5800According to Reuters, this device — code-named the Tube — will be formally announced on October 2 in London.
Nokia has been promising a touchscreen-based version of Symbian S60 for some time, but has run into problems and delays. Devices running this upcoming version are expected to still be able to run software written for current touchscreen-less S60 phones.
To improve the experience of using its touchscreen, Nokia will supposedly include haptic feedback in devices running this new version of S60. This will cause the display to vibrate whenever an on-screen button is touched.
An Overview of the Nokia Tube
Quite a bit of information has already leaked out about the first touchscreen-based S60 smartphone, which will supposedly be called the XpressMusic 5800.
According to unconfirmed reports, this music-oriented device will have the following specifications:
* Operating System: Symbian S60
* 150 MB of internal storage
* microSDHC slot — 8 GB card included
* 3.2-inch, 640 by 360 pixel touchscreen
* Wireless:
Quad-band GSM, Single-band (2100 MHz) HSDPA
Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 2.0
* A-GPS
* 3.2 MPx camera with flash
* 3.5 mm headset jack
* TV-Out port
Microsoft Again Says It Has No Plans to Make Its Own Smartphone
Ever now and then a rumor crops up that Microsoft is going to release its own smartphone. The man in charge of the company’s Windows Mobile program yesterday repeated what has always been said before on this question: it’s not going to happen.
This question never cropped up when Microsoft was a software company that just created operating systems and let others handle the hardware. But in the last few years it has released its own gaming console, the Xbox, and its own music player, the Zune. This has lead people to wonder if Microsoft is going to release other hardware, like a smartphone.
Back in 2006, the head of the Zune team even said a combination Zune and mobile phone was in the cards. However, the company has stepped back from that, and in 2007 Microsoft’s CEO Steve Ballmer dismissed the whole idea.
Yesterday, Scott Rockfeld, Group Manager of Microsoft Mobile Communications held to this position, telling Silicon Alley Insider that his company has “no plans to build our own phone.”
Instead, Rockfeld says Microsoft is happy to continue developing and licensing Windows Mobile to other companies.
Blackberry Bold unboxed
Recently RIM released their new baby, the Blackberry 9000 Bold and this seems to be a popular choice among the Blackberry fans. I must admit that I’ve never really used a Blackberry device in anger, I’ve set them up for other people and played with BES a little but never really got my hands dirty with the handset itself.
However, the Bold looked like an interesting device, full QWERTY keyboard and a Half VGA display coupled with HSDPA and 1GB of ROM, I thought it was about time that we looked that the BB more closely.
I know many people fall in to one of two camps, those that love BB and those that hate it. Blackberry lovers seem to claim that their devices are easier to use and more robust than their Windows Mobile counterparts. We’re going to have a look over the next week or so.
As always, you can see the device up close in our unboxing video below:
Blackberry Bold specification:
* 114.3 x 60 x 12.7 mm
* 133g
* Talk Time: 300 mins
* Standby Time: 780 hrs
* 480 x 320 pixels TFT display
* GSM: 850/900/1800/1900 (Quad-Band)
* WCDMA: 850/1900/2100 (Tri-Band)
* 2 mega-pixels (auto-focus) camera
* Hi-Resolution VGA Video Recording
* SMS/MMS (with video)
* E-mail (POP3, SMTP, IMAP4, BES, BIS)
* 1GB ROM / 128MB RAM
* microSDHC (external
* miniUSB
* 3.5mm Audio Connector
* Bluetooth (2.0)
* Wi-Fi (IEEE 802.11g)
* GPS
* BlackBerry Maps
Suspected ASUS P565 turns up, gets detailed
Nothing is quite official about this ASUS phone just yet, but the current speculation is that it’s actually the ASUS P565 and, judging from some newly-detailed specs, it looks like it shouldn’t have much trouble attracting its share of interest. Leading the way is a speedy 800MHz Marvell Tavor processor (apparently a first for any phone), and a still relatively uncommon 2.8-inch VGA screen, which should go nicely with the VGA camera for video conferencing (you’ll get 3-megapixels for still mages). Otherwise, you can expect European HSDPA connectivity, built-in GPS, a 1300mAh battery that promises 3.5 hours of 3G talk time, and Windows Mobile 6.1 for an OS (with ASUS’ Glide software on top of it), of course. No word on a price just yet, but word is this one is on track for a release as soon as October.
Adding location to a non GPS phone: introducing OpenCellID
In this two part article, we will introduce mobile positioning based on CellID, and we will take a look at OpenCellID, the open source database of CellIDs. We will demonstrate how to use OpenCellID through some simple examples. The second part of the article will show how to use OpenCellID with OpenStreetMap and the 8Motion library to create a full interactive mobile mapping experience in JavaME, with each of these examples being less than 100 lines of code.
What is CellID?
We all know that GPS will be deployed in the vast majority of phones in the future. For now though, only a few high-end handsets are GPS enabled. An alternative, which has been available for some time, but which has gained momentum only recently is location based on CellID. So, what is CellID? A CellID is a number which is associated with a specific cell (the radio tower to which your handset is connected). In most cases, this is the closest tower to your location. So by knowing the location of this tower, then you can know approximately where the handset is. This concept is illustrated below. However, a tower can cover a huge area, from a few hundred meters, in high density areas, to several kilometers in lower density areas. This is why location CellID accuracy is lower than GPS accuracy. Nevertheless location via CellID still presents a very useful alternative.
CellID has recently become much more popular, thanks mainly to its seamless integration into GoogleMaps for Mobile.
OpenCellID
So this sounds great, let’s just get the device’s CellID, and then we will know its location. So what’s the catch? The issue is that the location of cells is not public information. Operators keep this private, for many reasons including:
They don’t want to give tower location information to their competitors
They use this as an extra revenue income, as they provide paying services to retrieve cell location
This is the reason we have set up a service called “OpenCellID”. OpenCellID.org is an open source database of CellIDs, serving two purposes:
Anyone can create or use an application to gather information about cell locations, and send this information to the OpenCellID server, thereby improving the coverage
The database can be used by any application to retrieve the location of a cell, according to the CellID
