To see what’s hot and what’s not in the cellular world, I tried to find out what was the top selling cell phone in the US at the moment. Up popped this little beauty, the Nokia N95 according to mysimon.com. Not cheap at US$724 but it certainly has all the bells and whistles and then some. Sexy double slider action, 5 mega pixel camera, GPS mapping so I get home safely from the pub, and yes I can even call a taxi with it if the walk home gets too much! Up to 2GB of memory for tunes and vids too.
Here’s the official ad for the wee beasty listing all the funky features of the N95 with some groovy Moby-esque music in the background.
I’m certainly impressed by the N95 and obviously so are a lot of Americans. It may not be the slimmest phone around, but then with all that functionality stuffed into one piece of kit it was always going to be a bit on the chubby side. And obviously battery life is a concern but if you are looking for an all in one piece of kit and are the kind of person who remembers to charge it every night then the N95 could be for you.
Helio’s ‘ultimate mobile machine’, the Ocean, is available on their website for US$295. The snazzy gizmo has a dual slider capability, one slider revealing a numeric keypad for general phone use, the second a qwerty keypad for messaging and emails. With the dual sliders the Ocean is 0.86 inches (2.2 cms) thick making it quite a meaty piece of equipment but still only weighs in at 5.61oz (159g). The Ocean also boasts 200MB of memory to store your tunes in, built in GPS capability to link to Google Maps, and a 2.4 inch QVGA screen with a res of 240 x 320. Check out the full details at Helio.
The Ocean is currently only available in black so may not suitable for a mother’s day present but it does look pretty sexy. If you’re looking for an all in one solution to your phone, email and messaging needs the Ocean could be your saviour. If anyone has had a play with one of these puppies drop us a line and let us know what you think.
Surprise, surprise. Google can be little after all. But only in design and only in three different pages. Anyway, I will skip right to the point. The Google index hosts about three mini-googles, if I may call them that, specially optimized for mobile phones, or for people that really hate crowded pages. Google’s everyone’s search engine, isn’t it?
Alright, Google for IE Search comes first. It’s a page that was originally designed for IE’s explorer bar, but if you are the kind of person that doesn’t like Google’s cluttered original homepage and you’re looking for something simple, this might work for you. No links, no ads, just the input field, two buttons, the logo and the copyright.
Second in place, another page created for Internet Explorer, but the results will consist only in the website titles, and eventually a small text description if you mouse-over the link.
Last but not least, it’s Google for mobile phones. This page will show short descriptions as well as the URL for every given result. You might also try the transcoded pages that will show more content and less JavaScript, animations and Flash objects.
The first phone call made from a mobile device took place back in 1973, when Dr. Martin Cooper, inventor of the Motorola DynaTAC 8000X tested his prototype in the streets of New York. Ten years later, in 1983, the first ever mobile phone was available to everybody. The weight and size of the phone (0.8 kilograms and 25.4 centimeters) made it close to impossible to carry the phone around, so it was mainly used in cars.
Know a good story? Send it to tips(at)our-picks.com and we'll read it, turn it inside out, strip it naked, and we might transform it into a shiny front page article. And of course, you'll get your credit :).
