Motorola Krave ZN4 review roundup

We had a feeling we’d get a mixed bag of reviews as soon as we first saw the Motorola Krave ZN4 — it’s one of those love it or hate it type things, you know? In some cases, reviewers chose to focus on the positives, noting that it was cute, unique, a good music player and a phone that would last and last without a recharge. Another batch of critics couldn’t hold back the whip, pointing out that it lacked WiFi, packed a lackluster browser, included yawn-worthy software and offered a keyboard that was “straight-up awkward.” As expected, overall ratings hovered between just below average to just above average, and it seems this phone will be exactly what you make it out to be. Moto fans will likely have plenty to cheer about, but those without a dog in the fight may want to give the writeups below a more thorough glance before dropping $149.99 and agreeing to a super-sized 2-year commitment.

Main Source: Engadget

Other Sources:
Read – PC Magazine
Read – PhoneScoop
Read – Laptop Mag
Read – DigitalTrends
Read – CNET

Orange UK halts BlackBerry Bold sales

Orange UK has temporarily stopped selling Research In Motion’s BlackBerry Bold while it tries to figure out a solution to unspecified 3G-related problems on the handset.

The operator halted sales of the popular handset on Friday. According to a spokesperson, sales will resume when a software fix becomes available, though no date was given.

“Orange UK is committed to providing the BlackBerry Bold to its customers in the U.K.; however, Orange UK and (BlackBerry manufacturer) RIM are currently working on providing a maintenance release of software to address some reported 3G-related concerns,” a statement from Orange on Monday read.

“Although the reported 3G concerns have been limited to a minority of Orange customers in the U.K., Orange UK and RIM both take customer concerns very seriously and felt it was prudent to introduce a maintenance release of software for Orange UK customers,” the statement continued. “Orange UK and RIM apologize to customers for any inconvenience and expect to provide a software maintenance release soon.”

The company declined to give details to ZDNet UK about the problem. The BlackBerry Bold is the first in RIM’s line of smartphones to include high-speed 3G, or HSDPA, connectivity.

Source: Cnet

Xberry lives brings Xbox Live to your BlackBerry

By Matt Burns

You have to imagine that at least a few Xbox Live users have a BlackBerry and this app is aimed right at ‘em. XBerry Live! seems to do about everything a Live user would want on the go, but be warned that this BlackBerry app isn’t going to make your day go by any quicker. Just think, it’s around 2 o’clock and you see all your buddies gaming away on COD4 while you have a stack of TPS reports right next to you. How’s is that going to make you feel? Probably like you were back in High School and done with your day by 2?

Nokia confirms N-series touchscreen phone

Nokia has sprung something of a, well, obvious statement by announcing that it will be bringing an N-series branded touchscreen phone in the coming months.

Devinder Kishore, director marketing, Nokia India, said: “We will have lot of touchscreen phones coming up,including an N-series device very soon.”

Speculation about what the device might be has led to the inevitable belief the new phone will be the N97, with an 8MP camera truly making it the flagship device to bring Nokia into the touchscreen fight.

Losing appeal

But it’s more likely that Nokia will look around the N85 mark, not wanting to cannibalise the N96 handset’s appeal after releasing it so recently.

Word is the new handset will be launched in the latter part of Q4 2008, but given the delay on the 5800 XpressMusic until 2009 in developed markets, don’t be surprised if nobody has heard anything by February.

Source: Techradar

Android phones making their way into the wild

Most of us will have to wait until October 22–or later, given that T-Mobile sold out–but if you have the right connections, you can get an Android phone now.

Google co-founder Larry Page flashed his Android phone briefly in a meeting two weeks ago with reporters, but they’re trickling farther down the ranks at the Internet giant, too.

I snapped this shot of one Google employee surfing CNN.com with his Android phone while waiting for his chief executive, Eric Schimdt, to talk about energy at a San Francisco speech last week.

Android is the Linux-based open-source operating system Google created in partnership with several other companies. T-Mobile is selling the first Android-powered phones, the G1, but other manufacturers are expected to join in 2009.

Source: Cnet

Blackberry Storm already next month

Network operators Vodafone and Verizon Wireless will sell Research In Motion’s BlackBerry Storm smartphone from next month, the companies said Wednesday. The Storm will be available from Vodafone in the U.K., Ireland, Germany, Romania, Spain, Italy, France (via partner SFR), India, Australia and New Zealand from next month, and from Verizon Wireless in the U.S. With a touchscreen interface, the largest screen size ever on a BlackBerry device and a long list of features, the Storm will be a worthy competitor to Apple’s iPhone all over the world, according to Ben Wood, analyst at CCS Insight. Pricing will be announced in the coming weeks, according to RIM.

The Storm is the first touch-screen BlackBerry device and has what RIM calls a “clickable” screen: The user feels the screen being pressed and released, similar to the feeling of a key on a physical keyboard or a button on a mouse, which should make it easier to type, according to RIM. The touchscreen technology is very impressive, according to Wood, who describes the 3.26-inch, 480 by 360 pixel screen as a big key. “They have reinvented the touchscreen with the Storm. It’s not as good as a qwerty keyboard but it comes close,” he said. The Storm measures 112.5 millimeters x 62.2 mm x 13.95 mm and weighs 155 grams, compared to 115.5 mm x 62.1 mm x 12.3 mm and 133 grams for the iPhone. Users can surf the web and download email using either EV-DO Rev. A or HSPA (High-Speed Packet Access), but there is no Wi-Fi.

Top 10 Mobile Phone Screwups

iPhone: Sealed batteries

It’s remarkable that the iPhone succeeded at all with so many weaknesses, but what’s remarkable is that it managed to get away with a non-user-replaceable battery. I mean, how many phones with sealed batteries can you count? But that’s not all, the iPhone battery replacement program slaps you with a $79 service fee for the replacement battery, plus $6.95 for shipping. Now you know why Apple likes iPhone batteries sealed. What’s next? Cars with sealed reservoirs that can be refueled only at Shell gas stations?

Android G: No headphone jack

The first Android-powered Google phone is an excellent device at first sight. On a closer inspection, however, compromises and weird design choices start to show. We were tempted to pick G1′s plasticky appearance and the aesthetics that surely won’t win any beauty contest, but it is the lack of headphone jack that truly amazes us. It’s beyond comprehension how collective design minds of Google, HTC and T-Mobile came to such design. It’s almost as if Apple made cool new iPod with a tiny mono speaker and no headphone jack.

Blackberry Storm: I am the iPhone lookalike

The first Blackberry touch-based smartphone reminds me of Steve Ballmer in this “I am a PC!” video. Touch screams “I am an iPhone lookalike (and proud of it)” and we’re sure that it will do really great e-mail. That’s about it, really, thanks to practically lack of any form of marketing from Blackberry. Underselling itself is the biggest blunder of Blackberry Touch. If you want to compete with iPhone, you just don’t keep your mouth shut.

Garmin Nuvifone: Another proprietary operating system

Garmin Nuvifone came out of nowhere. We admit, we are sold on the idea of the GPS focused mobile phone from a compan specialized in GPS navigation systems. Unfortunately, this indicates Nuvifone could suck as a mobile phone. Not that it is short on specifications – on the contrary – but all that hardware is useless without elegant software. Instead for choosing, for example, Android or Windows Mobile, Garmin decided to power Nuvifone with its own operating system used in their GPS gadgets. Now, everyone who has used Garmin’s navigation equipment knows that it comes short of sleek graphics, smooth animation and desktop-like features. It’s the software, stupid!

Motorola Z1: Kick-butt kick-slider causes back-bending

Motorola didn’t learn a thing from last year’s problems that plagued Z8 slider-phone. The Symbian-powered Z10 is take-two for the kick-slider concept that hinges the phone as it opens into a curved shape. And what is the reasoning behind this wizardry? It allegedly improves call quality by bringing the microphone closer to the mouth. It wasn’t really necessary to tank the otherwise great handset that has excellent video recording capabilities juts for the sake of wow effect when you kick-slide it open. Do it too many times and you risk back-bending.

Nokia N96: Feature beast for geeks

Expected to arrive during the quarter, Nokia N96 is by any measure a feature monster that has it all. But top-notch hardware has no match in software and the end result is actually a concept phone that proves how much can be crammed into a handset. N96 is not perfectly balanced product, although it could have been. It is too heavy, looks bulky and if its predecessor is any indication, clunky user interface and unreliable navigation button will appeal only to geeks. If only we could have the iPhone with N96 hardware.

Nokia Tube: Boring, commodity “lifestyle” phone

Finnish mobile phone leader will bring a plethora of touch screen-based devices to the market by year’s end and one of them is going to be called Tube. The device will be aimed at “volume market”, which most likely means a lot of compromises. Why is it taking Nokia so long to come up with a product that can take the iPhone head-to-head? Tube is the biggest blunder because it looks like to be typical underwhelming, cheap phone aimed at average consumers who really doesn’t but the lifestyle that Nokia serves in ads.

Palm Treo Pro: Tiny, narrow physical keyboard

I don’t get it… With 50% of Americans with sausage fingers, Palm makes this touchscreen phone with a narrow physical QWERTY keyboard below the screen. Guys, if you bothered to make a real keyboard it’s either landscape-oriented QWERTY keyboard that slides-out beneath the screen or nothing. If Treo Pro had slide-out keyboard like G1, it would have actually been much more interesting smartphone than G1 is. Bar the narrow keyboard, Treo Pro is pretty capable Windows Mobile smartphone.

Samsung Instinct: Bad marketing cripples a great product

The only iPhone challenger this summer, Instinct sells for $129 with a 2-year Sprint service contract. It’s a great handset with some features that the iPhone 3G lacks, such as camcorder camera, live TV and music downloads over the cellular network and touchscreen that also works with a stylus. Instinct is also a prime example how bad marketing cripples a great product. Samsung was so confident in Instinct that it made ads that pitched key Instinct features against the iPhone, with both handsets shown side-by-side. As if providing free advertising for the iPhone wasn’t enough, the ads became irrelevant when iPhone 3G came out soon thereafter, but it took Samsung weeks to remove videos from Instinct site. Next phase brought trailers and scenes from an imaginary high-tech spy movie starring Instinct, but they were later removed, too. Makes you wonder who exactly is a target customer for Instinct if not a 13-years old kid?

SonyEricsson Xperia X1: Comes too late

If SonyEricsson launched Xperia X1 this summer, it could have become a huge hit and practically the only viable challenger to the iPhone 3G. But man is this phone way too late… With G1’s release and other smartphones scheduled to arrive in the coming weeks, Xperia doesn’t look so groundbreaking anymore – its mojo wore off by now. As if bad timing wasn’t enough, SonyEricsson will initially launch the phone across Asia, Europe, the Middle East, Africa and Latin America, but not in the U.S. where it is expected to come possibly by year’s end.

Source: TGdaily

Nokia to unveil touch-screen phone

Nokia is preparing to enter the touch-screen cell phone market next week, with the debut of its first finger-sensitive phone, according to a Reuters report.

The European handset makeris planning to take the wraps off its touch-screen phone, code-named “Tube,” during an event Thursday in London for analysts and the media, according to Reuters, which cites two unnamed sources. (For more, including a photo, see “Hold the phone: Nokia’s Tube is the Nokia 5300!“)

The Tube will join a field that has been getting crowded since Apple debuted its popular iPhone a little over a year ago. Since then, competitors such as Samsung Electronics and LG Electronics have come on the scene with their own touch-screen phones. Earlier this week, T-Mobile unveiled its G1, a touch-screen device that is the first to run Google’s Android software.

Nokia noted in July that it planned to enter the touch-screen market and was initially aiming for the low end of the market, Reuters reported.

A representative from Nokia could not immediately be reached.

Source: Reuters

T-Mobile to throttle G1 speed after 1GB a month?

T-Mobile is warning G1 customers that they could get placed into the slow lane if they use more than 1GB of data in a billing cycle.

Engadget spotted the fine print underneath T-Mobile’s G1 page on its Web site trumpeting the arrival of the first phone to run Google’s Android software. “If your total data usage in any billing cycle is more than 1GB, your data throughput for the remainder of that cycle may be reduced to 50 kbps or less,” the company warned.

Now, that doesn’t apply to anything you download or upload over a Wi-Fi connection, and may not be much of an obstacle for some users. But if you’re like a few folks inside our office–one of whom has used 187MBs in just the past 24 hours on his iPhone 3G–you’re liable to hit that speed bump pretty quick. Downloading almost anything on a 50Kbps connection is going to be extremely frustrating.

T-Mobile might have trouble enforcing this cap, but they appear to be putting it in the contract. It’s a confusing move, given the trend among carriers toward all-you-can-eat data plans, but could be a defensive maneuver to protect T-Mobile’s young 3G network from being overwhelmed by G1 users.

Click here for full coverage of Google Android.

Source: Cnet

Live blog: First Google Android phone is unveiled

Nearly a year after word of a “Google phone” started spreading, T-Mobile USA and the search giant are revealing the first mobile device to run on Google’s Android operating system. Anticipated is a smartphone manufactured by Taiwanese electronics maker HTC called Dream. Below is CNET News’ live coverage of the event here, which has concluded.

Click here for full coverage of Google Android.

10:15 a.m. ET: We’re waiting for the event to start. As noticed here, some photos of T-Mobile’s G1 phone–also known as HTC’s Dream–are emerging shortly before the official debut here.

10:30 a.m.: T-Mobile USA’s chief technology and innovation officer, Cole Brodman, takes the stage and introduces everyone for the launch. Andy Rubin of Google takes the stage, as does the chief technology officer of Deutsche Telekom, Christopher Schläffer.

10:35 a.m.: Schläffer announced that Deutsche Telekom is also announcing the Android phone across the pond on T-Mobile by the end of the year. He is talking about how Deutsche Telekom has grown its data revenue by 43 percent. Traffic has grown 250 percent, and the company is ready to capitalize further.
10:40 a.m.: Andy Rubin takes the stage and introduces Peter Chou, CEO of HTC. He starts off by congratulating everyone, from Andy Rubin to the whole T-Mobile team. We’re 15 minutes into the press conference, and we still haven’t seen the phone. That said, Chou described the device and called it iconic.

10:45 a.m.: Brodman says the company is going to drive change by working with third parties. No more fuzzy pictures, and no more unsubstantiated blog posts. “Here is the G1.” And he reveals it. They start to play a video on the big screen. Everyone in the crowd holds up their phones and cameras to get a picture of it.

10:50 a.m.: Now all the executives line up on stage to take pictures. They are bombarded with photographers. The phone looks a lot like the Sidekick. I’m not sure how iconic the device is. But now they’re going through the features, showing how to drag and drop by swiping the touch screen. The home screen looks a lot like the iPhone screen. One of the big things the G1 allows you to to is multitask, so you can be getting messages as you’re talking or doing something else on the phone.

10:51 a.m.: The G1 comes with Google Maps street view, and there is a compass mode, and the scene moves as you do. Google is front and center. There isn’t a pinch feature to zoom in and out, as you would with the iPhone, but you can highlight an area, and blow up the image. They also show how you can use the dedicated keyboard and then use the touch screen to access links on a Web page. They show the long press so that you can click on a link and then send an e-mail directly.

10:55 a.m.: Now Brodman is talking about the Android Market, a sort of application store for the Android phones. He talks about how third parties will drive innovation. And then he rolls another video. Now we are going to get into the nitty gritty, hopefully, of what the Android Market will be.

10:58 a.m.: The video is of a bunch of programmers singing the praises of open source. They are talking about how cool it is to develop on the platform. But they aren’t really saying anything about what the Android market will be and how it will work. Now Brodman is bringing developers on stage. There is an application called Eco Reo, which allows you to track your carbon footprint to be a better global citizen. And Shop Savvy helps people find the best prices on things.

11 a.m.: Now we are into the Q&A. The price of the G1 will be $179, with a two-year contract. It will have two data-messaging plan options. The first offers a unlimited Web usage and some messaging for $25. Then there will be a $35 plan, with unlimited messaging and Internet access. It will require a voice plan, and it can’t be used as a tethered modem.

T-Mobile is live with 3G connectivity now in 16 markets. By the time of the G1 launch, it will be in 22 markets, and by November, it will offer 3G in 27 markets, which will cover about 80 percent of T-Mobile’s customers.

The Deutsche Telekom executive said the G1 will be available in the United Kingdom in early November and across Europe in the first quarter of 2009.

11:05 a.m.: The phone will be locked to the T-Mobile network. Brodman said Google and T-Mobile will be marketing the device together. There is no Microsoft Exchange support. But it could be a perfect opportunity for the developers in the Android Market to develop something.

The phone uses browser technology called WebKit that uses the same base technology as Google’s Chrome browser. Andy Rubin called it Chrome Lite. Brodman said the device is aimed at the consumer market.

11:10 a.m.: Rubin says the phone will have a robust Gmail experience, enabling fast e-mail search. There will also be integrated online presence with Google Talk.

As for music, you won’t be able to port iTunes music to the device. No big surprise there, though the question was asked. DRM-free music, however, can be added to the device.

Another question regarded Skype. There will be no integration with eBay’s VoIP service, though the device has Wi-Fi.

The G1 will be able to be used internationally. It has a dual-band radio for UMTS and a quad-band radio for GSM.

11:13 a.m.: Now it’s time for some special guests. Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page take the stage. They just rushed over from the Google transit launch, braving the Manhattan traffic.

Brin said he has already been playing around with the device and described an application he developed that allows him to throw up his phone and calculate the amount of time it takes before it hits the ground. Not an application that will likely be found in the Android Market.

Larry Page also said he’s been having tons of fun playing with the G1. And he said the phone is as good a PC as anything people were using just a few years ago. Now the press conference is over, and they have invited the crowd downstairs, where they have a bunch of G1s set up to play with.

11:18 a.m.: “It’s exciting for me to have a phone I can play with and modify, just like I could with computers in the past,” Brin says.

And Page asks audience members to compare how fast they can search on laptops to searching on their phones. Android is designed to narrow the gap. “Being able to do search with the ability you’re used to having on your laptop is a really, really worthwhile thing, and we’re really excited about that,” Page says. Google, of course, makes the vast majority of its considerable revenue and profit from ads that appear next to search results.

11:28 a.m.: Gmail messages are pushed to the phone, so new e-mail arrives without the user having to check for it manually. The Gmail application can work as a front end to other e-mail services, too.

“The device syncs well to Google services–also to Yahoo, AOL, and Microsoft as well,” Rubin said. He also said the Gmail application has several features from the Web-based Gmail interface: threaded conversations, fast search, and the ability to archive messages.

Source: Cnet