Omio News Blog

Nokia E75 versus HTC Touch Pro: It’s Friday Showdown Time

Nokia are the dependable old boys of the phone world. HTC: the rogue newbies, intent on making a name for themselves but out of the two who has came up with the best slider QWERTY keyboard device. It’s a toughie.

It’s Friday, the afternoon is winding down and it’s mobile phone showdown time. We’ve lined up the oh-so-similar HTC Touch Pro with the Nokia E75 to see how they both stack up, relatively speaking of course.

Operating System

Both phones have different operating systems. The Nokia E75 features the Nokia native Symbian Series 60 3rd edition. The HTC Pro has a Windows Mobile 6.1 OS.

Camera

Both phones pack in 3.2 megapixels but the HTC sneakes ahead with its VGA CMOS camera.

Networking

Both models sport WiFi and Bluetooth v2.0 connectivity, quad band GSM GPRS, EDGE and 3G technology. The two are WCDMA are compatible.  The E75 has an integrated A-GPS receiver and support for Nokia maps. While, on the other hand, the HTC Touch Pro has a special integrated GPS antenna to support maps.

Memory

Of the two phones, the E73 has a much larger comparable memory – 50MB. The HTC meanwhile has only 288MB but both phones have an expandable micro SD card for added memory.

Display and Design

With a touch screen measuring a paltry 2.4″ and 240 x 320 pixels, the E75 falls behind in the display rankings. The HTC Touch Pro has a 2.8″ screen with a resolution of 640 x 480 pixels. The E75 does have two different styles of keyboard so it redeems itself slightly. It also has the regular alphanumerical keyboard so you can use the phone like you would with a regular keyboard.

Battery Life

The HTC Touch Pro has the more powerful battery here – just under 7 hours of life for GSM usage and 6 hours for WCDMA usage. The Nokia E75 smartphone offers 5 hours and 20 minutes of battery life for GSM usage and 4 hours & 20 minutes for WCDMA usage.

Dimensions

The HTC measures 102 mm long, 18.05 mm wide and weighs in at 16.5g. In contrast, the Nokia is 111.8mm long, 50mm wide, 14.4mm thick and weighs only 139g.  Six grams – it makes all the difference.

Price

A SIM-free Nokia E75 is the cheaper of the two handsets in this often determining purchase factor.

Which of the two are you pining for?

Nokia Xpress 5800 Debuts BBC Live Streaming

How cool is this.

Video footage has come to light of the Nokia 5800 streaming live footage from the BBC. Watching the BEEB in real time, who would have thought it.

It’s something that has the danger of being just good in theory and there’s always the chance that video being blocky and jaded, with content taking ages to buffer. But that doesn’t seem to be the case with the Xpress 5800.

Nok Nok, who reviewed the live streaming on the handset are singing its praises, even in the initial beta testing stage.

The video runs on Real Player over Wi-Fi and early reviews report that, even though video footage takes a while to buffer (around 10 seconds), audio kicks in straight away. After that video is glitch-free, clear and sharp.

So Nokia 5800 customers will soon be able to watch BEEB institutions like Jonathan Ross and a Question of Sport anywhere, even on the bus into the work. It sure beats a crumpled copy of the Metro.

Palm Pre Time Travelling Back To Palm OS

Those of you waiting for the Palm Pre release day (there are a few of us in the Omio office), brace yourself for some good news. Come launch day, the phone will come with thousands of new games and apps available for download.

All this new software is down to one thing.

Palm killed off their Palm OS in February this year in favour of, the speedier and easier to use, Web OS. But it seems they’ve had a change of heart and have asked the Palm OS emulator class people to integrate Palm emulator into Web OS and with it more than 30,000 apps and games come launch day.

For Palm it will give them a much-needed leg up. They’re up against the full force of the Apple marketing machine and the recognition of brands like BlackBerry, Sony Ericssson and Samsung and all their affiliated app stores and add-ons. Making an impression on consumers that aren’t necessarily tech savvy will be a Goliath task.

First Pics OF HTC Snap: BlackBerry Bold Clone

HTC revealed the HTC Snap at CITA yesterday.

There’s nothing particularly groundbreaking or revolutionary about the mid range handset and with it’s full QWERTY keyboard, it bears a striking resemblance to a BlackBerry Bold.

The phone has everything you’d expect from a quality smartphone: HSDPA, Wi-Fi, GPS, Bluetooth with A2DP, 2.4 inch QVCA display, 2MP camera micro SDHA expansion slot and a Window’s Mobile 6.1 OS beneath HTC’s Touch Flo interface.

Snap’s design team have also taken a leaf out of the RIM’s book by dropping the Dpad for a “jog ball” scroller.

HTC havn’t released any price details yet but have said they’ll be launching the Snap phone in Q2. Which could, in fairness, mean either tomorrow or as far away as June.

The Snap will be renamed as the HTC S721 for US customers and will be available this summer.

Now, feel free to insert the appropriate breakfast cereal, obscure late eighties dance troupe reference.

Lenovo Phone Resurfaces: Launch Date Imminent?

Pictures have surfaced of the much anticipated new Lenovo phone.

When we first saw it at the end of 2008, the UI was looking very apple’y and new pictures, from PConline.com,showing the updated phone in all its glory, does nothing to distance Lenovo from iPhone aesthetics.

If the rumours are true the Lenovo phone is to have onboard TV, courtesy of the CMMB options and an increased memory capacity with the addition of an inbuilt micro SD card. It’ll have Wi-Fi along with TD-SCDMA connectivity and will come with an inbuilt 5 megapixel camera with flash and autofocus.

As is the fashion lately, the phone has an open source operating system. The Open Mobile Operating Sytem  is a modified version of the Google Android OS.

Previous predictions put the official launch date of the Lenovo phone around April time but these unofficial shots point to a much later date for the China Mobile device.

Nokia Point & Find Hits The UK

Nokia has launched a beta version of their “Point and Find” service.  With the app you can point your phone at “real life” objects and you’ll magically get sent all sorts of relevant information about whatever it was you snapped.

The new version Nokia “Point & Find” focuses on movies and is available to UK and US customers. With “Point & Find” you can point your phone at a poster for a new movie and the phone will work out which film it is, show you a trailer for it, some short video clips, reviews and find the closest cinema where it’s playing

When the phone recognises the object, in this case the movie poster, it uses its database of virtually tagged items to return sets of relevant links about its content and services. It’s all done by real time image processing, integrating GPS positioning technology with category-specific text-entry search. Pretty straightforward.

So far the beta version of the app only works on certain phones. Here’s a quick list of compatible handsets – N82, N95, N95 8GB, N76, N81k, E51, E66, 6110 Navigator and 5700 XpressMusic.

Point and Find can be downloaded in the UK and the States here.

http://pointandfind.nokia.com as well.

Samsung Instinct Mini Officially Revealed

Samsung have officially revealed their Instinct Mini, otherwise known as the S30. The phone is the follow-up to the original Sprint Instinct.

The announcement was first made on Samsung’s Korean site.

The big official unveiling is expected to take place at the International CTIA  2009 Wireless Convention in the next couple of weeks.

The Instinct S30 was first spotted in the wild way back at the beginning of March, but it took until the end of the month for Samsung to confirm that the S30 was a replacement, not simply a compact version of the original.

Along with the touch screen there will be the same GPS, EVDO Rev.A and Bluetooth of its predecessor.

Source: SlashGear

Orange Vegas Touchscreen Phone

Orange are getting ready to sell one of the world’s most affordable touch screen smart phones, the Orange Vegas.

The handset is dual band GSM/GPRS and features a 2.4 inch TFT touchscreen display. The phone is retailing for only €69 on Pay As You Go, making it one of the cheapest touch-screen phones you can buy.

The phone also has:

• Bluetooth
• MP3 Player
• FM radio
• 1.3MP camera
• 64MB of internal memory
• 1GB MicroSD card
• Talk time: up to 3 hours
• Stand by time: up to 7 days
• 84 grams

The Orange Vegas is already available in black and pink on Orange’s UK website but isn’t available to buy quite yet. It’s expected to go on sale in European markets first of all.

HTC Magic Released On Vodafone May 1

Vodafone’s exclusive Android phone, the HTC Magic, will be available to UK customers from 1 May.

It’s the second phone from Google’s open source Android platform; the first of which was the G1 phone.

Along with the new release date, the Magic has been given a new name – the HTC Magic Pioneer. Quite why the name has changed is anyone’s guess.

Vodafone will be offering the phone for free on £25 a month contracts.

Razor Phone: World’s First Shaver Phone

Remember the days when you could only ever have a quick shave between phone calls if you carried around an electric razor AND a  phone. You’re electric razor was just another bulky thing you had to carry around with you. Well, not now, oh no.

Now there’s a phone that can make you look presentable and, you know, make calls too. Online retailer Solomobi.com, has launched the Razor Phone, that doubles as a face-fuzz remover.

The beard trimmer is hidden behind a removable plate at the bottom of the handset and when the battery is fully charged it can support a “full electric shave”.

Clippings are held behind the blade until you empty them out. Which is fine if all the clippings don’t work their way inside the phone and make a mess of the micro chips inside – the biggest detriment to the success of the Razor Phone.

The phone supports dual-band GSM calls and WAP. It has a 2.6 inch touch screen, camera and Bluetooth support.

Unfortunately, the Razor Phone doesn’t have any reserves of shave balm built-in but it is available online for £79.