It’s entirely possible that the Google G1 Android mobile phone, available soon in the UK on the T-Mobile network, could be the phone that dethrones the iPhone not only in sales, but in attractive features that are smartly presented

Given the features and functions that the Google G1 Android mobile phone packs, is it any wonder?

On first glance one might think that the Google G1 Android mobile phone is a plain and simple smartphone, but a deeper inspection of the Google G1 Android mobile phone reveals that it is actually much more similar to the Nokia Internet Tablet devices than it is to a traditional smartphone.

The Google G1 Android mobile phone packs a number of features at the touch of a single button including G-Mail, YouTube, and Google Maps. Of course the integrated Wi-Fi and 3G functionality ensures that web-browsing will be an option, which the Google G1 Android handles with aplomb. Users can easily zoom in or zoom out of a web page in much the same fashion as iPhone users have been doing over the past year or so.

Overall the Google G1 Android mobile phone is similar in size to the Apple iPhone, but it features a crystal clear 3.2” 320 x 480 display that neatly folds aside and reveals a QWERTY keyboard that Steve Jobs might raise his nose at, but has been a barrier for many would be iPhone adopters. The Google G1 Android mobile phone is also much heavier than its rival from Cupertino, weighing in at a healthy 158 grams. Another feature found in the Google G1 Android mobile phone that the iPhone lacks is a very Blackberry RIM Pearl-esque trackball located on the bottom on the phone when the keyboard is tucked away under the monitor and on the right when the keyboard is visible.

Perhaps the most impressive feature of the Google G1 Android mobile phone is its customisability. I’m hard pressed to name a smartphone with a homepage as flexible as that of the Google G1 Android and I’d even go so far as to say that with the open source nature of the G1’s OS ensures that we’re going to see far more applications and features to extend the functionality and customisability of the G1. Considering the runaway success that Google’s had up to now it’s hard not to wonder if Microsoft Exchange support be far off? Who knows how many million more a business Google G1 Android phone might attract?

If Middleton had been stopped by the police, she would have received at least a £60 fine and would have had three points added to her driving license. Many people are aghast that a women as high-profile as she would dare to break the law when she is expected to set a good example. Many people consider her to be a potential future royal – the assumption has been made that she and Prince William will marry – and for her to break such a law has left the media and much of the public confused and upset.

In fact, the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents spoke about the dangers of using a mobile phone while driving, though the spokesman would not talk specifically about the Middleton situation.

The spokesman specifically referenced the use of mobile phone use while driving as “a serious issue and one of the big problems” because they have “become [a] part of everybody’s lives.”

The spokesman went on to say that the following regarding errors caused by drivers talking or using their mobile phone while driving: “You start to tailgate, vary your speed and wander about on the road. All these things make you more likely to crash.”

The spokesman also went on to say that those who use mobile phones while driving were “four times more likely to crash.”

Prince William and Kate Middleton have not spoken about the event, though the media has suspected the young lady has been talked to about her role model status. Though she was not born into royalty, it is widely known that if you date a royal, you are immediately thrust into the spotlight and expected to uphold not only a sense of dignity but also the law. Perhaps the 26-year-old will learn from her mistakes. After all, a picture is worth a thousand words.

With the ever decreasing price point of mobile phone technology and the social behaviour of our society, the popularity of the mobile phone has exploded in the past 10 years. Once a technology seen as a luxury only afforded by travelling business men and women working globally, the mobile phone has made its way into the lives of over 75% of our civilisation, not limited to men and women alone, but to teenagers and children as well. In certain countries, such as Europe, the number of mobile phones currently activated actually exceeds the number of people in the population. This equates to many users owning more than one mobile phone.

In today’s society, most of us now consider the mobile phone to be an absolute necessity. And with the continual growth in technology advances being made available on these hand held devices, it’s no wonder that so many of us depend on them. But could our dependency on the mobile phone pose a risk to our lives? The fact is, it can and it does. The use of a mobile phone can be deadly.

Consider the following facts. In 2007, The Department for Transport reported an astounding 348 auto accidents directly resulting from the use of a mobile phone while driving. Of these incidents, 25 were fatal, 64 were declared serious, and 259 were minor. This increasing number of mobile phone related accidents has proved that safety is in fact compromised by the use of these mobile phones while we’re driving. The Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents (RoSPA) claims that you are four times more likely to get into an accident while on a mobile phone. That’s absolutely terrifying!

In 2003, the use of a mobile phone while operating a vehicle has been banned in many places in response to these tragedies. But is a ban enough to eliminate this hazard? Aegis Mobility has another solution.
In response to this latest trend of mobile phone related incidents, Canadian firm, Aegis Mobility plans to release their DriveAssist Software as a monthly subscription based addition to mobile phone users. This software is designed to automatically tell us as callers that the person we are trying to call is currently driving and prompts us to leave a message. This eliminates distractions associated with mobile phone ring tones blaring while we’re en route.

If you’re not impressed by this life saving technology alone, read on. In addition to its ability to detect when a call recipient is in motion while driving, as the caller, you also have the ability to determine the exact location of the person you are attempting to contact via the use of satellite navigation technology. This is taking mobile technology to a new level. For parents, the ability to track their children’s whereabouts through the use of a mobile phone is a valuable addition to their phones capabilities. Not to mention eliminating the possibility of their teenager getting into an accident while using a mobile phone in route.

This technology is a major step in reassuring the safety of motorists while continuing to make leaps and bounds in mobile phone technology.

Developing economies in South America and Asia has been driving this increase in demand, with developed countries such as the United States largely penetrated already. In these developed countries, there is a push to expand to the developing countries and increase global reach.

Over the past eight years, mobile phone subscriptions have increased an average of 24% year-on-year.

A few factors have contributed to this breathtaking growth rate. For one, the costs of mobile phone usage decrease with every passing year, making the technology more affordable to more of the world’s residents. Mobile handsets are cheaper, and the infrastructure to support the cellular networks is often superior to the fixed lines in developing countries.

According to Joss Gillet, a senior analyst at Wireless Intelligence, about 600 million new mobile phone subscriptions will be added this year worldwide.

Africa, the Middle East, and Asia are growing at rates of 27%, 25%, and 24%, respectively. Operators in many developing countries are recording faster rates than ever before.

Mobile phones compatible with the GSM standard, account for the bulk of total new connections (80%). The remainder comes from CDMA, which is popular in China and the United States, with 10% penetration, and the rest from modern 3G networks worldwide.

Despite the economic uncertainty in many nations, Gillet expects the growth to continue. He notes that in the past year, mobile phone revenues increased even faster than GDP in Europe. Increased competition in developing markets is forcing significant innovation and value, as providers compete on the basis of price, network coverage, quality, and additional services.

The word Nokia may bring to mind images of the old-school basic model currently carried around by only the cheapest of users. However, Nokia has become more hip since those days, with its new upcoming release of the Nokia “Tube,” aka the Nokia 5800 XpressMusic mobile phone. This mobile phone is hip, has a ton of extras and is set up to do significant battle with any mobile company out there.

Let Me Introduce You

The Nokia Tube (Nokia 5800 XpressMusic) delivers a touch screen phone that is as fashionable as it is capable. The Nokia Tube (Nokia 5800 XpressMusic) offers you high quality music track sound, along with an S60 touch screen device that allows you to type in those digits fast and sure. The design itself is extremely sleek and trim. It looks as though Nokia & Dolce & Gabbana teamed up on this one, with the intent of making heads turn.

Features of the Nokia Tube

Well, besides the S60 OS touch screen, the Nokia Tube comes with a 3.2″ display that provides plenty of space for even the chubbiest of fingers! The Nokia Tube & GPS are now hooked up together, and Wi-Fi is integrated into the system. A 3.2 megapixel camera, along with an 8GB SD card, sets the Nokia Tube apart from its peers and is sure to bring in a large, high-end customer base. The Nokia 5800 XpressMusic system finally allows users to listen to their favorite music, with high quality sound.

When Can I Buy One?

While the Nokia Tube has been held under tight wraps by the manufacturer, news leaks have indicated that the phone is set to make its debut on October 2nd, the same day Nokia’s, “Comes with music” service is launched. Not to mention, the first day American VP candidate Sarah Pallin engages in her first debate with her VP opponent. The Nokia Tube 5800 Xpress Music phone has the world’s attention, as all wait for it to be unveiled to the public.

So, keep your eyes open and get ready for the snazziest phone Nokia has ever produced, the Nokia Tube is coming soon to a store near you!

Arguably the world’s least enjoyable experience might be getting even worse as more details have emerged of Ryanair’s plan to let you make mobile phone calls from onboard.

Rather than making you keep your mobile phones turned off for the duration of your time spent in yellow and blue hell,  provided you are willing to stump up £2 per minute and there are no more than five other fools doing likewise, then you can chat on your mobile phone to your hearts content as you wing your way to an ex-military airbase 5000 miles from your ultimate destination.

Because basically (according to the Guardian) the rules are going to be as follows:

…only six people can use their phones at a time, but anyone can text or use their Blackberry. At first the service will be on 14 of the 166 aircraft, but within six months if the trial is successful it will be rolled out to the rest of the fleet.

Calls are predicted to cost about £2 a minute and the airline will get a slice from each text, email or call.

£2 a minute? How could anyone who is flying on a Ryanair flight (and thus is not particularly important otherwise they’d be getting shuttled about by an airline that does business class, or at least doesn’t have a permanent two for one offer on spirits*) find a reason to make a call that could litterally cost the same as a month’s worth of land-based calls if the conversation runs to more than “I’m on a plane”…

Do you want 400 or 600 B&H from the Duty Free, pet?

400, alright. Anything else?

Are you sure… right oh.  And does our Derek want a bottle of something?

[Derek....]

A bottle of scotch…. Oh heck, need to go love, I’ve spent all me holiday money on this call….

Basically, it would seem that the brave new model of Ryanair budget flying is is to lose money on the seat, and hope that the flight is stuffed full of folks that get drunk enough on the two-for-one booze to spend a small fortune on the million euro scratch cards and calling their pals (cause they can).

Which, based on my frequent experience (*see, it takes on to know one) of Ryanair flying, seems to be working out pretty well for them despite all the financial woes currently being suffered by other, less in-your-face, airlines.

So if you can’t wait to make some of the most expensive mobile phone calls of your life, best get on to the Ryanair website and snap up one of those amazingly cheap flights for 1p (+£15 taxes, £6 booking fee, £3 credit card fee, £24 baggage fee, £6 check in fee, £6 priority boarding… etc, etc).

As for the impact calling will have on the in-flight ambiance, Ryanair spokesperson,  Evil O’Killer, said:

If you want a quiet flight, use another airline. Ryanair is noisy, full and we are always trying to sell you something.

I kid you not.

The start of the revolution?

Okay, okay… that isn’t true, but with the launch of the first Android phone all thoughts are on where the hotly anticipated Apple v Google battle might end up.

Last time Stevo went properly head-to-head, it was back in the 80’s with him versus the rest of the PC industry. On that occasion he ended up being turfed out of Apple by some old bloke from Pepsi. Of course he bounced back from that little career blip to revolutionise animated feature films with Pixar, before returning to Apple as a hero and eventually becoming capo e tutti capi of must-have mobile phones.

This time around, he (along with Microsoft and Nokia) are the established players in the consumer sector (with RIM being the daddy in the corporate sector) and it is Google who are playing the classic Jobisan role of wild-eyed upstarts with their open-source Android stack determined to conquer the whole flippin’ market.

Of course, unlike your typical start up Google are a massive, highly profitable company who happen to pretty much own the internet and Android is just another route to the customer for their web-based contexual advertising. Which means that the commercial model is already figured out, which again is very unusual for a new entrant (and very ominous for everyone else).

Anyone who has switched from Internet Explorer to Firefox and then discovered all the hundreds of cracking plugins or who has spent some time messing about in the Apple App Store (or who has played Pirates on Facebook, etc, etc), knows all about third-party apps and their importance to new content-oriented consumer technologies.   With Android being open source and thus free to develop on, there is little doubt that developers will swarm around it, and already there is a rapidly expanding Android App Market (see more at techcrunch).

This will only get bigger and better as the new Android phones actually go on sale, which poses the question: How will Steve avoid getting left behind by Google?

The answer is he probably doesn’t care.  Apple knows its customers and it knows that it will never be the mass market model.  Sure this was the approach that got him canned the first time, but this time the market is bigger and the Apple fans are all rich 30 and 40 somethings that will pay for an iPhone and accept a smaller, but perhaps less buggy set of applications.  Of course being the unpredictable fella that he is he might just go all out make the the Apple stack open source, and then out-design Google’s handset partners…

How Microsoft and Nokia will react to Android as they are probably the real target is a very different story.  Didn’t Mr Balmer once say that he was going to f*cking kill Google?  Now might be the time to start walking the walk on that one.  However, Microsoft have got other issues on their agenda like yahoo, their share buy-back, life without Bill and how to f*cking kill Google in the search market (which isn’t going great).  And as for Nokia, well my hunch is that they’ll probably end up getting into bed with Android.

So expect to be owning an Android-powered phone in the not to distant future…. “When Google Rules the World”.

See Sir Alan on the bus to work - iPlayer and N96 hookup.

Talk about finally hitting the back of the net. Nokia, having played second fiddle to Apple in the mobile phone hype-wars since Stevie J first announced that the mobile phone sector was his latest industry-to-conquer, have seemingly pulled a bit of a rabbit out of the hat with news of a tie-up with the BBC.

Since 3G mobile phones cost the networks a cool twenty-two billion quid back in the day one of the big questions asked by everyone (punters, shareholders, worried mobile phone execs) is “what do we do with a 3G phone?”

Of course techies have always been rubbish at working out uses for technology - some of the first Home PCs were promoted as recipe ”stores” for housewifes, I kid you not.  Funnily enough Microsoft Spongecake just never took off in the same way that stuff like word-processing and surfing the internet did.

Everyone knew that with 3G phones (or multimedia handsets as they tend to get called these days) content was King, but no one was quite sure what content was suitably regal (short football clips that have already been on Sky Sports News a million times that afternoon, for example, weren’t a roaring success at about 50p a goal). 

Well it turns out that for Nokia content isn’t King it is actually Queen… Queen Victoria and the other famous names of Albert Square to be exact.  By inking a deal to pre-install the BBC iPlayer on the Nokia N96 with full download-and-keep rights Nokia have finally shown the casual mobile phone shopper that they understand what sort of content makes people pony up their hard-earned for a new mob.

No hacks or workarounds, this is full licenced BBC content on demand to go along with the built in digital telly tuner, proving that we might all have loads more devices than we did in the 50s, but Auntie still knows best…

Sadly the Nokia 96 is the only one of the nSeries range to get the iPlayer at the moment (or more accurately preloaded after the 1st of October, although early purchasers can download it on this date as well), but we presume that if the numbers stack up, this is a deal that will be extended to all new nSeries phones.  How long before Apple, in a spectacular case on one upmanship announce that they’ve done a deal with the UK government to launch a new public funded broadcaster, develop a rival web-based content on demand platform and give that away free with their iPhones…. (Ed: Steady).

Sony Ericsson Xperia X1 - Arriving in October!

Speaking at a press conference in London last week, a Sony Ericsson spokeperson confirmed  that the Sony Ericsson Xperia X1 will be launched in the UK, Germany and the US at the beginning of October.

This marks something of a change from the official line that the Xperia X1 was only going to get a German launch in 2008, with the UK and US markets having to wait until 2009.  This was put down to delays caused by getting Windows Mobile 6.1 to play nice with the Xperia X1.

So anyways, if you were wanting one for Christmas, then it looks like you’ll be in luck.  Although expect to pay around £600 for the Xperia X1 sim-free and perhaps £150-£200 on an 18 month £35 contract.

Here is the latest Sony Ericsson Xperia X1 promo that is currently doing the rounds:

Test link

Nokia N96 - Now Shipping

In eventually getting round to shipping the N96, Nokia has been accused of some people of making paint drying seem fast.   This is a handset that has been on the pending list for months now (actually over half a year). Images of the N96 have been all over the web, along with reviews since March, but until now no actual handsets.  Nokia certainly is the opposite of Apple when it comes to how best to create hype.

However, now all the waiting is over and the latest and greatest in the much acclaimed Nokia N series, has made its way from Finland to Blighty. Nokia’s latest dualslider multimedia flagship has been the subject of frenzied internet (and real world debate) since it was originally announced all the way back in January of this year.

Scores on the doors seem to suggest that the N96 will cost around £440 (which is around £100 more expensive than the N95 8GB). Of course, if your teaming it up with a £35 contract, expect to pay something more like £100-£150 and maybe as little as £0 if you are really breaking the bank with your monthly spend.

Functionality-wise the N96 pulls very few punches in dishing up a seriously heavyweight feature-set:

• Live TV thanks to integrated DVB-H (Digital Video Broadcasting - Handheld) technology
• A 2.8″ Display which produces high quality images and supports a wide range of video formats
• Assisted GPS which offers turn-by-turn voice navigation using Nokia Maps
• A Massive 16GBs of internal memory with the potential for extension to a monstrous 24GB by way of an optional MicroSD card
• N-gage gaming which takes full advantage of the vivid display and the onboard 3D sound
• 5 Megapixel camera which includes superior quality optics from Carl Zeiss
• WLAN and HSDPA support

And not resting on their Scandic laurels, Nokia have recently announced another new phone for their Nseries range, the Nokia N85. This handset slips nicely in between the N79 and N96 in Nokia Nseries range, and is a dual action slider like the N95 and N96. It is also slated to feature Wi-Fi and HSDPA connectivity, integrated GPS and a Carl Zeiss lens in its 5 megapixel camera (which can capture VGA video at an impressive 30 frames per second).

Nokia N85 - Coming Soon!

The Nokia N85 will be packing a 2.6 inch OLED screen, rumoured to be lighter and more energy efficient than the usual TFT displays. The N85 also has a microSD card slot and will come with an 8GB card as standard. Other features include Bluetooth and USB connections for transferring data to and from the N85.

The N85’s battery will have a capacity of up to 5 and a half hours of talk-time and up to a jaw-dropping 25 hours of audio playback in its offline mode.

Little news as yet in terms of price or networks, but rest assured that will follow in the run up to the launch of the Nokia N85, which is probably going to be late-October.