Tuesday, December 19, 2006 Limpag: New clamshell phone from Sony Ericsson By Max Limpag Celltalk
COLOR-CODED CONTACTS. Sony Ericsson has unveiled a new clamshell phone that offers, get this, color coding of lighting effects for your contacts.
The phone, the Sony Ericsson Z310 (see photo), allows you to assign colored lights to frequent callers so that you’d know, by the color of the light being flashed, which caller is on the line. This color coding of the lighting effects is just one facet of the phone’s personalization option, you can also customize the phone is such a way that the theme, menu and screen display match the time of day. I’ve never been taken with clamshell phones.
I’ve always had this impression that clamshell phones are vulnerable because of its hinge. But looking at the Z310, you can’t help but be taken by its polished finish and its front panel. Sony Ericsson said in a press statement that the “front icon display is integrated into the design, hidden discretely beneath the surface until a message or call is received.” The Z310, which will be available early next year, is a triple-band multimedia handset. As with most handsets nowadays, it also serves as a music and video player as well as a point and shoot camera.
The phone also comes with Bluetooth connectivity. The Z310 also allows posting of photos directly to a blog site. The phone supports HTML browsing.
This means your Internet browsing isn’t limited to specially formatted websites, you can view most sites. You can use the excellent and freely downloadable Opera Mini browser to view websites.
MOBILE INTERNET. Mobile phone leader Nokia said two weeks back that the Internet will be the “key driving force” for the mobile phone industry. The company said “music, mobile TV and navigation services will play a key role in driving” telecoms growth. It sees more people accessing the Internet for the first time via a mobile phone rather than a PC in emerging markets.
The statement was made by Nokia CEO and President Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo during the Nokia World 2006 conference in the Netherlands. Kallasvuo told the conference: “The internet has transformed the way we live our lives and communicate with each other...The next wave of the Internet will be to make it truly mobile, creating new ways for people to connect to others and find information from wherever they are.” There is no doubt that data services will play a crucial and profitable role in the telecoms industry. But for people to start using the mobile Internet more often, service providers will have to restructure the way it’s charging consumers. Globe, for example, still charges per kilobyte of download (based on promo messages sent to my son’s phone) and this isn’t really an attractive setup for consumers. Smart, on the other hand, offers data services at a flat rate of P10 per 30 minutes. You don’t have to be a GSM engineer to know which charging is more consumer-friendly. Content providers also have to realize that the mobile Internet goes beyond reformatting things for the small screen. The phone would be an excellent client for a server-side computing setup. An example of a good mobile phone application is the Gmail for mobile software. The Java application allows you to access your Gmail account on a compatible handset.
When sending an e-mail, the phone application connects to your Gmail contacts database and gives you a searchable listing of e-mail addresses.
This saves you the hassle of having to remember email addresses or going through your files for contact details.
Also, the emails you read in your phone are also marked as read when you check your account in your PC. The interface of the application also closely mirrors the experience of using Gmail—-you read messages in conversation views and you can even view some attachments.
