Camera Phones Plaza

Let’s take a break in hunting the upcoming smartphones, and take a look at one of the most popular handsets of the beginning of this year. Samsung F210 was announced in the summer of 2007 and released in stores in November last year, but it became one of the best choices when it comes to music phones, in January 2008, when more people found out of its existence.
It’s not a slider, or flip-phone, nor a candybar, but something more special, a swivel cell phone optimized for music, with lots of cool features and an eye-catching design.

In its normal shape it measures 87.8 x 31 x 20.5 mm at 72 grams, and when you swivel it open you reveal a nice keypad, which even if it’s tight has large bold buttons for comfortable typing with heavy-metal edge for durability.
The swivel system allows the Samsung F210 to provide a single display when open or close, and its screen is a high-resolution TFT LCD of 256K colors, measuring just 1.46 inches in diagonal, keeping it simple and sophisticated at the same time.

The user interface features cool graphics, high-clarity and superb colors for showing music playlists, the equalizer and song IDs.
You can store 250 songs or 6,000 pictures in the internal memory of no less than 1GB, or you can add much more by inserting a microSD standard memory card to reach 2GB storage.
With the song identification capability you can record a few seconds of any song you are hearing for the first time and like a lot, and receive details about it.

Until you find your favorite settings, the handset provides a Music Set-up Wizard to guide you through menus, side volume keys, and a music library to organize music by song, artist and genre.
Samsung F210 comes also with built-in FM radio so you can listen to your favorite tunes on the go in 3D Sound, and be able to get station and music information at anytime, thanks to the RDS technology.

Don’t worry about your old songs still located on your hard drive! Transfer the best of them onto your MP3 player-looking cell phone via the high-speed USB 2.0 connectivity.
Other functionality you can use when you’re mood for, is the digital camera of 2MP with video recording and up to 1600 x 1200 pixels for still images. To have your creations on special paper in order to give them to your friends, connect the cell phone to a Bluetooth-enabled printer and print all wirelessly, or using the cable and the PictBridge support.



This cell phone model from Samsung has a continuous talk time of up to 3.3 hours and a standby of maximum 265 hours.
Besides all these features, Samsung F210 has email, Internet browsing, video player, flight mode, voice memo and Java support.
It is available in stores at about $260.

If you have ever wanted to try and learn to read Japanese, which a very complex language, but it would help you in case you play to stay for a while in this country, now you have to chance to do it in a smart way directly on your iPhone or iPod.
ThinkMac Software is a company from the United Kingdom, an independent software developer that designs innovative applications for the iPhone platform.

By installing the iKana touch 1.0, you would enable Japanese hiragana and katakana learning on the iPhone or iPod touch, by using flash cards with cool animations, spoken sound clips and many language examples. In order to improve your beginner skills and learn to read Japanese, you can perform recognition tests and writing tests to memorize things easier.
Hiragana and katakana are components of the Japanese writing system, representing phonetic scripts.



The speed test provided by the application you have to identify characters before time expires, while the writing test provokes you to trace each stroke in a character correctly.
iKana touch 1.0 is available at the App Store and iTunes for the iPhone and iPod touch, while the company provides also the version for the Mac OS X. We don't know how it works and if there are issues taking into consideration the latest rumors about iPhone 3G problems, but the interface is pretty nice.
For the handsets it has a price of $7.99 USD in the United States, £4.99 in the United Kingdom, and 5.99 Euro in the European Union.



The target of this application is to teach you to speak, read and write both hiragana and katakana phonetic alphabets, in a fun and easy way.

The second multimedia handset released by Nokia together with the Nokia N85, is the N-Gage-enabled Nokia N79 bar model with a nice silver finish and equipped for mobile entertainment.
Featuring navigation, multimedia player, FM transmitter, high-speed wireless transfers, full web browsing in landscape mode and 10 pre-installed N-Gage games, like the previous model mentioned, Nokia N79 will be out in October at a starting price set at EUR 350 before taxes.

It too has a built-in 5MP digital camera for pictures and video recording, optimized with Carl Zeiss lens, sliding lens cover to protect the lens when not in use, dual LED flash for powerful light during night or when you want to capture moments in artificial light, as well as the geotagging capability, which allows you to see at a later time where you took all those pictures. While the N85 has an 8GB microSD memory card, this one comes with 4GB for 3,000 songs, 2,500 images or 4 hours of video stored on it.



"The Nokia N79 packs cutting-edge technology into a compact design - a characteristic of the iconic Nseries - that allows people to discover, create and share their passions with others," said Juha Kokkonen, Director, Nokia Nseries. "It has been designed for those who want a device that is as appealing as it is powerful and comes with interchangeable covers that have automatically matching screen themes. This balance of performance and style means that it is a powerful and defining step forward from the popular and very successful Nokia N72 and Nokia N73."

It is not just a high-end cell phone but also a customizable handset that allows you to choose its color matching your taste, from Xpress-on covers Light Sea Blue, Espresso Brown, Olive Green, White and Coral Red.



At high-speed 3.5G HSDPA you have quick access to online social communities like Flick or YouTube, the Nokia Music Store, N-Gage, Nokia Maps and Share on Ovi service.
In addition, there is the A-GPS enhancement for turn-by-turn directions during walking or driving, as well as information on 15 million points of interest.

While keeping us all anxious to find out the Nokia N96 release date, Nokia announces the release of 2 new multimedia computers in the N series, the N85 and N79.

Nokia N85 optimized for entertainment on the go including N-Gage gaming and media sharing, is sporting a large 2.6-inch OLED display with low power consuming properties, on which you can browse full web pages in searching for news, sports and other up to date information. This black slider handset comes with FM radio, a built-in 5MP camera with Carl Zeiss technology, geotagging capability to assign location data on your pictures, turn-by-turn voice navigation to quickly and accurately find your preferred place to spend your time, as well as high-speed wireless transfer rates via 3.5G HSDPA.
It seems that it will be available in stores at the same time with the Nokia N96, in October, and it will have a retail price of EUR 450.

"The Nokia N85 was created to be more than the sum of its parts, offering a complete mobile entertainment package designed for connecting, sharing and discovering," said Juha-Pekka Sipponen, Director, Nokia http://www.nseries.com Nseries. "The iconic Nokia Nseries dual slider design has evolved to become smaller and sleeker while integrating the newest features and services to deliver the best mobile experience to date."

Besides the access to the fun Ovi service, Nokia N85 brings with 10 N-Gage games pre-installed, dedicated gaming keys, and an 8GB microSD card providing enough space for up to 30 hours of music, which you can transfer to and from the computer via the USB connectivity.



The impressive digital camera of 5MP features dual LED flash for low light conditions and records videos at a high resolution at 30 frames per second seed. Additional elements include the accelerometer sensor for auto-rotate, enabling the landscape mode, Bluetooth 2.0 with A2DP, email, Instant Messaging, RSS reader, TV out, Office document viewer, and up to 6 hours and 50 minutes of continuous talk time.

It made its first appearance among LG phones at CES 2008 in black, and now Verizon Wireless has it in titanium, with V Cast Music with Rhapsody for over-the-air downloads of over 5 million songs, and Visual Voice Mail feature, which allows you to manage your messages I a smarter way.

This touchscreen smartphone with a flip QWERTY keyboard in a laptop style, and dual-display, comes at a price of $149.99 after a $50 mail-in rebate and a 2-year agreement.
The V Cast Music costs $14.99 monthly, while the Visual Voice Mail service available at $2.99 on month lets you delete, reply or forward voice mail messages without listening to voice instructions.



LG Voyager in Titanium provides also V Cast Mobile TV, full HTML browsing, Bluetooth 2.0 wireless transfers at high-speeds, a built-in 2MP camera with camcorder functionality, and the possibility to manage your files on a large 2.81-inch external or internal touch-sensitive Thin Film Transistor display with vibration response. The vibration response makes me thing of the haptic technology used by Samsung Instinct, which gives you a subtle feedback as you browse through the menus and access commands. Haptic comes from the Grek “Haphe” which means “pertaining to the sense of touch”, and the new technology replies to the user selections by making him/her feel subtle forces, vibrations or motions through the skin surface.



Other features include multimedia player, dual speakers for stereo sound, microSD memory slot for up to 8GB storage capacity, Instant Messaging, standard email, the VZ Navigator service for access to location details of all points of interest as well as turn-by-turn directions, USB Mass Storage for PC connectivity, retractable TV antenna for enhanced TV reception, and up to 240 minutes of talk time.
The handset measures 4.64 x 2.12 x 0.71 inches at 4.69oz and has hearing aid compatibility, like all the other newly released handsets on the market.