Samsung Enter the Smartwatch Market

Mr Bond is that a phone, a computer or just a watch on your wrist?

We wanted the LG GD910watch phone but the price was too high even for a vanity piece of jewellery and now Samsung in releasing one the S9110 and plans to bring it to Europe. The 450 euro smartwatch will be launched in France with a 4.5cm touchscreen, metal body and leather strap.

At just 11.98mm thick it's described as the world's thinnest smartwatch with Outlook e-mail, voice calls, MP3 player, and Bluetooth to support that earpiece it sounds impressive and is under half the price of the LG GD910 offered by Orange.

As We Await Apple

So as the world awaits Apple’s next announcements on Monday and the undoubted media blitz that will follow we have taken a quick look at some of the others vying for space in this crowded market.

Palm Pre
The Pre has made its long awaited entrance and now its down to the consumers to decide whether it lives up to the hype or becomes just another also ran. The webOS, Palm's new operating system enables concurrent applications open at once. You simply organized the apps like a row of cards and you flick the screen to switch between them. WebOS will also notify you of events that need your attention, no matter which application you're in. Again, making the iPhone look cumbersome and others just clumsy and slow. The Pre’s webOS aggregates contacts and calendar items from multiple sources, like Google, corporate Exchange servers, and can even insert your friends' Facebook photos into your contacts list. This obviously wins over the iPhone’s in many ways but is it enough to make consumers buy or even switch allegiance? Will we get iphone app overload and will the Pre give us the apps that are clearly driving this market?

Whether you get a Pre or not, its has clearly raised the bar on the software will leave its mark on the phones you buy in the future.

LG
We have long awaited LG GD910 mobile watch will be hitting the UK in July but unfortunately only being available via Orange and with a £1000 price tag. The price will almost certainly put off many from being James Bond but will it become a designer status symbol for chavs or merely a nice product at the wrong price? As previously reported it has a 1.4 inch touchscreen, looks good being only 14mm thick, has 7.2Mbps HSDPA, voice recognition, text to speech capability, Bluetooth, MP3 player and tells the time too.

HTC
HTC are about to unveil its third Andriod mobile and rumours suggest the announcement will be on June 24th . The HTC Hero is expected to launch in two models, one with touchscreen only and one packing a QWERTY keyboard and so offering appeal to all. With Google’s arsenal of potential opportunities and its cross platform design, the Andriod phones are certainly ones to watch.

ACER
Acer’s new Tempo F900 smartphone arrival to the UK appears imminent. First shown in Barcelona in February the device looks set to have a £429 price tag. It features a 3.8 inch VGA screen, Internet Explorer 6, with JavaScript and Adobe Flash Lite, and high-speed HSDPA. Acer has clearly stated it wants to be a smartphone player and have adopted Acer 2.0 user interface to aid navigation and ‘desktop’ customisation, in addition to Google Search, Google Maps and YouTube. Acer is not alone in the move from netbook to mobile and could bring some interesting user friendly aspects to the table.

INQ
UK based INQ is to launch a Twitter phone which it claims will be the first mass-market phone to have a client for the social networking phenomenon built-in. It will use the internet to send and receive tweets, rather than text messages. The question is what is so special and surely everyone else can easily follow. Like Skype you don’t buy a device just make it easy to twitter or do you?

Two Smart Smart phones

We said to Watch Barcelona!

The Mobile World Congress in Barcelona is certainly living up to the expectations we had of it. Already we have seen significant announcements such as those we wrote about earlier from Adobe now we have the expected mobile jockeying from the smartest smartphone.

Sony have thrown down the gauntlet to all camera freaks with their Idou which has a built-in 12.1-megapixel camera. Why do you need a digital camera when they can deliver to this specification in a mobile?

The Idou will also have a 3.5in widescreen touch-screen and powerful flash for high quality photos. The symbian driven device has all the usual music and video features of their Walkman range of phones and users will be able to download extra software and applications to their device.


The LG Touch watch phone we raved about earlier this year is coming to the UK via the Orange network 'later this year' . The Touch watch phone is a radical step, eye-catching and certainly will tick the gadget novelty box for all would be James Bonds. But it is no slouch on the functionality side, offering HSDPA connectivity, video calling (alongside audio), media playback, web browsing (if you've got the eyes for it) and to protect your investment, a water-resistant shell and tempered glass.

We must have one!!!!

Forget New York All Eyes Look to Barcelona

It appears as if the mobile world has ignited and next week's Mobile World Congress in Barcelona is likely to be the event of the year and one that now impacts all media sectors and gives pointers to the future of technology and media consumption. We have reported recently on the smartphones to be launched the potential rumours of a Stanza and Adobe DRM ebook solution and much more. So what else can we expect?

Another rumour is that Nokia about to launch an application store for its Symbian platform. Will it happen? The reality is that Nokia has to make this move to keep up with the explosion of competitors who are already there. We now have the iPhone App Store, Android Marketplace and Samsung and rumours of a Microsoft ‘online bazaar’. Nokia already has some distribution platforms for Symbian applications, but nothing to date that is compelling for both users and developers.

LG plans to unveil the LG Arena, model LG-KM900, a touchscreen multimedia phone with a 3-D user interface. It boasts a cube-based layout that provides four customizable home screens for access to its features, which include music, movies and pictures. Users can "spin" to select different applications. Personally we await the he new LG GD910 wrist phone.