The Samsung V820L pivoting flip is a capable 3G phone in its own right, complete with Bluetooth, a 2 megapixel cam, microSD expansion, and a front-facing secondary cam for video calls, but it also adds digital TV reception for Brazil’s nascent ISDB-T spectrum.
The relatively expansive 2.6 inch display should be a boon for watching your favorite Portugese-language programming on the go, though it sounds like the limited coverage could be a big bummer at this point until broadcasters have the time to build out the network just a bit. It sounds like carriers might subsidize the phone a bit to knock down that stratospheric price 1,499 reais (about $904). read more…
Germany’s been one of the European countries protesting the hardest against the EU’s selection of DVB-H as the union’s mobile TV standard of choice — and for good reason, seeing how it already had a nice little chunk of cash sunk into T-DMB. Vodafone Germany is actually looking at rolling out a pair of phones next month that simply pull down plain ol’ DVB-T signals — the kind generally destined for home televisions, not pockets.
This obviously gives the service a far larger footprint and content profile right off the bat, but the tradeoff is that DVB-T was never designed for the small screen and suffers from a greater power draw than either DVB-H or T-DMB. read more…
Sprint contacted us today to let us know that it owns the exclusive North American rights to Qualcomm’s QChat PTT technology, which raised a very interesting question: what the heck is Verizon using, then? PhoneNews is suggesting that Big Red’s actually using an upgraded version of BREWChat, Qualcomm’s old-skool PTT system that had originally been developed for and deployed on 1x networks. read more…
The new MWg Zinc II slider handset is a 500Mhz processor, the MWg Zinc II speeds along quite nicely, and the Windows Mobile 6.1 Professional OS brings threaded SMS text messaging to the table, which is a big plus. Unfortunately, the WM6.1 UI enhancements are mostly limited to the Windows Mobile 6.1 Standard (non-touchscreen) version of the handset. read more…
Nokia’s having a bit of trouble keeping its E71 QWERTY business phone under wraps, with that initial sighting in January, and now another couple in-the-wild shots to keep us interested.
The “E” moniker designates a Nokia smartphone with a business slant, of course, and thanks to a lovely QWERTY board, the E71 seems to be no exception; specs on the E51-ish device are said to be pretty much in line with what we’d expect for a circa-2008 piece, including HSDPA, WiFi, GPS, and a 3.2 megapixel primary cam with a secondary up front for video calling. As for North American 3G, well… as usual, we can only hope.
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