Smartphone Blog

Asus made always good Pocket PCs and smartphones. The best features of their devices are good configuration and particularly long time of wark on one battery charge. The Pocket PC’s from Asus are usually able to work 20 to 30 hours. Of course this time is considerably reduced if you use WLAN or GPS, but to those values are anyway very good. It is therefore surprising that the Asus devices compared to HTC or Nokia are less widespread. That could be because Asus invest not so much in marketing in Europe. To change somehow this fact for a bit, I will report, in my opinion, about very successful smartphone model from Asus.
As expected, Asus P526 offers a lot of features. The phone runs on Windows Mobile 6 and offers such features as a touch screen with a resolution of 240×320 pixels, Bluetooth 1.2, WLAN b / g, GPS (Sirf III), SD card slot and 2 MP camera. The phone comes with a car mount, 1GB SD card, and as Destinator navigation software.
Asus P526 is not a Pocket PC with a built-in GSM module, but a true smartphone with a touchscreen. That’s why the phone is compact and has a full phone keyboard. This design makes it difficult to mount a large display, so the device offers only a display with a size of 2.6 inch.
Windows Mobile and Destinator are good optimized for such displays.
In my opinion, Asus made with this phone a very successful combination between 2 different device classes. Normally, the manufacturers offer either a Windows Mobile phone without a keyboard, or, if the cell phone is in the usual mobile phone form factor, it would have not any touchsreen.

Pearl is known for interesting offers and good prices. Today I visited the site and discovered a very interesting offer. It is a mobile phone. Strictly speaking, it is a fully-featured smartphone with touch screen, Windows Mobile 6 Professional, triband, Bluetooth and 300MHz processor from Intel. The cell phone cost 139.90 without a contract. Perl offers this phone under the name Mobile Simvalley. Because it is quite normal that electronics devices from leading manufacturers are offered as no-name products by Pearl, I made a quick search and found out that Pearl sells under the name Simvalley XP-25 a Smartphone by the Russian company RoverPC (RoverPC C6 ).
I don’t know much about this company. What I know is that this company is not a newcomer at the market and provides PDAs and smartphones based on Windows Mobile since several years. In Russia, this company is naturally more popular than here, because they are selling their devices more cheap, than big and known electronic manufacturers.
The features of this cell phone are actually, quite OK. You can find everything you need in it. The only thing I would like to have in that device, is certainly WLAN. But because I use the WLAN only at home, I don’t need actually in the mobile phone. An important point is also the possibility to update the operating system to Windows Mobile 6.1. The option, to update the operating system, will be offered not by all mobile phone manufacturers. So I was not able, for example, to update my Asus A636N, because Asus, apparently for marketing reasons, no offered the update for Germany, but for many other countries he does it.
Of course I described here not all details about the phone, because I do not think they are very important, but I would say, this offer ist very interesting for people, who are not able to invest a lot of money in a cell phone. From my own experience I would say that Pearl is not so quick as Amazon, but if you decide to purchase the phone, you should be aware that you will wait a bit until the goods arrive. But perhaps it was an exception case with me and you would receive the product very quickly.

The time seems to come. Today, the new Apple iPhone 3G was officially introduced. As expected, the main highlight of the new version of the phone is, as the abbreviation 3G (3 generation) says, UMTS. The next feature is GPS receiver.
TomTom also not waited long and advertised immediately that iPhone now supported by TomTom Navigator. Unfortunately the other technical data is same as its predecessor. Even the 2-megapixel camera is one of them. Because what could be Apple. I saw the photos, made by iPhone. These photos are not very heady. I don’t know any cell phone, that makes really good images, but if I purchase such expensive device, I expect that it has at least autofocus. The last important thing is the price. In the U.S. at least, the new cell phone will cost from 199 to 299 U.S. Dollars, depending on the model. This is a good news, but also the confirmation that Apple business modell with its strategy of revenue sharing and distribution by selected partner in each country does not achieve great success. The stock market reacted with slight decline.
But we should not forget that the new iPhone has already the new version of firmware. This means that we will be able to install software from other developers on the device. This includes, for example Core player. Core player makes possible to play DivX without converting. I think that the other major software vendors will soon also on board. The features of iPhone will rapidly increase. It is possible that Apple will soon one of such great players in mobile market like RIM.

Syberia is an adventure game, originally developed for PC. The success was so great that the developers decided to port Syberia on the other platforms.
The game is very interesting to play because of the sophisticated game scenario, tricky puzzles and lovingly designed graphics.
A short story:
Kate Walker works for a large law firm in New York. She receives from her employer the task to close a contract for the sale of a small, in the Swiss-situated toy factory. Kate could not imagine how this deal will change her live. What should actually be easier than to fly to Europe, close a deal and return the next day in NY? But the destiny of the young woman is not so simple as she thought. Upon arrival, Kate learns that the owner of the factory recently died and all rights to the factory on inherited by her brother. As the boss of Kate learns about it, he calls the young woman to stay in Europe until the contract is not fulfilled. The only problem is, nobody knows where the only heritor resides.
Before Kate complete the mission, she will lern a lot of interesting people and creatures about, each of them has the individual look and unique history. She will solve many “intelligent” puzzles and visit many interesting places.
I tried the game today on my Asus A636N successfully. I really liked it. I always wanted to know how it goes further and although the puzzles in the game are not always simple, I could find for the time I spent with the game, many interesting things out. I would like to continue playing the game as soon as I have a bit more time.
My conclusion: Syberia is a very successful game, it could be compared with such games as Monkey Island, The Dig, or Day of the Tentacle, which is also playable on the PPC with the help of ScummVM.

It seems that Bluetooth will not die in the next time. The developers of Bluetooth are working intensively on developing of this standard. The proof is a new specification called Bluetooth 2.1 EDR.
This specification don’t have those revolutionary changes like Bluetooth 2.0, but it has important security fixes, lower energy consumption and more simply procedure to coupling devices (Near Field Communication).

The new firmware is finally released and could be downloaded at Asus site for free. I will install it today or tomorrow, depends on the time that I will need to backup all my data.

Update:

Ok, I was able to reflash my Asus P525 with a new firmware and now I have windows mobile 6.0 on my device. It seems, that this OS is based on WM5.0, I don’t see big difference between WM5 and WM6, only a graphic design is now more similar to Windows Vista. There are some new utilities that the new OS offers. But I think, that I don’t really need such features how live search or live messenger on my PDA. I use mChat with ICQ protocol and it is enough for me. I noticed that WM6 needs a little bit more RAM than WM5. It is nor really good, but it could be worse. (Microsoft…)

My conclusion is that I did not lose anything with this update, but I don’t have many advantages with it too. A nice graphic, file crypting and some other (un?)useful tools, it is all new that I can find at this moment.

All blogs and press are writing now about new cell phone from Apple. There are hundreds of videos and thousands of pictures of iPhone you can find in internet, people share their experiences, some of them are disappointed, other are sold of this device.

As for me, I think iPhone will find his place on the market. This device is a limited version of smartphone like Windows Mobile based devices. It has many useful and simply interesting entertainment features and accessible interface. The buyers of iPhone will be people, who don’t want or can’t learn how to use a device such as mobile phone based on Symbian or Windows Mobile.

But people, like me understand that the possibilities of a device, which don’t support the installation of third-party applications, are very limited. I can’t imagine having that device in place of my Asus P525.

The new smartphone from HTC will be only 18 mm thin, it will have a 400MHz Processor from Samsung, quad GSM and quad UMTS support, HSUPA support (high speed uploads), a camera with 3 megapixel and auto-focus on the back of device and one VGA camera on the top for video calling and GPS.

The specifications sound very interesting. I wish this device would have a USB-host and VGA resolution, than I would buy it, although I have now my Asus P525…