Penny Mobiles – Mobile phone news, reviews & information

According to Steve Jobs, the antenna issue is “a challenge for the whole industry”.

Mobile phone users and many mobile phone makers beg to disagree; after all, this is the first time that a device would actually drop calls if its antenna was held. Even in the early days of 2G/GSM devices, Nokia manufactured plenty of mobile phones with visible antennas that literally jutted out of the phone body. Phones like the old Nokia 5110 would still work properly even if the antenna was being touched by the hand.

And in the many years since then, various phone makers have made countless numbers of mobile devices that have not only made the antenna smaller and non-obtrusive, but also equally, if not more efficient.

Companies like RIM, whose BlackBerry Bold 9700 was named directly by Apple as a device affected by antenna issues. What Jobs might have failed to realize that even if the Bold or any other handset loses a bar of signal from touch, none of these phones would drop a call like the iPhone 4 would.

Jobs also failed to realize that RIM would also speak out.

To sum it up nicely, here is a quick excerpt from RIM’s official statement, “Apple’s attempt to draw RIM into Apple’s self-made debacle is unacceptable. Apple’s claims about RIM products appear to be deliberate attempts to distort the public’s understanding of an antenna design issue and to deflect attention from Apple’s difficult situation.”

Nokia has also stated they their company emphasizes a lot on testing their products –including the antenna performance, to ensure the usability of their mobile handsets.

The two companies are not the only phone makers to have made their voices heard. Samsung and Motorola have also spoken out as well. Of the three companies that Apple has directly mentioned in the presentation, only HTC (manufacturers of the HTC Wildfire and Desire, among others) has yet to make a comment (and many believe that it will not be long before that).

Nokia’s X6 is a pretty impressive handset. It sports a 3.2 inch TFT capacitive touch screen display, an ARM 11 434MHz CPU and a 5 mega pixel camera with Carl Zeiss optics, auto focus and LED flash. This media-centric handset has been designed to play plenty of media file formats and provide users with hours of entertainment in video or music.

Of course, that entertainment can only last so long. Between surfing the web via 3G or WiFi and using the handset’s media player, many users are reporting that the X6’s 1320mAh battery is not living up to expectations (on a full charge, users expect to get about 35 hours straight of playback).

According to a recent report, it seems that the culprit for the battery issue is not really the hardware, but user’s inability to shut down applications that are still running in the background. While the same solution applies to many other devices, it is inherently important for the Nokia X6 –as shutting down these errant apps is a simple matter of having to just access a menu and individually turning off the unneeded apps.

For those wondering why background applications would drain power, it is because the processor is still running the apps. CPU’s are among the most powerful users of battery energy. Running apps to a minimum is an important part of conserving the energy on a phone.

Of course, there are also a few other things that users should keep in mind when it comes to batteries. The first is to have an alternative power supply if you know you would need it. Long trips, all night events and other activities have a tendency of keeping users away from being able to charge at home. In this case, having a phone charger or a secondary battery is quite important especially if you will need the device (of course, it is important to make sure that the secondary battery always has a full charge).

With the Kin’s unexpected cancellation in Europe, it is hard to see how Microsoft is ever going to regain its foothold in the European mobile phone markets. However, the American electronics manufacturer seems determined to set things right. Learning from how the social networking centered duo fared in the US, they have instead decided to cut their losses and focus their efforts on the launch of the Windows Phone 7 platform.

Retailers are preparing early for the line of products sporting the new operating system, creating attractive shop displays. Some of the Windows Phone 7 ads are due to be posted even as early as within the month.

According to official Microsoft documents that were leaked to the public, the company confirms a third quarter launch date for the new operating system. People who estimate the arrival date of the Windows Phone 7 platform say that it is actually due to be released on September.

It seems the accelerated release date can be attributed to the Microsoft branded Kin’s lackluster appeal in the mobile market. It was, after all, pitted against heavy competition against Google, Apple as well as Nokia.

With all the promotional shop floor displays and awareness drives, Microsoft really does not want to leave too much to chance. All the publicity and marketing should leave an impression on the consumers, after all, Microsoft has quite a few unique wow factors up its sleeve.

There are plenty of things to look forward to in the Windows Phone 7 platform. The modern user interface, plenty of apps ported from the Xbox Live Arcade as well as a great, Flash capable web browser. Hopefully all of this is enough to boost the Microsoft platform’s 7 percent market share which is only a fraction when compared to the 44 percent that Nokia’s Symbian dominates.

Cambridge based electronics manufacturer ARM is enjoying a very solid position in the mobile phone industry, even with competitors such as Texas Instruments, the company’s CPU’s are the standard hardware for many smart phones by manufacturers all over the world.

Intel, a major player in the computer industry, seems to have their sights on the mobile phone market as well. With the introduction of the Intel Moorestown CPU several months ago and the continuous evolution of the Atom hardware to consume less and less power, the company is getting close to producing hardware that will provide plenty of processing power, but will not be consuming so much energy.

According to recent reports, the first Intel bearing smart phones might be seeing light by 2011.

The company is taking the transition slowly and steadily. The company has already started with several Taiwan made tablets –providing the CPU for handheld devices can go a pretty long way.

The MeeGo operating system which Intel co-developed with Nokia is going to be released in October to November. According to Intel, they intentionally designed the MeeGo to work with a wide range of processors –not exclusively Atom technology. By doing this, their OS can be more widely used. Their previous operating system, the Linux based Moblin OS seems to have been scrapped in favor of the MeeGo mobile platform. Of course, with their team up with Nokia, it is likely that new devices from the Finnish phone maker will be showing the new Intel CPUs next year.

In the meanwhile, ARM is steadily strengthening its position in the industry. They have already acquired the support of Microsoft for Windows Phone 7 –according to Steve Ballmer, Qualcomm will be playing an instrumental role in the development of the OS and as such, a Qualcomm CPU is a requirement for the new platform. Aside from Microsoft, Intel has also teamed up with phone manufacturers HTC and Motorola.

It has just been confirmed that the Nokia C1 is now available in the UK and it is priced at a very cheap price of just 30 Pounds Sterling. The impressive little budget phone from Nokia might sound like an absurdly cheap device, but it still packs enough features to be worth the purchase.

Overall, the Nokia C1 is a candy bar 2G handset with a few extra features that makes the selection worthwhile (and for the low a price, it is hard to get any better than the C1). The new phone will come with 1.8 inch TFT display that provides users with 128 x 160 pixels of resolution. The screen can handle up to 65 thousand colors so you will be able to view content quite easily. The phone menu is short and easy to figure out on the first run.

As one would expect, the handset is able to handle voice calls and text messages. The phone memory can store up to 64MB of data, but users need not worry about the limited space since the device will support microSD cards.

The music player on the handset will allow users to play MP3, Wav and AAC music files as well as tune into FM radio. An FM recorder will allow users to make quick recordings of their favorite tunes or programs.

Packed with an 800 mAh camera, the Nokia C1 will keep your phone running for more than 500 hours on standby. On a full charge, the device can take a call 10 hours long –nonstop.

The Nokia C-series handsets, particular the C1, C2 and C3 mobile phones, are mostly low end devices that are focused on delivering practical features at a decent price. In that regard, the Nokia C1 easily fulfills its objective and is a successful one at that.

Everyone already knows that global warming is an issue that has to be dealt with, and but no one really considers mobile phones as a heavy contributor of greenhouse gases –though it is easy to forget how big a handset’s carbon footprint truly is.

The first thing that people do not realize is that phones use energy. Sure, we charge phones on electric outlets, but the amount of energy that mobile phones consume each year is roughly the equivalent of taking an airplane ride from London to New York, and that is pretty big. Considering that almost half of the world’s population makes use of mobile handsets, the overall impact of this tiny bit of technology is actually pretty huge.

Of course, the biggest concern still lies with manufacturing. As much as usage consumes energy, even more is spent on making these handsets. This is why many mobile phone manufacturers are being ranked by order of their eco-friendliness. In fact, many companies are now trying hard to catch up with their target CO2 reduction quota –the cutoff for which is 2015.

Sony Ericsson and Nokia are currently on the extreme lead (according to Greenpeace) thanks to their efforts in changing the way the produce mobile phones.

On long standing argument against going green is that change will be expensive –what many manufacturers do not realize is that by switching to renewable energy, changing the composition of raw materials, and changing the internal policies would actually prove to be cheaper in the long run. Implementing changes costs money and resources, but the amount that would be saved later on is significantly bigger.

According to recent reports, there are over 2.7 billion handsets that are being used (some people have more than two phones so this is not a population estimate), if the users of these devices cut down on their energy usage rate, the world can save tons of energy in the process.