VISA hate carrying cash and they reckon you do too, and so they’re shouting about their new wireless payment systems. Recombu caught up with the company in Paris to look at three different ways of managing payments, ranging from a straightforward on-device app, wireless payments using NFC (near-field communications), and even a VISA app embedded into a SIM with its own mini-webserver.
Video demo after the cut
You can’t accuse Qualcomm of not looking ahead. While their Snapdragon chipset was in strong attendance at their London event today, they were also rolling out some particularly impressive predictions for the future of mobile chipsets. Qualcomm expect the mobile chipsets of 2011 to 2013 to be capable of gaming performance on a par with the Xbox 360 and Sony PS3, thanks to a new breed of dual-CPU SoCs with high-performance 2D and 3D crunching.
Maemo – as on the Nokia N900 – is still more of a geek’s paradise than a consumer-ready platform, so we hope the development team responsible for it will be working hard over the next couple of years. That’s because the Maemo marketing team have let slip that, as of 2012, Maemo will replace Symbian as the OS for Nokia’s entire Nseries range of handsets.
October has come and gone, and rumors that HTC would launch at least one entry-level device based on Qualcomm’s Brew mobile platform during the month have failed to pan out. According to a DigiTimes report, that’s because HTC have delayed the launch of their so-called feature phone range until early 2010, faced with “Brew’s relatively immature application service platform offering for telecom carriers”.
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T-Mobile USA have announced that they've once again started selling Sidekick handsets, having taken the messaging-centric devices off the market during significant data outages last month. Both the Sidekick LX 2009 and the Sidekick 2008 will be available, each with new pricing: $149.99 for the former and $49.99 for the latter, assuming a new, two-year agreement.
While we may continue to blast Qualcomm’s FLO TV standalone streaming TV handheld, we have no problem with manufacturers integrating mobile TV into their cellphones. Nokia’s latest, the 5330 Mobile TV Edition, does exactly as its name suggests: packs a DVB-H digital TV tuner into a media-centric handset, complete with hardware music control keys, a 2.4-inch QVGA display and a 3.5mm headphones jack.
LG have confirmed that they are planning follow-up versions of their LG GD910 watch phone, though it’s unclear whether an entirely new model is on the cards. Speaking at a launch event for the LG GW620 Android smartphone this week, the company’s UK sales and marketing director, John Barton, revealed that “more styles” of watch phone were in the pipeline, together with a non-keyboard Android handset for 2010.
If you thought you’d seen it all in Nokia’s Vision of 2015 video, book a flight to Tokyo and stop by Fujitsu’s offices there. They haven’t seen to have got the memo that modular, wirelessly-connected mobile phones with integrated pico-projectors are meant to be the stuff of futurology, not fact, and as such have produced a working version of their F-04B cellphone. Akihabara have been for a play, and claim it’s a brilliant multifunctional device.
Samsung’s Bada OS, freshly announced – though far from released – for mobile devices is reasonably interesting on its own, but we always prefer to have an inkling of hardware to go along with our software speculation. Happily that itch has been allegedly scratched this morning, with a render of what’s purported to be the first Samsung Bada device.
Willeke at GSMHelpDesk has been slipped an image of this touchscreen handset, though there are no accompanying specifications to tell us what sort of experience we can expect. That leaves us arguing the aesthetics, and while the device pictured is reasonably inoffensive, it doesn’t exactly distinguish itself from any other touchscreen-centric candybar. Perhaps there’s a slide-out QWERTY keyboard waiting to wow us, but right now hardware controls look to be minimal.
Nokia’s The Way We Live Next 3.0 event isn’t intended to launch new hardware – they had Nokia World a few months back for that – but they couldn’t let the day pass without revealing a few details as to how they envisage devices and services of the future functioning. Heikki Norta, SVP of corporate strategy, took to the stage to show a demo video of possible mobile life in 2015, complete with location sharing, face recognition and that old mainstay of futurology concepts, projection keyboards. There’s also a pretty impressive dual-display netbook and a modular system which can easily switch your “passport data” between a full-sized handset and a smaller unit more suited to exercise-wear.
Video demo after the cut
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