Having looked at several models from Nokia’s Symbian^3 smartphone range over the past few months – including the range-topping Nokia N8 – today it’s the turn of more basic fare from the company. The Nokia X3-02 Touch and Type may have a touchscreen but it also keeps a numeric keypad, albeit one with an unusual layout, for those for whom T9 has yet to be eclipsed by on-screen keyboards. Is Nokia still the king of budget cellphones? Check out our full review after the cut.
Cricket Wireless has announced a new wireless plan that bundles unlimited music downloads with the usual calling, messaging and data access. Cricket Muve Music, set to makes its sales debut at CES 2011, is priced at $55 per month and comes with content from Universal, Warner, Sony and EMI. There's also a new phone to access the Muve Music service on, the $199 Samsung Suede SCH-r710.
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Tablets, iSuppli tells us, are the new epicenter for convergence, part smartphone and part notebook. It’s not a new story; every few months the convergence debate rears its head, suggesting the latest and greatest device category is pulling together the disparate threads of modern digital life and blurring the overall lines between segments in the process. Yet, despite the soothsaying, the “converged” experience still falls well short of the holistic ecosystem we’ve been promised: we have more devices than ever before, and they seldom talk well to each other.
UK carrier Three has stepped up to shake the mobile industry out of its data complacency, dropping the 1GB cap on its The One Plan tariff and instead offering truly unlimited data. The plan - which is priced at £25 ($39) per month - offers 2,000 any-network minutes, 5,000 Three-to-Three minutes and 5,000 texts, but of most interest to data-hungry smartphone users will be the absence of "fair use" restrictions.
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You could well argue that the great thing about phones is that they generally prevent the person you're talking to from lapping at your face during a conversation, but design researcher Fabian Hemmert wants to bring some of that tactile feedback into the modern cellphone. Speaking at TEDxBerlin, Hemmert showed three prototype phones that could variously recreate the feel of breathing on your neck, the squeeze of a hand, and even the wetness of a sloppy kiss.
Video after the cut
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Microsoft's KIN handsets may have scored a reprieve of sorts at Verizon last month, but it seems the carrier is still on course to shut down most of what made the tweens' smartphones special. According to WPCentral, as of January 31 2011 the KIN Studio will close permanently; that means all of the OTA functionality KIN users have been enjoying - such as posting photos to social networks, using the Feed Reader and all the Loop sharing support - will cease to function.
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All the folks in Wales be speedin along now, just a chuggin with brand new Arqiva and Alcatel Lucent carriers utilizing Long Term Evolution masts through the Preseli Mountians. Soon testing will begin to see if it'll be economically viable to bring internet to all those homes that otherwise had slow internet or no internet connection at all. A 800MHz spectrum left over from the digital TV switchover in the area will be used for the trial, this then to go on auction to network providers in 2011.
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Nokia has outed a new, very basic QWERTY phone for message-addicted users. The Nokia X2-01 runs S40 and has a 2.4-inch QVGA display, quadband GSM/EDGE and a VGA resolution camera; there's also Bluetooth 2.1+EDR and a 3.5mm headphone socket.
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As rumored, Microsoft's ill-fated KIN cellphones have made a second appearance at Verizon, this time branded as the KIN ONEm and KIN TWOm and bearing far more affordable data plans. The KIN ONEm is priced at $19.99, while the KIN TWOm is $49.99; data plans will eventually start from $9.99 for 25MB per month.
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Food, family, festivities: the holidays can be stressful, and that’s before you decide what should go inside the wrapping paper. SlashGear can’t help you with the cooking, but we can cut through the sales hyperbole and help you pick the best in consumer electronics so that the only disappointment this December is the brussels sprouts. In our 2010 Holiday Gift Guide we’ve picked our favorite cellphones, computers, accessories and more, so read on for the best in tech this season! (We’ll be updating the Holiday Gift Guide throughout the holiday season)
Microsoft's KIN was arguably scuppered by Verizon's insistence on pairing the starter-smartphone with a mandatory full-price data plan; customers weren't convinced, and the KIN ONE and KIN TWO were pulled from shelves in July. Now, it seems, Verizon is giving the KIN a second chance; according to a device overview from the carrier leaked to PPCGeeks, both handsets will return sometime this quarter.
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We spotted Verizon's new E Ink feature-phone, the Samsung Zeal, getting a premature preview earlier today, but the carrier has now come clean on the dual-hinge handset. Like the Alias 2 before it, the Samsung Zeal has a full QWERTY keyboard which uses E Ink keys; that allows the layout to change according to what app is running and which way around the handset is being held.
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