A Tale of Two Cities - With the Nokia N86 8MP!

A new exhibition has opened at London’s Heathrow airport this week, showcasing photographer Henry Reichhold’s latest work. Running in Terminal 5’s Expo area until May 2010, the exhibition features large panoramic photographs of two of the worlds most famous cities; Dubai and Mumbai. As interesting as all this is, at this point you may be wondering what exactly this is doing on the pages of a mobile phone blog. Well, rather than opting for a dedicated digital camera, Henry instead decided that a Camera Phone would be more than up to the job. The Phone in question? Well, that’ll be Nokia’s 8.0 Megapixel N86.

That’s right, eschewing large cameras and lenses for a completely standard N86, the installation boasts over 90 images taken with Nokia's flagship camera phone. Taken over the course of eight days in November 2009, the images were created by stitching several separate shots together contrasting the slums ob Mumbai with the fabulous wealth of Dubai.

Speaking about the exhibition, Henry commented “The Nokia N86 Explore exhibition visually maps the polar opposites of two of the world’s most extreme urban dwellings: Dubai is a showcase of extraordinary wealth, development and architecture, whilst Mumbai is an extraordinarily vibrant city driven by the resilience and incredible good nature of its people who live for the most part in poverty. It also goes to show the potential and range of new multimedia communication devices which are able to capture the world in a way never previously thought possible.”

Mark Murphy, operations director at Terminal 5 said, “We’re delighted to welcome Henry Reichhold back to Expo at Heathrow Terminal 5. His photographs not only add a dynamic visual presence to the airport but also challenge preconceptions of what can be achieved with a mobile. It’s very inspiring and certainly encourages us all to celebrate technology and create our very own mobile artworks.”

So, enough chit chat, i’m off to grab an 8.0 Megapixel camera phone and a one-way ticket to the far reaches of the globe. And if you can’t wait for my exhibition, be sure to check out Henry Reichhold’s at Heathrow’s Terminal 5 Expo Area before May 2010.

E4 sends up the iPad in TV advert!

Poor old Apple despite being ubiquitous with cutting edge technology, it seems people are queuing up to have a dig at Job’s and Co. It’s not only their products that seem to be the butt of many a joke, but also their marketing and advertising that people seem to find perfect parody fodder. Cast your minds back to December and you’ll remember the Sun newspaper's comical send up of the iPhone adverts. And now, it’s the turn of Channel 4’s comedy off-shoot E4, who have decided to playfully poke fun at the upcoming Apple iPad. We won’t spoil it for you, check out the video below to see for yourself (and check out the Original iPad video to see just how well it has been parodied). Well, they say imitation is a form of flattery so i guess Apple should be flattered by the raft of send ups that have surfaced in recent months. I wouldn’t bet on it though…

Nokia officially announce the C5!

Nokia have officially announced the first member of the new Cseries range; the Nokia C5. Having done the rounds in numerous spy shots and leaked images and hinted at way back when Nokia nabbed the copyright for the C series name, the C5 enters Nokia’s range as the phone to bring the Symbian Smartphone operating system to the masses. Will it succeed? Read on for our first look at the new C5.

Aesthetically, the C5 bears a striking resemblance to the 6300, one of Nokia’s most popular and successful launches in the companies history. Sporting a candybar form factor, the C5 boasts a large finger-friendly keypad and sharp 2.2 inch display. So on the outside, the C5 could easily be mistaken for yet another Nokia candy-bar feature phone but on the inside it’s a totally different story.

The C5 runs Symbian series 60 pitching it as a fully functional smartphone only with a feature phone design, size and, most important of all, price. Download apps from Ovi Store, pull in Facebook status updates to your contacts list and launch instant messaging conversations from your home screen. As a Symbian smartphone, the C5 also benefits from Nokia's free Sat Nav initiative with Ovi Maps pre-installed, offering free voice guided in-car and on foot navigation.

The premium features don’t stop there. The C5 includes HSDPA connectivity ensuring the aforementioned app downloads and web browsing are lightening quick. Nokia have also found room for a 3.15 Megapixel camera with Flickr support, MP3 music player and FM radio, a 3.5mm audio jack, Bluetooth and expandable memory. Throw in up to 12 hours talk time and a staggering 26 days of standby and it’s obvious Nokia are on to a winner with the C5.

Keep an eye on the blog for more information as soon as we know more.

Apple sues HTC for patent infringement!

For Apple’s legal team, it seems three is the magic number. Not content with counter suing Nokia and being sued by Kodak, Apple have launched yet another law suit this time against Taiwanese smart phone manufacturers HTC. The reason? Patent infringement. Or so Apple has alleged.
Yes, following ongoing legal wranglings with Nokia and Kodak, the Cupertino outfit have now filed suit against HTC claiming the smartphone manufacturer has violated patents relating to the iPhone’s “user interface, underlying architecture and hardware”. Speaking about the legal action, Apple CEO Steve Jobs commented “We can sit by and watch competitors steal our patented inventions, or we can do something about it. We’ve decided to do something about it. We think competition is healthy, but competitors should create their own original technology, not steal ours.”
Some of the 20 patents Apple claim have been infringed include Unlocking A Device By Performing Gestures On An Unlock Image, something that could quite easily cover any touchscreen phone without a hardware unlocking button, List Scrolling And Document Translation, Scaling, And Rotation On A Touch-Screen Display which relates to how scrolling menus bounce when you reach the end (among other things) and Automated Response To And Sensing Of User Activity In Portable Devices which refers to the proximity sensor turning off the screen when the iPhone is held to your ear on a call.
At this point, it’s very early days with HTC yet to answer to the claims and a court date potentially months (or even years away). We won’t see the end to this one just yet. At this point, you may be asking yourself why HTC? All 3 of the above features have all been seen in notable handsets from the likes of Nokia, Samsung and the Palm Pre so why are Apple only going after HTC? Well, that’s anyone’s guess, but the cynical amongst you may see this as a thinly veiled dig at Google. Whilst HTC manufacture both Windows Mobile and Android handsets, the Taiwanese outfit has been a major supporter of Google’s OS from day one.
With Apple and Google originally co-existing quite amicably (the iPhone uses Google Search and Maps after all), the relationship started to turn sour after the arrival and subsequent success of Google’s Android smart phone operating system which has clearly moved into iPhone territory. Now, with the release of the HTC manufactured Google Nexus One, Google have moved from software to hardware and it comes as no coincidence that Apple have decided that now is the time to act. Looking closely at the patents, we can see that it is Android that is mainly being implicated.
Google have even gone as far as to issue a statement following the law suit, commenting “We are not a party to this lawsuit. However, we stand behind our Android operating system and the partners who have helped us to develop it.” Whether this means standing behind their partners with moral support or some financial clout remains to be seen but this one’s definitely set to run for some time. Keep an eye on the blog for more information on this as and when we get it.

Google launches Gesture Search for Android 2.0 phones and above

Google have officially announced the launch of Gesture Search, which is a new way of searching your Android phone’s content by simply writing letters on the screen with your finger.

Below is an explanation from Google themselves.

“Say you want to call your friend Anne. Just open Gesture Search and draw letter “A”, and Gesture Search returns a list of items that have words starting with “A”. If your handwriting isn’t all that neat, that’s okay. If the “A” you draw looks a bit like an “H”, as seen in the bottom left corner of the screenshot, “H” results will be brought up as well. If needed, you can also erase a query by crossing it horizontally: left to right erases the entire query, and right to left removes the last letter or space in the query. Now you can either scroll down the list to find Anne or write more letters to refine the search.”

Sounds like a pretty good and simple tool to use, and definitely a lot more convenient to use in public rather than voice search. If you fancy trying out the Gesture Search for yourself, search for it in the Android Market; it will only appear and be available to download for handsets running on Android 2.0 or higher. If recent rumours are correct, all Android phones will be upgrading to 2.1 meaning all Android users will be able to take advantage of the new Gesture Search tool.

Keep an eye on the blog for new Android mobile phone releases which will be sporting Gesture Search.