It was all about convergence at the CommunicAsia information and communications expo this year, with manufacturers introducing everything from full-blown multimedia devices to digital broadcast television and music players, all integrated into the slim form factor of a mobile phone.
This issue, TAN KIT HOONG takes a quick look at some of the interesting products on display at the exhibition halls.
MOTOROLA introduced a number of new phones and products in funky colours but the one that definitely stole the show was the highly-anticipated Motorola Q, a Windows Mobile 5.0 smartphone tricked out with a keyboard with the slim styling of the Razr series.
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Various delays later, the phone, which currently supports CDMA, is finally officially out and thankfully, it’s still a pretty exciting device.
Running on Windows Mobile 5.0 Smartphone edition, the device comes with a Qwerty keypad and scroll wheel in the style of RIM’s BlackBerry devices. It even supports push e-mail with Microsoft Exchange 2003 and has true multimedia capability with a large 320 x 240-pixel screen and 1.3-megapixel camera.
The device’s built-in Windows Media Player software supports most of the popular compressed audio and video formats, including MIDI, AAC, WMA, MP3, MPEG4 video, and WMV.
Rounding off the feature Where’s Ming?
One of the other interesting products at the Motorola booth was the Ming, which is currently only released in Hong Kong and China but is due to eventually make its way into other markets as well – the phone is the latest update to the Linux-based phones that the company has been producing for a while now.
The Ming still runs on Linux with handwriting recognition built-in (important in countries where Chinese character entry is easier if written by hand) and has a much nicer overall design.
The phone has some other interesting features built in however – for example, you can use its 2-megapixel digital camera to capture a photo of a business card and the phone’s character recognition software will convert the card’s information into text and then attempt to put this text into the appropriate categories automatically.
Apart from just phones, there was a plethora of interesting Bluetooth products on offer as well, ranging from headsets to a funky controller called the S705 Bluetooth SoundPilot, which supports the A2DP Bluetooth profile.
The A2DP profile is an industry-standard Bluetooth profile which allows the S705 Bluetooth SoundPilot not only stream audio, but also to control the audio playback wirelessly (to skip songs, control volume, etc).
Unlike the usual integrated Bluetooth headset, the S705 is a little Pebl-like device which allows you to plug in any standard stereo earphones into its standard 3.5mm stereo socket.
Interestingly, the device also has an integrated microphone so you can answer phone calls if you’ve paired it to a Bluetooth-enabled mobile phone.
Also notable was Motorola’s Portable Charger P790, which comes in all the colours of the new Pebl series.
This portable charger contains a large 1700mAh battery so you can carry it with you when you don’t have a power socket handy – the P790 is said to offer two full charges for most Motorola phones and plugs right into the miniUSB socket found on most Motorola phones.
Best of all, when you do get to a power socket, you can charge both the portable charger and the phone at the same time by plugging the wall socket charger to the portable charger connected to the mobile phone.
New Rokr
Another product worth noting is the next generation of Motorola’s iTunes phone, the Rokr E2.
The Rokr E2 improves upon the E1 by including an SD (Secure Digital) card slot for memory expansion of up to 2GB, a 1.3-megapixel camera, FM radio and the ability to stream stereo audio to a Bluetooth stereo headset
Samsung’s Q
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In fact, since it runs Windows Mobile 5.0, it has all the software features of the Motorola Q.
The phone has a miniSD slot and is supposed to support GSM/GPRS networks. Overall, the Samsung i320 is a little narrower and thinner than the Motorola Q and looks pretty good in black.
We’ll certainly be keeping an eye out on the availability of this Samsung mobile phone.
Rotating LG
LG had one of the largest booths at CommunicAsia and apart from the skimpily-clad girls, this South Korean manufacturer also had lots to show off, although most of the phones were CDMA versions unlikely to make it into this country.
One interesting model was the LB1500, a CDMA phone with a 2.2in (320 x 240pixels) screen, a miniSD slot and a 1.3-megapixel camera.
Those features are pretty standard these days but what really caught our eye was the funky screen, which can rotate 90° on its axis so you can view it in landscape mode without having to turn the whole phone on its side.
The LB1500 supports terrestrial DMB (Digital Multimedia Broadcasting), a digital transmission system for delivering audio and video over the regular television broadcasting airwaves. set is the latest Bluetooth supporting the A2DP profile which can stream stereo audio to a Bluetooth stereo headset.
While the current version of the Moto Q only supports CDMA networks, the really big news is that the people at Motorola have confirmed that a GSM version is due “by the end of the year” although no exact date has been set. -theStar
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