Smartphones have taken mobile phone technology to the next level. A combination of a personal digital assistant or PDA and mobile phone, these super-smart palm-sized gadgets are packed with useful applications. No longer just a phone, you can share data, photos, files, email, surf the web, update your calendar, listen to music and even shoot and watch movies in HD.

There are quite a few smartphones on the market to choose from but don’t be fazed by all the jargon – it really comes down to what your main usage or requirements are. Operating systems can vary from brand to brand, with Android, Windows, Apple OSX, Symbian, BlackBerry OS and the latest Samsung Bada being the main options.

If you love all the fun apps, check out the phone’s battery life because bright screens, fun games and a multitude of apps can drain the juice of a mobile. Those who like to text and email may well prefer a larger QWERTY keyboard. Some of the latest handsets also offer built-in 3G for faster data sharing and downloads while others include wi-fi for quicker access to the internet. Obviously style, size and brand are also a big part of the decision process and we’ve made it easier with a quick round up of some of the hottest handsets on the market.

For great photos on the go the Nokia X6 is a slimline 3.2-inch touchscreen handset complete with a 5-megapixel autofocus camera and Carl Zeiss lens. The 16GB version has plenty of storage for music and media files, Quick-touch access to friends and family and the option to get extra entertainment from the Nokia Ovi store. Find a Nokia X6 smartphone tariff online today.

The latest Wildfire smartphone from HTC offers a social media centre in your pocket. Thanks to Friend Stream software, you can see all updates, tweets, photos etc in one feed and even sort them by friend. Plus the simple- to-use tap to view panels and next-generation caller ID will even tell you when it’s someone’s birthday. Compare HTC Wildfire tariffs online.

Any multimedia addicts will love the Sony Ericsson Vivaz Pro. This super-slimline handset has a 16.9-inch widescreen and QWERTY slider keyboard – ideal for emailing. Plus a dedicated one-touch video button provides a fuss-free way to shoot in HD and publish online. Review all the Vivaz Pro features and tariffs.

Powered by Bada, Samsung’s hot new smartphone the Wave incorporates a mega-bright 3.3-inch Super AMOLED screen, fast 1GHz processor and HD video capture. This entertainment-rich mobile delivers responsive gaming action and plenty of social networking add-ons and all in vivid high-resolution colour. Find out more about the Samsung Wave.

The Sony Ericsson Experia X10 is a one-stop shop for all your media and social network updates. This smartphone has an impressive user interface, MP3 player, wi-fi and 3G, all packed in to a sleek glossy handset. Plus there is a 8.1-megapixel camera, which can even recognise some of your friends’ faces – and for those who like all the latest tech but in a smaller handset, check out the Sony Ericsson Experia X10 Mini.

Talking of small smartphones, the HTC Mini HD goes a long way to prove great things can come in small packages. This tiny handset offers many of the features of its bigger brothers, such as real time Twitter updates or shortcut keys for important numbers or applications, as well as HD quality images and 3G. Plus, the HTC Mini even has a 5-megapixel camera all packed in to a tiny case. Find an HTC HD Mini tariff online.

The latest iPhone 4 packs a smartphone punch for any Apple addict. Behind the minimalistic handset you’ll find HD video, 5-megapixel camera with flash, a high-resolution sharp Retina touchscreen and phone apps galore. Use the iPhone as an MP3, games console, editing suit or even for video conferencing. Review all the iPhone 4 features for yourself.

If it’s a mini PC you’re looking for then the latest Nokia N900 might just be the answer. Much more than just a smartphone, this glossy QWERTY slider handset boasts 3G, wi-fi, fast internet browsing and media entertainment thanks to the Maemo 5 operating system. Store all your files and photos on the whopping 32GB of internal memory and even tag and share your photos online with tag cloud. Check out all the Nokia N900 functionality online.

For serious texting and emailing you can’t beat a BlackBerry. The latest BlackBerry Bold 9700 features a sharp high-resolution display, intuitive trackpad navigation for easy scrolling and improved multimedia playback of up to 35 hours. Add to this hi-speed 3G network connectivity and expandable memory for extra storage and you’re good to go. Find a BlackBerry Bold tariff today.

If you want all the features of a BlackBerry, but with the touchscreen functionality of some of the other smart phones, you can’t beat the BlackBerry Storm. This neat palm-sized handset includes a SurePress virtual keyboard, 3.3-inch screen, easy switching from web-browsing to the phone features and a long battery life. Throw in a 3.2-megapixel camera and quick-link connectivity and the BlackBerry Storm has it all.

Motorola’s smart new handset called the DEXT includes Motoblur technology – ideal for streaming messages and updates right to your phone via secure synchronisation. This power-packed side slider handset manages to merge ergonomic design with functionality. Enjoy snapping away with the 5-megapixel autofocus camera, picture editing and Geo Tagging or link to the internet via wi-fi and browse the web with a full HTML browser. Compare Motorola DEXT offers online.

Finally, here’s the Desire smartphone from HTC. Heavy on personalisation widgets and HTC applications, this mobile has it all. View your photos, messages and the web on a large 3.7-inch touchscreen in super-quick time thanks to a 1 GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon processor. Use Friend Stream to follow all your social updates in one place. Promoted as an intuitive mobile, the HTC Desire is one of easiest smartphones to use thanks to its HTC Sense software. Compare HTC Desire tariffs on Ciao.

Bangalore: Nokia’s Ovi Store developers are unhappy with the way its run. Over 42 percent opinioned that the store is “below average” compared to rivals like Apple’s App Store or Google’s Android market and only 21 percent think it a better choice than the rest.

Open-First who did this survey found that the speed of the approval and posting process is considered the primary complaint as 55 percent are dissatisfied with how long it takes to reach the store. While iOS app developers have complained of exceptional delays and app rejections that didn’t have adequate explanation for a fix, delays on Ovi Store are potentially worse. One developer reported that all its apps took “months” to reach the store……..

A problem unique to Nokia was device selection: at least one developer complained that Nokia had too many phone models, making it difficult to effectively target apps. The sheer variety of phones, which run into several current models in a single series alone, sometimes a mixture of touch- and non-touch designs within those series. Both Android and the iPhone have been helped by having a consistent emphasis on touchscreens and requiring certain controls.

Unhappiness with pay is also widespread, as 81 percent of developers aren’t making the expected revenue. About 70 percent of developers feel compelled to write for another platform to support themselves.

The climate for Ovi compounds and partly explains the declining interest in Nokia at the high end, where the much wider selection of apps has led previously loyal customers to consider Apple and Google. Finland’s largest company is hoping for a turnaround with the N8 and Symbian^3 but is also facing risk as it almost starts from scratch with future MeeGo devices.

Another day, another problem for the iPhone 4. Today’s hot topic issue deals with its proximity sensor. According to a group of concerned iPhone owners on 9to5mac, the proximity sensor on the iPhone 4 isn’t quite sensitive enough and carriers a large potential for in-call issues. Users are reporting that the sensor has a tendency to think the phone is away from one’s face when it is in fact not. This can lead to user’s cheeks doing everything from muting calls to hitting the end button. Our devices aren’t suffering from this issue, but based upon what we’ve read there are quite a lot that are. How is your proximity sensor working out?

What we’re looking at here is the Nokia N9 live and in the digital flesh. Negri Electronics, the people that leaked the images, are keeping mum about the specs of the device until they’re ready to publish their full review, but from the images we can clearly see that previous rumors were correct in that there’s an 8 megapixel camera with dual-LED flash, front-facing camera with LED flash, sliding QWERTY keypad, nHD display (640×360), and support for the 850/1900 MHz bands of UMTS/HSDPA. It’s clear that this is an early prototype N9 considering its still running Symbian S60 — a platform that will now know will never again grace the Nseries line-up once the N8 is released — but we’re sure if and when Nokia launches the phone it’ll be running MeeGo. In the meantime, hit the jump for a couple more pics.

Apple kicked off an action-packed week today with the full release of iOS 4, its newest operating system for iPhone and iPod Touch devices. Though we’ve been playing with the developer’s version on an iPhone 3GS since April, we wanted to wait for the real deal before offering our official take. And from what we can tell so far, our original positive impressions hold true. That’s not say that everything is perfect, but iOS marks a significant and welcome jump in the iPhone’s evolution.

The iBooks interface is smartly designed, and pages and text are rendered extremely well. Simply put, other e-reader applications pale in comparison to iBooks. It’s only too bad that the selection isn’t as good as some of its rivals. The newest version of iBooks supports in-app PDF viewing, as well as ePub files.

Check out this excerpt from our longer iOS 4 Walkthrough video that shows off iBooks for iPhone and compares it head-on with the Kindle app. You can also take a look at the features in the gallery below.

What do you think of iBooks for iPhone? Will you use it to read books on your phone?

Sony Ericsson Xperia Sony Ericsson announced X8ad. X8 is a 3-inch display with a resolution HVGA.
Phone is powered by a 600MHz Qualcomm processor and operates Android 1.6. The Official Sony Ericsson Blog posted a video hands on the camera.
X8 Xperia Android 1.6 is normal somewhere deep under the skin Custom. This means (mediascape) aggregators like it or not, and practical look at the earliest pictures, the Sony Ericsson social (Cape Times) and the media, it seems directly interface Mini X10. 3.2-megapixel camera is in the back, WiFi, a 600MHz processor, 1200 mAh, and the volatility of the stock market provides the contents at the end. X8 costs about € 259 ($ 318) start in the third quarter of this year.

It depends a QWERTY keyboard on the screen (as opposed to mini-X10 virtual alphanumeric keyboard). And although not mentioned in the video, it would be a landscape, QWERTY, a virtual keyboard displayed Android camp.
X8
Video also shows an important indicator – Sony Ericsson XPERIA X8 is in the largest markets for less than 200 € (250 U.S. $). Lowest prices good sales – such as Motorola FlipOut estimate of about 350 €.

Nokia is apparently unable to combat the challenge given by touch-screen smart-phones manufacturers and they were humble enough to admit it on the record.

Nokia’s performance has plunged over the years and in sales specifically. Still they are standing at 40 percent market share, but all those are low-end, in-expensive cell phones with little margins.

Recently Nokia cut its forecast for profit for this quarter reasoning intensifying competition in the high-end segment, a shift in its product mix toward devices with lower margins, and the depreciation of the euro.

It’s not that Cell phone maker is quietly witnessing the empire to fall, Nokia actually reorganized its business twice in recent months, replaced a top handset executive and creating a business unit to focus solely on smartphones.

But maybe that’s not working out as Wall Street Journal said: Nokia Dials More Wrong Numbers!

The company plans to launch a new lineup of smartphones later this year, but industry watchers had expected the devices to come in the first half, underscoring concern that Nokia isn’t getting new phones to market quickly enough. Nokia Ovi Store has also fallen far short of Apple’s App Store in terms of the number of downloads and applications it offers.

There are similar concerns about Nokia’s user interface – another key battleground in the smartphone segment as users seek slicker ways to navigate around the growing array of mobile applications. A new version of Symbian, Nokia’s dominant platform, had been set for launch in the second quarter, but Symbian3 now won’t arrive until the third quarter.

Microsoft will release a new mobile OS for enterprise handheld devices later this year as it tries to simplify the Windows Mobile upgrade cycle for customers, the company said Thursday. The Windows Embedded Handheld OS will come out later this year and be based on the Windows Mobile 6.5 technology, said David Kelley, product unit manager for Windows Embedded at Microsoft, at an event in New York.

In 2011, the company will release a new version of Windows Embedded Handheld, which will be based on Windows Embedded Compact 7 OS, Kelley said. The OS will feature a richer and immersive user experience, and improve on reliability and security features, Kelley said.

The company wants to provide backward compatibility and a clear upgrade path from Windows Mobile 6.5 to the upcoming operating systems, Kelley said. That should extend the lifecycle of devices such as smartphones…..

Microsoft announced Windows Embedded Compact 7 last month as the next generation of the Windows Embedded CE platform. The OS can be used in embedded systems such as in set-top boxes and slates.

The company has announced the Windows Phone 7 OS for smartphones. Microsoft’s focus on consumer mobile devices will continue through the Windows Phone brand, Kelley said.

The announcement came at the launch of Motorola’s ES400 Enterprise Digital Assistant, which is a smartphone designed for enterprise use. It runs on the Windows Mobile 6.5 OS.