A little while back I pondered on Nokia spreading their wings further than just the mobile phone market with the registration of the Cseries and Xseries trademarks, and even had a little guess that they might be thinking about making inroads towards the netbook market. Well, I guess I was half right.

Announced just a couple of days ago, Nokia’s Booklet 3G will be similarly specced as most current netbooks on the market: a 1.6GHz Intel Atom Z530 CPU, 120GB hard drive and a 10.1″ LCD, as well as integrated 3G, a swappable SIM card, A-GPS, Bluetooth and WiFi.

Straight away you can see that familiar Nokia ‘curve’ design, but will that be enough to compete with the myriad of already-established brandnames in the netbook market? Asus, Acer, Samsung, MSI, HP, Lenovo, Dell… these guys have been releasing system after system for a while now. But what sets the Booklet 3G apart from other netbooks is the higher resolution screen, as well as an HDMI output, and Nokia are claiming a 12 hour battery life.

I guess the jury’s out until we start getting our hands on them – September 2nd marks the Nokia World conference in Stuttgart, Germany, and I’m sure we can expect them to be giving UK release dates and prices.

The future is here. Or I suppose you could say that the future has been here for a while, but they’d never got it quite right in order for it to become commercially popular. Sure, the famous Casio calculator watches have their own cult following even now, but this wristwatch is packing rather more than just number crunching.

For all those James Bond wannabes who want a wristwatch that does much more than just tell you the time, the wait will soon be over. The hand made LG GD19 was first presented at this year’s CES in January, and gained some popularity when it was found to be pretty darned useable, against all odds.

The tough stuff out of the way: how does it work? Well, it has a pretty decent speakerphone on it, but you’d certainly be better off with a Bluetooth headset. The watch packs stereo Bluetooth, so it’s not a bad choice for listening to music on the go, either. You can dial numbers either by asking it ever so nicely thanks to its voice-activated dialling, or with the onscreen keypad; and texting is performed via the touchscreen keyboard. There’s even a VGA camera built-in, and for the truly image conscious, there’s even a choice of 8 different faceplates so you can make your watchphone your own. Check out the phone demo below for a closer look.

Hopefully the £500 price tag will prevent thousands of teenagers across the country from giving loud demonstrations of their new gizmo (and all included ringtones) on the back of buses. Since only a limited number are being made, LG are looking to gauge public reaction to see if the form factor will really take off if made more publicly available.

On sale from August 27th and available only on Orange, this really could be one to watch.

(Sorry.)

Source: telegraph.co.uk/technology/mobile-phones/

Dr Caroline Tagg from Birmingham University has become the first post-grad to gain a PhD in… text messaging.

Her family helped her dredge through 11,000 text messages from 235 people: some 190,000 words. Surprisingly, she found that amongst the 235 people, the now-familiar “Textese” abbreviations weren’t the norm. However, I’m willing to bet that if the sample texts had been from the demographic who used text messaging the most (I’m guessing teenagers), that would most likely have been the case.

She said: “It was a long haul but that is normal. I believe it is the first PhD in the UK to look at the language of text messaging.

“There is a panic in the media about the effect of text messaging and people are genuinely worried about it.

“It is perceived to have a negative impact on language but a lot of people don’t really look at the text.”

She analysed spelling, grammar and abbreviations used in social and business texts. Caroline said the average text contains 17.5 words.

And she discovered from her 80,000 word thesis that there is more to texting that just abbreviations – something most people associate with texting.

“Actually, not many people use abbreviations,” she said. “People use playful manipulation and metaphors. It is a playful language. Not only are they quite creative, it is also quite expressive.”

Personally (though I suppose I am a bit of a grumpy old man when it comes to these kinds of things), I do hate txtspk. It’s annoying to read (for me, anyway); and most people are getting plenty of free texts every month, so why not just spill over into another message? Another Telegraph article from 2004 shows that some pupils are already starting to resort to text message language in their GCSE exams, and that sounds like a bit of a slippery slope to me.

So, 2b or nt 2b?

Apologies for all the iPhone posts, but it looks like there’s rather a lot going on with everybody’s favourite touchscreen mobile phone at the moment…

Here’s a little bit of good news for people still unsure as to whether they want to subscribe to a network monopoly in order to get their hands on the iPhone – rumour has it that O2’s exclusivity on the handset will end on the 9th October, though it looks as though they will retain solitary rights to the 3rd generation iPhone 3GS.

Great news for those who have been admiring the iPhone from afar but didn’t want to switch networks or hack their new, expensive device for a taste! O2 remain tight-lipped on the actual date, though. The facts are that they currently hold the rights to sell the iPhone until 2012, but the deal to be the sole network was only a two-year contract, and that’s almost come to an end.

Since it’s only the UK, USA and Germany who have adopted network exclusivity (out of around 80 countries in which the iPhone is sold), this development doesn’t really change the bigger picture for the iPhone. But one thing’s for sure – you can expect to see far more of them once they’re readily available on every cellular network.

As of mid-July 2009 Apple had approved over 65,000 apps to the burgeoning App Store, and had attracted over 1,500,000,000 downloads from iPhone and iPod Touch users. Added to the wonderfully useful Twitter clients With the sheer amount of pointless apps in the store – such as fart machines, accelerometer-aided Zippo lighters, and even a toaster simulator – you would think that Apple’s approach to sanctioning third party apps was fairly lax. That is, until an app comes along that treads on a few of Apple’s toes.

Google Voice was in the news a week or so ago thanks to the official iPhone app (along with some from third party developers) being rejected from the App Store on the somewhat dubious grounds that it ‘replicates existing features on the iPhone’. Whilst it was OK for hundreds of alternative SMS and VoIP (most notably Skype and Fring) – all of which duplicate features already on the iPhone – Google Voice has earned Apple’s ire. However, it’s somewhat suspicious to note that it was removed a while after it had been accepted into the App store, implying that perhaps somebody else was a little peeved at their potential loss of profits.

AT&T – the most likely culprit here, since Google Voice would certainly impinge on their profits with cheaper calls & SMS – claimed to have no involvement once the regulatory body of the FCC got involved in the debâcle, though a little Googling shows that there is a certain degree of evidence that hints otherwise.

OK, so it’s not exactly the first time that Apple haven’t acted like the most forward-thinking company ever, beyond its somewhat draconian App Store approval system: the iPhone OS has, since the very beginning, been tightly restricted by Apple to prevent (amongst many other things) SIM unlocking, non-sanctioned third party apps, and customisation of fonts, user interface and ringtones.

iPod Touch 2G users were excited about the enabling of the existing Bluetooth chip in the 3.0 firmware update until updating revealed that it only gave wireless headset functionality and ad-hoc multiplayer – still no BT file transfer, which has been standard on the vast majority of mobile phones and mid to high-end electronic devices since before 2003.

Thankfully there still remain a few alternatives for getting Google Voice – not yet available in the UK, sadly – working on your iPhone, but you’ll need to jailbreak your phone to get hold of them.