Samsung surprised all guests at a Corby event in December, with a new mobile phone range.

Samsung have created a range of mobile phones designed for women, who are looking for the fashion accessory phone.  The Samsung Diva (S7070) and the Samsung Olivia (S5150) are the first phones come from this new ladies range.

Design and usability
This range is all about the unique design, or should we say never-before seen design.  The Samsung Diva is a mid-range phone with a little extra – from the front the Diva looks like a basic touchscreen phone with a gem styled ‘Back’ key button. But once you turn the phone over that all changes, you are welcomed with a pearly white colour and 3D quilted back.

The 3D quilted diamond shapes cover the back of the phone with a loudspeaker grill designed with style and a smart black lens for the taking pictures.  The lens allows for a 3.1-megapixel camera with auto focus and that combined with MMS means you can snap those fantastic fashion moments and share them with friends.

It doesn’t stop there ‘the beauty effects’ feature allows you to snap some pictures and then edit them, make them look better! Another important feature is smile shot, this means your camera picks up on when someone is smile, allowing you to take the best possible pictures.

Social-networking
The Diva offers easy access to social networks, including Facebook, MySpace and many more. It’s really easy to keep up to date with friends and family and keep them up to date with you.

Diva size
The Samsung Diva is slim-line measuring at a small 13.4mm thick, light-weight and portable the phone can fit into any bag.  Standing at 101 x 54.3 x 13.4mm in all.

Chat with friends
With up to 10 hours talk time, you don’t just have to keep up to date with friends via social network sites – Chat till your heart’s content!

Safety first
The Samsung S7070 has smart unlocking system. ‘Smart unlock’ allows you to unlock your Diva with by simply drawing a letter on the screen. If you pick the letter ‘P’, everytime you draw a letter ‘P’ on the screen you can unlock your phone.

Gesture control
Not only can you unlock your phone via gesture control, you can also open a menu item or application, or you can even call a friend – all simply by drawing a letter on the screen.

The Samsung Diva (S7070) does lots more, there’s a built-in FM radio and Music player for all you music lovers.  You can also share your favourite tracks with family and friends and set them as you ringtone.  The music play lets you filter tracks by album, genre and author, while automatic playlists are generated (most played).  There’s many more music features, I’ve just touched on a couple.

TouchWiz – what’s it all about?
TouchWiz is the latest user interface which brings a familiar Samsung experience and offers an easy to use navigation around your phone to key features. You will have three non-scrollable home screens with widgets, and the new, flatter multi-page main menu.  (Similar look to that of the iphone menu).

Overall the Diva has style, usability and a huge feature set – what more could a girl want. To be the first to hear about this, click-here.

T-Mobile is one of the top mobile phone operators and has seen their site conversions increase by a fifth in the two months, since they gave their site a massive clean up.

Back in October the mobile network agreed to merge its UK operations with a big rival operator – Orange. T-Mobile relaunched their site back in November as apart of a year-long ramping up for all online activity. Since this ramp the sites conversion rates increase by 20% – the head of T-Mobile’s online experience said, ‘the aim was to help consumers who are confused by mobile retail sites’.

He went onto say, ‘Historically, as an industry, we haven’t really talked to them in a language they can understand, whether it’s about deals, tariffs or handsets. We’re looking at how to expand from the existing site to become a benchmark etail site for mobile and the wider industry.

T-Mobile in November reached 1.73 million visits in November 2009.

Have a look at our T-Mobile offers – Click Here!

Paying for applications, would you? Have you? Should you? There are lots of questions surrounding the price of apps!

A popular marketing magazine ran a poll to see just how may of us would pay for apps, interestingly only 36% said they were willing to pay for an iPhone app from the Apple APP store.

Back in 2007 we saw the launch of the iPhone and since this time Apple has managed to develop millions of apps and has now been branded the largest Application outlet in the world. Within the app store you have about 20 categories worth of applications, these range from business to news, too games and travel.

Here’s a staggering fact for you, App Store customers have downloaded well over 3 billion apps, but according to reports the latest UK poll, showed that 63.6% of respondents would not pay to download an app. With the remaining 36.4% saying they have spent money on at least one app for their Apple iPhone.

The COI – Central Office of Information, is the biggest UK advertiser, its called for guidelines to be offered on advertising in mobile phone apps. This way of adverting has become increasingly popular with worldwide brands and will continue to grow as the iPhone app store does.

Competition
The success of the Apple App Store has prompted big competition between brand to get there adverts on the apps.  No results show just how effective this way of advertising is, but I’m sure they soon will do.

The most noticeable competitor for the Apple app store is the Nokia Ovi Store, but with the launch of the Google Nexus one – there may be new competition…

Would you pay for an app?

Rumours are out that Sony Ericsson have manufactured a phone called the Sony Ericsson Kurara, all specifications are unofficial at the moment as Sony haven’t  signed off features.

Lets’ have a little look at the phone:
Key features include, an 8.0-megapixel camera, with touch-focus, geo-tagging, face and smile detected and video recording. With all these camera features, you’ll the Kurara will allow you to take amazing pictures with great Sony quality.

The Kurara apparently has a 3.2 inch touchscreen which has accelerometer sensors; this allows you to view your screen horizontally and vertically. The phone is also rumoured to have built-in Wi-Fi , 3G and A-GPS support.

With mobiles phones becoming more like mobile organisers features become more useful, gone are the days were you had a separate TomTom, mobile phone, MP3 Player and laptop it’s all in one now. The Kurara will become your mobile organiser, with Google Maps allowing you to find step-by-step directions. For all you social media fans you have Facebook and Twitter applications, allowing you to post comments on friend’s pictures and update your status.

Gesture Control means you can mute the Sony Kurara with a wave of a hand, or snooze the alarm if you’re lying in bed. The Kurara’s Gesture Control feature allows true ‘handsfree’ handling of calls. Gesture control makes using your mobile phone effortless and allows you to interact with features quicker.

Summary of key features:
8.0-megapixel camera
3.2 inch touchscreen
Accelerometer sensor auto-rotate
Wi-Fi
Google maps
Gesture control

Size:
TBC

Display:
TFT touchscreen
16million colours
Display 360 x640 pixels
3.2 inch screen
Accelerometer sensor for auto-rotate

Sound:
Vibration
MP3 ringtones
Speakerphone
3.5mm audio jack

Memory:
150 MB storage
256MB RAM
MicroSD up to 32GB

Data:
EDGE
3G
GPRS
WLAN
Bluetooth
Infra red
USB
Symbian Series 60, 5th edition
ARM Cortex A8 600 MHz, PowerVR SGX graphics

Browser:
WAP 2.0
HTML

Messaging:
MMS
SMS
Email

Radio:
Stereo FM radio with RDS

Other features:
Google maps
Facebook and Twitter apps
YouTube and Picasa integration
WMV/RV/MP4/3GP video player
MP3/WMA/WAV/RA/AAC/M4A music player
Organizer
Gesture control

All features and information to be confirmed once Sony Ericsson have announced this information.

Back in September 2008 Sony announced the launch of the highly anticipated Xperia X1 with availability throughout Europe, Asia and Latin America. The phone gave Sony customers a new user experience and created an innovative design. If you liked the Sony Ericsson Xperia X1 or were a little interested, the brand new Xperia X10 really is going to wow you.

Back in December I did post about the Xperia X1, check out the post – Click Here

What’s the Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 all about?
The idea of the X10 is to introduce and open up the integrated world of social networking, entertainment and communication. Due in April 2010 the X10 has a new US (user experience) platform, that allows you to organise your business and personal life with a better experience.

Have a look at the TV advert:

More about the UX platform
Without going into lots of technical terminology the UX platform allows Sony customers to experience a unique experience. How? By mixing together the very ‘best-in-class entertainment features with signature applications’, ‘unrivalled integration of social media services’ and a ‘rich graphical user interface’.  Sony are claiming the Xperia X10 is the first mobile phone to humanise the way we interact with phones.

The President at Sony Ericsson said: “The XPERIA™ X10 and the family of phones launching in the first half of 2010 underpin our commitment to an open and multi-platform strategy that maximises choice for the consumer and delivers the best possible consumer experience. The reaction from our global operator partners to the XPERIA X10 has been extremely positive and we will be rolling out across the world including Japan from the first half of 2010.”

Signature applications
I mentioned above ‘signature applications’, these include Mediascape and Timescape™ – both these allow you to organise everything in your life on your phone in an intuitive way.

So what are they all about? Sony Ericsson Mediascape allows you to get all the music, photos and videos you want from friends and artists. It smartly accesses multimedia from everywhere; this includes PlayNow™, YouTube™ and your phone. Sony Ericsson Timescape™ this application manages all your communication with one person in one place. So for example, you can browse through conversations on Facebook, Twitter, photos, email and texts all in one go.

This works by cleverly recognising connections between contacts, content and media. Allowing for this connection, customers are able to use a wider range of ways of communication without the hassle of chasing up conversations. It is all about maximum choice with the Xperia X10, you can download any applications you want directly from a huge range of stores including PlayNow™ and the Android Market™.

So now you know the details, let’s have a look at the key features and the full spec.

Key features
8.1-megapixel camera
4.0 inch touchscreen
Google™ search (from standby)
Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync®

Full Xperia X10 specification:

Design and display
Auto rotate
Gesture control
Picture wallpaper
4.0 inches  Touchscreen
Google Maps™
65,536 colour TFT Touchscreen
480 x 854 pixels (WVGA)
Scratch-resistant

Camera information
8.1 megapixel camera
Up to 16x digital zoom
Auto focus
Intelligent face recognition features
Geo tagging
Image and video stabilizer
Photo and video light
Send to web (photo and video upload)
Smile detection
Touch focus
Video recording
Recent shot tray

Music
Album art
PlayNow™
TrackID™
Bluetooth™ stereo (A2DP)
Media player
Music tones (MP3/AAC)

Web
Bookmarks
Google™ search (from standby)
Web feeds
WebKit web browser

Communication
Sony Ericsson Timescape™
Speakerphone
Vibrating alert

Messaging
Email
Conversations
Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync®
Picture messaging (MMS)
Predictive text input
Text messaging (SMS)

Entertainment
3D games
Media browser
Infinite button
Video streaming
Video viewing
YouTube™

Organiser
Alarm clock
Calculator
Calendar
Flight mode
Infinite button
Office suite
Phone book with dialer
World clock

Connectivity
A-GPS
Google Maps™
Wisepilot™ turn-by-turn navigation* (free trial version)
3.5 mm audio jack
Bluetooth™ technology
Micro USB connector
Synchronisation
USB support
Wi-Fi™

Other information
Size: 119 x 63 x 13 mm
Weight: 135 grams
Phone memory: Up to 1 GB
Memory card support: microSD™
Memory card included: 8 GB
Operating system: Google™ Android Donut, version 1.6
Processor: 1GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon™ QSD8250

Availability and versions
Networks
UMTS HSPA 900/1700/2100
GSM GPRS/EDGE 850/900/1800/1900
UMTS HSPA 800/1900/2100
GSM GPRS/EDGE 850/900/1800/1900

If you want to be the first to hear about when we have the Xperia X10 in stock and fancy winning a PS3 Slim, sign-up to our newsletter today – click here