T-Mobile have found a unique way to keep high-paying customers coming back for more. Or a least, unique for legal operations: selling unlocked iPhone 3Gs! Yes, the 3Gs that are exclusive to O2. Yes, unlocked the way that Apple are extremely litigiously against. It’s definitely a case of “Give them what they want.”
T-Mobile are managing this by being pretty quiet about it (though not quite quiet enough, what with this being on the internet and all) and jumping through a series of legal loopholes that’d make someone suing McDonald’s for making hot food blush. They’re only offering the iPhones to upgrading customers, technically meaning they’re reselling phones that happen to be unSIMmed, and they’re doing it in small numbers – thereby maintaining high paying customers while (they hope) not shifting enough units to enrage Apple. We’ll have to wait and see if they get away with it.
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Welsh is spoken by approximately 725,000 people in England and Wales and although there are very few solely Welsh speakers, there are enough people who undoubtably prefer to express themselves in their native tongue. Seeing as phone manufacturers need to adapt keyboards and add language packs for many European dialects, it makes sense to add Welsh to the list!
Samsung are the company in question and from the 1st September the S5600 will contain a library of 44,000 Welsh words to make texting somewhat easier than using an English only T9 system! Also known as the Preston – Samsung should have nicknamed it the Swansea, as Preston is not in Wales – the S5600 is a 3G phone with HSDPA, a 3.2 megapixel camera, the TouchWiz interface, expandable memory and A2DP Bluetooth v2.1. Even without the Welsh language add-on, the S5600 is a great touchscreen phone available at a competitive price.
This isn’t the first time Samsung have identified a niche language market in need of filling, as last year they were the first to add Gaeilge – the Irish language – to a mobile phone, in this case the Tocco. It will be interesting to see the sales figures of the S5600 in Wales at the start of next year to see exactly how well this new function has been received.
At first it was hoped Samsung’s first Android phone would be on sale in the UK during June, but at the beginning of July this date was pushed forward to the second week of August, which we hope remains accurate. Coming at the same time as this adjusted release date was the news that O2 would be the UK operator flying the Galaxy flag.
Reports indicate the phone will have both an 8GB internal memory and a MicroSD card slot for another 32GB, plus a 3.5mm jack plug for using you own headphones. The design may be a typically Samsung-style approach, but its 11mm chassis thickness is slightly slimmer than the Magic and is rumoured to be metallic.
All the initial photos of the i7500 showed a model in black, but now we have some leaked images showing a very fetching white version, a colour which seems to suit Android phones rather well. So what have we got to look forward to in this Samsung offering? Aside from the Cupcake Android OS, it has a 5 megapixel camera, 3G with 7.2Mbps HSDPA and HSUPA, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, GPS, 8GB internal memory and a 320×480 AMOLED touchscreen.
If it wasn’t for Verizon’s habit of castrating WIFI capable phones, there would not be any excitement about the spyshots that show a BlackBerry Storm 2 mobile phone – with WIFI support. WiFi? Duh! Even my photo frame has WiFi, so what’s the big deal? What we would be excited about would be to learn that the Storm 2 handset has a much faster graphics interface with decent hardware acceleration. When we asked about OpenGL ES support, we were told by RIM that 3D graphics were “not a priority right now”. That’s too bad.
Nokia has released a firmware update 11.043 for its N86 handset, and for those who are clueless as to how to download the update, head on to the Applications folder and select software update, following the instructions displayed thereafter. According to Nokia’s changelog, this firmware update will allow you to download content straight to your device via Nokia Ovi Store instead of the Download! option previously. Apart from that, landscape orientation functionality will be improved in in Nokia Maps alongside enhancements in the Browser, Share Online, Camera and Settings Wizard segments.
