Coming Soon: Nokia 8208

High-end CDMA phones from Nokia are as rare as snowfall in the desert. Naturally we're delighted to come across this one -- meet the Nokia 8208, the newest CDMA (EV-DO/1Xrtt) based handset from the Finnish phone maker.
From the looks of it, the 8208 bears an uncanny resemblance to its GSM-based cousin N96 and might just end up as the first phone from the Series 40 stable to sport a dual-slider design. And, there's a Chinese version as well, the 8208C.
On the features front, the phone has a 3.0 mega pixels camera with flash and 6x digital zoom; a 2.2-inches screen that displays 16 million colors and sports a decent QVGA (240 x 320) resolution; 150MB internal memory that can be expanded up to 8GB; FM Radio; a dedicated music co-processor; etc. The phone supports BREW 3.1.5 for browsing and comes with a mini USB port and Bluetooth 2.0 with EDR.

The phone promises 20 hours music playback on a full charge, and 11 days standby and 4 hours talk time.

As of now, the phone is listed as "coming soon" on the Nokia Web site.

source : http://www.techtree.com/

Next Windows Mobile version arriving next week

Microsoft is getting ready to take the wraps off the latest version of Windows Mobile, according to a report out Tuesday.

Pocket Lint is claiming that Microsoft will release Windows Mobile 6.1 next Tuesday, which happens to be the day that Microsoft's Robbie Bach, head of the Windows Mobile team, is planning to give a keynote address at the CTIA Wireless conference in Las Vegas. Purely a coincidence, I'm sure, although it will be April Fool's Day.
Windows Mobile 6.1 will be the first major update to ship since version 6.0 made its debut last year. Screenshots that leaked out earlier this year hinted that 6.1 would use a sleeker interface, cutting down on some of the clutter in the 6.0 version.

The sixth version came with some incremental improvements to Windows Mobile 5.0, according to CNET's review of WM 6. But next year, Microsoft is expected to take a nod from Apple's OS X and release a touch-screen-oriented user interface as part of Windows Mobile 7.

I'll be at CTIA next week for Bach's keynote address along with several colleagues, as we check out the latest from Microsoft's smartphone group. At the moment, Windows Mobile phones are quite popular with the CNET News.com crowd, but there's not a single company in this industry that isn't re-examining its future road map after watching the debut of the iPhone.

source : http://www.cnet.com.au/