Well, I finally decided to retire my faithful SE W810i cell phone and I have ordered a Nokia N95 8GB. It should take about a week before I actually receive the unit, but that will still be in time for my trip to the Netherlands.

As compared to the original N95, the N95 8GB drastically increases the memory of the standard N95 but keeps its functionality, including quad-band GSM with UMTS/HSDPA, WiFi, GPS and 5-megapixel camera. It also increases the display size from 2.6 to 2.8 inches and redesigns the music keyboard not to be flat.

All in all a worthy replacement of my current phone. B-)

Next week the Mobile World Congress 2008 will start in Barcelona, Spain. This event, formerly known as 3GSM World Congress, is a combination of the world’s largest exhibition for the mobile industry and a congress featuring CEO’s representing mobile operators, vendors and content owners from across the world.

At this event traditionally many new mobile phones will be presented. Some of these to hit the market immediately after the congress, others to remain concept models forever.

These are (some of the) models that are rumored to be announced/shown on the MWC:

• E-TEN Glofiish M810
  • The Glofiish M810 is a sleekly portable, HSDPA, Wi-Fi b/g and GPS ready handset, designed to help the new breed of bloggers, podcasters, video makers, and chatters, stay online and updated wherever they are. A full QWERTY keyboard makes blogging, text messaging and chatting quick and convenient, while a 2-megapixel auto-focus camera is great for capturing pictures or video that can be uploaded easily to a web-album or video sharing site. Finally, built-in JAVA support allows fun mobile games to be downloaded and played anywhere.
• E-TEN Glofiish V900
  • The Glofiish V900 is E-TEN’s first Pocket PC Phone to feature mobile TV. With major events such as UEFA Euro 2008 and the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games scheduled this year, there are sure to be events that people just don’t want to miss, and thanks to the V900’s support for DVB-H, DVB-T, TDMB and DAB broadcasting standards, they won’t have to. V900 also offers the benefits of VGA display and all-in-one connectivity solution comprising of HSDPA, GSM, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and GPS. Along with the Glofiish V900 E-TEN will debut its newly developed touch-based user interface.
• LG KF600
• LG KF700
• Nokia N96
  • Specifications (unconfirmed):
    • Quad band GSM (850/900/1800/1900), GPRS/EDGE, dual band (850/2100) HSDPA connectivity
    • Symbian, S60 FP2
    • 2.8″ QVGA 320×240px 16M Color display
    • 5 megapixel with Carl Zeiss lens, dual LED flash
    • Secondary front camera for video calls
    • 30 fps, VGA quality
    • 16GB built-in Flash Memory
    • DVB-H, class C, 470-750 MHz TV Tuner
    • Wi-Fi b/g, Bluetooth 2.0 +EDR, microUSB
    • aGPS
    • Full HTML, Flash Lite enabled Web Browser
    • Dimensions: 103×55×18-20 mm, 92 cc
    • Battery: Nokia Battery BL-5F, 950 mAh, Talk time: GSM: up to 220 min; UMTS: Up to 150 min, Stand-by Time: GSM: Up to 220 hours; UMTS up to 200 hours, Video playback: Up to 5 hours (in offline mode), Music playback: Up to 14 hours (in offline mode), TV Play: Up to 4 hours (DVB-H)
  • Standard package (unconfirmed):
    • Nokia N96
    • Nokia battery BL-5F
    • Nokia data cable CA-101
    • Nokia video output cable, CA-75U
    • Nokia Stereo Headset-HS-45, with remote AD-54
    • Nokia cigarette lighter charger cable DC-4
    • Nokia compact AC-5E
• Samsung SGH-E490
  • The Samsung SGH-E490 provides you aesthetic versatility. The handset features a 176×220 resolution on its TFT screen, multimedia player, EDGE and GPRS connectivity, Bluetooth 1.2 and USB 1.1, 25MB internal memory, and 1.3-megapixel camera with 4x optical zoom.
• Samsung G810
  • Specifications (unconfirmed):
    • GSM/UMTS/3.6 Mbps HSDPA connectivity
    • Symbian 9.2 OS with S60 3.1 UI
    • 2.6? 262K Color QVGA TFT display
    • 5 megapixel camera with 3x optical zoom, anti-shake, face recognition, macro mode, autofocus, etc
    • 150 MB of memory and microSD memory card slot
    • GPS navigation
    • Wi-FI b/g
    • Bluetooth 2.0 EDR, USB 2.0 (microUSB connector)
    • 1200 mAh battery
    • Dimensions: 104×52×9×18 mm
• Samsung U900 ‘Soul’
  • Specifications (unconfirmed):
    • Quad-band, HSDPA 7.2 Mbps
    • 2.2″ 16M QVGA TFT screen
    • 5MP camera with auto focus
    • Digital zoom
    • 106×50x12.9 mm
• Sony Ericsson G700i
• Sony Ericsson G900i
• Sony Ericsson Xperia X1
  • Probably the biggest surprise of the Sony Ericsson batch - the Xperia X1 is a Windows Mobile smartphone with a 3″ 800 x 480 pixel resolution touchscreen display. Coming in two quad-band UMTS variants, the Xperia X1 also has a 3.2 megapixel camera, GPS and WiFi, plus a host of other goodies. Sure, we’ve seen handsets like this before, but not from one of the big five players.
    And the choice of Windows Mobile as an operating system is a complete shock - until now, Sony Ericsson was a Symbian-only manufacturer.

I just came across TunIn.fm. This website enables you to listen to radio stations on your cell phone, even if your phone does not have a builtin radio! To access the stations, you simply point your WAP browser at http://wap.tunin.fm/ and select the station you wish to listen to. 1-2 seconds later the radio stations streams live from your phone speaker. It doesn’t get any easier than that! The system supports most modern cell phones, and has currently more than 200 (mostly Dutch) radio stations in its list.

One thing to keep in mind though is that this uses quite some bandwidth, so if you do not have a flat rate internet access subscription for your phone, you may want to think twice before using it…