As soon as Google announced its Android OS for mobile phones it quite appealed to me.
I’m currently quite happy with my Nokia N95 8GB, but still… 
The HTC Magic, currently available over here in Norway is not quite my style though… I prefer my phones to be black!
I also want a phone with at least the specs of my current phone, also when it comes to photo/video capabilities. It looks like the upcoming Samsung I7500 meets most/all of these specs with its 5 megapixel camera. (Not sure about its video recording yet though. The N95 does 640×480, 30 fps. Not many phones available yet which can beat that, even 2 years after the N95 hit the streets.
Although… The HTC Hero looks pretty cool as well, and it has more RAM than the Samsung I7500. (Question is: Does Android need that extra RAM?). It does not have the same nifty AMOLED screen as the I7500 though…
And then there’s of course the rumoured Sony Ericsson XPERIA (aka Rachael) with its 8mp camera.
Hmm.. To be continued! 
I know I already mentioned this last september, but I have now finally ordered all the components to replace/upgrade my little Linux server. The final component list is as follows:
The parts could arrive as early as tomorrow, so hopefully I get some time this weekend. And I also still have to make the final choice between KVM, VirtualBox & VMware… Most likely I go for KVM + virt-manager. I guess I will pay a last visit to the Virtual Machine forums to double-check my facts.
Yup, it’s that time of the year again. I’ll just ignore that the financial situation of this planet is going down the crapper at top speed and will invest a substantial amount of $$$ into a new Linux server. Main requirements:
- quiet. The box is standing under my desk, and I do not want to be able to hear it.
- plenty of storage. A couple of 1TB drives should take care of that.
- failover. The aforementioned drives will be configured as… RAID5? RAID10? Not sure yet…
- powerful enough to run several VM guests at the same time, so a good quad core CPU & plenty of RAM.
I think I have finally worked out the components line-up:
These parts should add up to a pretty cool beast…
The OS will most likely be (Gentoo) Linux with VMware, VirtualBox or KVM. Both the new releases of VMware and VirtualBox look promising, but I still lean towards KVM… Perhaps www.virtualmachineforums.info can shed some light on it for me…
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
- 106x50x12.9 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.
As soon as Google announced its Android OS for mobile phones it quite appealed to me.
