3 Ireland to Trial Live Broadcast

3 Ireland are to start testing Mobile TV, ComReg has issued Hutchison 3G Ireland with a temporary permit to begin testing DVB-H (digital video broadcast over handheld) services.

Over the next year 3 will be testing this and hopefully offering it to it’s customer. As of yet we have no more information on the rollout or what channels will be available.

We’ll keep you posted when we get more information

Nokia 6230i

Take a trip to the Vodafone website and you’ll find they are offering the Nokia 6230i for Bill Pay Upgrades for €59, the 6230i is one of the most popular phones in the Irish market everybody at some stage has had one or the older model the 6230. So what makes this phone so popular?

The 6230i is based on the classic Nokia design with a 1.3 megapixel camera and high-resolution screen which can display 65K colours, based as it is on Nokia’s Series 40 platform, the Nokia 6230i is really user friendly and agile, while text input is a breeze due to the excellent interaction between keypad and operating system.

A 32 MB MMC card comes bundled in the box, integrated FM radio, MP3 playback, Tri-band GSM 900/1800/1900 MHz, Record and playback your video messages to name just a few features.

Nokia 6288 announced

The Nokia 6288 has been announced today, this is a 3G slider phone which some high end features.

Dont expect to see this for a couple of months but we might see this in Ireland before the end of the year around the €300 price range.

The Spec for the 6288 includes:

* QVGA screen with 262k colors
* 2-megapixel camera for imaging, VGA camera for video calls
* Bluetooth
* Video ringtones

Nokia N80 Review

If you have €500 burning a hole in your pocket and your looking for a new mobile maybe you should take a look at the Nokia N80. It’s been around since early this year but three.ie are offering it online for a reasonable price.

This 3 megapixels slider-phone comes with 40 MB internal memory, miniSD (up to 2GB), hot swap, 128 MB card included. The OS is S60 3rd edition and come with the standard MP3/AAC/MPEG4 player and Stereo FM Radio for phones in this price range.

The N80 is a brilliant smartphone the picture display is absolutely stunning. Connectivity includes 3G, Wi-Fi 802.11g, Bluetooth and USB. You can also use synchronization via Bluetooth or USB for Microsoft Outlook.

Overall this is a stunning phone the high-resolution screen and 3 Megapixel Camera are brilliant but the camera lacks autofocus, which can reduce picture quality.

With 3,5 hours of talk time, 6 days of standby you cant go wrong, anyway pop over three.ie and check it out.

Netgear SPH101 Skype WiFi Phone

We should expect to see the Netgear SPH101 Skype Wi-Fi Phone around October in Ireland, if you haven’t see this yet the phone is capable of making Skype calls via a WiFi connection, therefore cutting out the need for a PC.

While all calls to Skype users are totally free you can also call non-Skype users by paying a small fee you simply need to buy some credit from Skype.

So what are the advantages of this phone

* Call anybody in the world free
* No PC required
* Make and receive calls wherever you have WiFi access
* Manager your Skype contacts list
* View who is available to talk
* Forward calls to your mobile or landline
* Communicate with ordinary phones worldwide for little to nothing.

Overall this I think this will be big, the problem in Ireland is we don’t have lots of free WiFi hotspots. Also the phone does not contain a Web browser, so it cannot access hotspots, which require web-based logins or authentications.

Nokia 2310

Vodafone are offering the Nokia 2310 which has a built in radio for €79 this month. This is not a bad phone and comes with Colour screen, Built-in Handsfree Speakerphone and a Standby time Up to 320 - 400 hours.

With customizable animated screensavers and wallpapers, polyphonic ringing tones you can be really creative. Even better drop into Meteor and you can get it for €69. Both Vodafone and Meteor have different Credit available with the phone so your basically paying the same price.

* Standby time*: Up to 320 - 400 hours
* Talktime*: Up to 4 - 6 hours
* Lightweight
* Weight 85 grams
* FM Stereo Radio
* Stopwatch
* Polyphonic Ringtones
* Calculator
* Built-in Handsfree Speakerphone
* *Manufacturer claimed battery times

Nokia 5200 and 5300

nokia-5200-5300 Pictures of the Nokia 5200/5300 are finally available, the new Nokia slider will have 160 x 128 displays, 1.3-megapixel cams, Bluetooth, EDGE data, and A2DP support on the 5300.

Thats about as much information as is available at present, but we’ll keep you posted should this change

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SanDisk introduces 4GB miniSDHC card

4gb-minisdhc ScanDisk have just announced a 4GB miniSDHC card, with this they have basically doubled previous capacities of the miniSD card.

“The 4GB miniSDHC card represents a significant technological breakthrough and highlights the growing need for large-capacity, high-speed storage for the mobile phone market,” said Yoram Cedar, executive vice president of handset business and corporate engineering at SanDisk.

There are however a number of issues, The new 4GB card is called SDHC because it uses the FAT32 filesystem which is “High capacity”. Unfortunately, today’s mobile phones run with the FAT16 file system and thus are unable to work with the new cards.

Because of this ScanDisk is not selling this retail at present but are shipping to phone manufactures. ScanDisk have ways around this with a firmware update, which could add the new functionality to existing handsets.

Nokia 6085 announced

The new Nokia 6085 is basically a clamshell phone. Nokia plan to ship this towards the end of the year, it should be available is three different colour schemes sand gold, royal pink, and seagull silver.

At this stage I’m not sure if this will be available in Ireland I’ll keep you posted as soon as I know…It’s expected to retail around €175

* Quadband GSM plus EDGE
* Bluetooth with stereo support
* 262k colour screen
* microSD card slot
* Macromedia Flash 2 player

Nokia 6111

The Nokia 6111 has been around a while but this is a really good sliding phone. On the front of the 6111 is a 128×160 pixel display in 262,000 colours. It’s comes with Bluetooth, tri-band with the provision of automatically switching between the bands…which really helps.

With talk time of three-and-a-half hours and a standby time of 240 hours, this is not a bad little phone expect to pay from about €29 to € 129 on contract from O2.