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Left: Motorola Droid for Verizon, Right: Motorola CLIQ for T-Mobile. Hint: Droid is the black phone in all photos.

 

Motorola's Droid is perhaps the most anticipated new smartphone of the season - if not year - and for good reason. The handset marks a number of firsts: Verizon's first Android handset, the first phone to ship with Google's Android OS 2.0, and one of the first two "comeback" phones from Motorola. Droid is also one of the slimmest touchscreen-and-physical keyboard phones in the world (Motorola and Verizon claim it's the thinnest) and is Verizon's entirely unsubtle head-to-head competitor for AT&T and Apple's iPhone, as the carrier's new "iCan't … DroidDoes" ads attest to.

 

For me, Droid's biggest calling cards are it's massive touchscreen display and that slide-out hard QWERTY. Looking at the Droid/iPhone comparison, Droid should be able to sway many a potential iPhone customer with the mere addition of that physical keyboard. Whether reality or perception, many a smartphone customer claim that they simply can't type on a touchscreen and so continue to eschew iPhone in favor of BlackBerries and Windows Mobile devices with clickable keyboards. Not that there aren't other reasons for eschewing Apple's smartphone, mind you.

 

iPhone fans (myself included) have been waiting for years for some glimmer of hope in the Flash-on-iPhone situation. We know that Adobe was gung ho about bringing it aboard, but Apple’s non response pretty much stopped it before it could even get started.

Looks like Adobe’s finally had enough of playing the patient would-be partner. Its good will is clearly spent, judging from the brief but kinda snippy message on its Flash download page. When a mobile user attempts to access the webpage with an iPhone, they get a few sentences about how Flash’s lack of support for the iPhone is all Apple’s fault.

This would’ve made me laugh, that is, if it wasn’t already making me want to cry.



Via: GearDiary, Engadget Mobile

I wonder if it was a successful campaign for T-mobile, permitting Moto Cliq pre-orders for existing customers only. In just four more days, the Droid is dropping on Verizon, so wouldn’t it have behooved them to sell as many of these in advance to as many people as possible? Or maybe it upped the hype, giving it an air of exclusivity. It’s hard to tell this early on, but I’m kind of curious how this worked for them.

So did you grab yours, or are you waiting for Droid, Passion, or another Android beauty to arrive?

Noah tests out Google Maps Navigation Beta for Android 2.0. How? He fires up the Verizon Motorola Droid and goes in search of dessert, of course.

Illegal downloads, we all know it goes on but no one ever admits to it. Illegal file sharers are the cause of a major decline of sales in the music industry, according to music officials and politicians. But people who illegally download music from the Internet also spend more money on their favourite tracks than anyone else, or at least that’s what findings from a recent survey show.

The survey carried out by the think-tank Demos, found that those who admitted to illegally downloading music from the web, spent an average of £77 a year on tunes - that’s £33 more than those who claimed not to have downloaded music illegally. These findings suggest that the plan to stop illegal downloads by cutting peoples Internet connections, could have an adverse effect on the music industry, by punishing it’s ‘best’ customers.

“The latest approach from the Government will not help prop up an ailing music industry. Politicians and music companies need to recognise that the nature of music consumption has changed, and consumers are demanding lower prices and easier access,” said Peter Bradwell, from the think-tank Demos, which commissioned the new poll conducted by Ipsos Mori.

However, music industry officials argue that the figures didn’t show the full picture. The poll also suggested that the governments plan to disconnect illegal downloaders Internet connections would deter up to 61% of people from downloading music illegally. Artists are split over the issue, Lily Allen and James Blunt have recently spoken out against dishonest track downloads, while Shakira believes illegal file sharing has helped bring her closer to fans. “The people who file-share are the ones who are interested in music,” said Mark Mulligan of Forrester Research. “They use file-sharing as a discovery mechanism. We have a generation of young people who don’t have any concept of music as a paid-for commodity,” he continued. “You need to have it at a price point you won’t notice.”

This year Virgin Media and Universal Music plan to launch the first music subscription service allowing customers to download and keep an unlimited amount of tracks for a set fee.

What do you think? Are illegal downloaders ruining the music Industry for the rest of us, or is it all a big fuss over nothing?

Post from Dial-a-Phone, UK's no. 1 for Mobile Phones.

In an unexpected move, Nokia has officially retired its N-Gage gaming platform and will begin moving their downloadable games to their Ovi store.  The N-Gage website and N-Gage Arena community forum will remain operational until September 2010, by which time Nokia hope to have a similar community system running alongside the Ovi Store.

From that point onwards all S40 and Symbian games will be inside the Ovi Store rather than under a separate umbrella, and of course, the Ovi Store will be pre-loaded onto your new Nokia phone.  So although the N-Gage name is being killed off, presumably all the games and if Nokia stay true to their word, the community will continue.  After all, they have a year to sort themselves out.

Although we didn’t expect it, we aren’t surprised by it.  Part of the iTunes App Store’s success (it’s currently the benchmark in terms of mobile application stores after all) is that everything is available under one roof and therefore easy to navigate and usable by everyone, whereas having a separate games store and then another for everything else just isn’t logical; a one-stop-shop will always be the best solution.

Nokia may also wish to distance themselves from the N-Gage brand, as aside from a hardcore network of fans, it doesn’t have the best reputation despite some very impressive games.  Fans of mobile curiosities will recall that N-Gage started life as a hardware series, starting with the Classic and ending with the QD, both of which had their own idiosyncrasies, before mutating into N-Gage 2.0, the download service we have today.  N-Gage Next Gen was fraught with problems right from the start, with its 2005 announcement starting several years of delays before the eventual 2008 public release.

Still, a gaming platform that gave us Hooked On: Creatures of the Deep can’t be all bad, can it!

Post from Dial-a-Phone, UK's no. 1 for Mobile Phones.