Who says Apples and Oranges are different? Not Apple or Orange, that's for sure as they've reached an agreement to offer the iPhone 3G and iPhone 3GS to Orange UK customers. Sure enough, the iPhone is already available in the UK but competition is always good.
Unfortunately, they were in such a hurry to announce this agreement that they didn't take the time to figure out pricing or tariffs, not even a launch date. What they did do is let you register your interest allowing you to check what type of tariff you're interested in (pay monthly, pay as you go or business) and if you're an Orange customer already. Hopefully, this will have some bearing on their decisions.
In the wake of the Orange UK and T-Mobile UK merging we are wondering if current T-Mobile UK users will also be able to join in on the fun at some point. We do remain pretty skeptical about it though, as the two brands are supposed to remain separate for at least 18 months.
As an immediate response, O2 which held the iPhone exclusivity in the UK upsofar, issued a quick press release, which broadly stated that losing a battle is not like losing the war, and they will offer Palm Pre exclusively in an attempt to keep the upper hand in the smartphone battle.

Source

After so much rumors and leaked shots and specifications, you would hardly imagine that the LG BL20 New Chocolate is not officially announced yet. Well, it is! Or better yet - it was! Today LG finally went live with it officially showcasing the successor of the once popular LG Chocolate to the public for the first time.
After being featured in numerous leaks (and under various names), the BL20 New Chocolate is now official with all the nitty-gritty details available as you might imagine. Of course, if you've been following our homepage, you'd know that the specs of this fella were pretty well known for several days now, but LG somehow refrained from actually announcing it.

Several years ago LG started the whole Chocolate lineup and mind, you, they did explore the sub-brand success to its fullest releasing not one or two, but at least three separate GSM handsets. We'd hardly be able to count the numerous CDMA offshoots but CDMA is out of our field of interest anyway.

Besides bringing a dozen of high-quality press images for your high-tech fetish enjoyment, the official information reveals little new facts about the chocolate bar (well, actually a slider).
The new LG Chocolate BL20 phone is a slim (12.3mm) handset with a 5 megapixel autofocus camera. It's not a full touch device, but it does offers a touch sensitive touch pad below the display that only comes alive after you slide the phone open. This time around the side keys - the two volume knobs and the camera key are touch sensitive as well (not quite practical, we would presume).

The bottom right corner of the navigational touchpad has a Widget Hotkey providing one-touch direct access to four of your most frequently used functions such as Weekly Schedule, Memo, News, Today's Weather or Alarm.
There's also a convenient Clear Memo Capture mode which takes shots of text, handwriting and drawings with the TextScan option as an additional way of storing and inputting info.

Here a short video for view:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m6f49K0tpNo

Unfortunately, there's no word of the handset featuring some modern features such as an accelerometer, a 3.5mm audio jack, let alone Wi-Fi or GPS. It's not a smartphone alright, but we've seen feature phones offer those by the dozen these days. The BL20 is not supposed to come with some advanced camera features and video recording maxes out at QVGA@15fps.
In other words, the sleek slider should better offer some aggressive pricing or it will have some rather hard time fighting off the competition off its back.
The LG BL20 New Chocolate should be available some time in Q4 2009 in the UK through the O2 network with UK pricing still undisclosed. However the official German LG blog suggests October availability with an MSRP of 269 euro. Seems quite steep, if you ask us.

Tags: HTC, Windows Mobile

We've just spotted some new images of the getting more and more popular HTC Pro Three (also known as Leo). Even if most of its specs are known since July the device is still waiting for its official announcement.

HTC Pro Three looks damn hot

The news is that Pro Three is expected to be the first WinMo based device to pack a capacitive touchscreen (measuring 4.3 inches, with multi-touch support including while watching video). That makes the Pro Three the first capacitive WinMo handset ever. The phone will also sport the latest reincarnation of company's proprietary TouchFLO 3D user interface which was already previewed a while ago.

The latest reincarnation of HTC TouchFLO 3D

The smooth operation of the Pro Three is guaranteed by its super zippy 1GHz Snapdragon CPU. Standing at the formidable 121 x 67 x 11 mm, it will also sport 320MB of RAM, 512MB ROM as well as HSDPA, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth support.

At the bottom of the specs list we find the microSD card slot, integrated GPS receiver with A-GPS support, on-device 3.5mm audio output jack, a 5-megapixel autofocus camera and the 1230 mAh battery.

The Nokia N97 mini leaked a long time ago and it was about time it got officially announced. The official announcement brought no surprises - the N97 mini sports a smaller 3.2-inch resistive touchscreen with 640x360 resolution, 3-row full QWERTY tilting keyboard (this time without the D-pad), a 5 megapixel camera (Carl Zeiss optics) with VGA@30fps recording and dual LED flash, 8 GB internal storage, FM radio and microSD card slot. The connectivity package is as full as usual - 3G, Wi-Fi, GPS, Bluetooth, 3.5mm audio jack and TV-out.

The Nokia N97 mini is only 14.2 mm thin and weighs 12 g less than its big brother. It will ship in October on 450 euro price.

Nokia 8800 series of luxury phones have always focused on high quality materials and superior build quality, while holding back on the spec sheet. With the Nokia 8800 Erdos this reputation is about to change.

First off, "Erdos" is just a code name so expect that to change at some point. And second - this won't be an Arte. The Arte phones have had largely the same design, differing in materials only. The 8800 Erdos changes not only the design but also the way the phones are built.
The Nokia Ardos body will be constructed out of a single piece of "bullet silver". This apparently is marketing talk for stainless steel, so you probably can't kill a werewolf with it, but carving out the body out of a single piece of metal is all the rage with high-end laptops and the ridiculously expensive luxury phones.

The screen of the Erdos however is covered with regular scratch-proof glass, rather than sapphire, which is the usual weapon of choice in such cases. The glass covering the screen though turns silver when the display is off, giving the impression that the phone is a single slab of stainless steel. The screen itself is an OLED unit with QVGA resolution and a diagonal of 2.4 inches.


The high-end design of the Nokia 8800 Erdos includes a rather unique feature too - it's a slider like the rest of its siblings, but the keypad raises to the level of the display when you slide it out. This should make the keys of the top row much more accessible.

Sounds good already, but we haven't even gotten to the good part yet - the Nokia 8800 Erdos is the first of its breed to be a full-on smartphone. It'll run the Symbian OS S60 and feature Wi-Fi and A-GPS. The internal memory is 8GB, though there's no card slot.

The camera is the best in the luxury class with its 5 megapixels and Carl Zeiss lens with autofocus. There's a dual-LED flash too.

Rounding off the specs is the reasonably compact size of the phone. The 8800 Erdos measures 116.9 x 50,3 x 15.0 mm, though its weight is kept on the hush-hush. There is also a dedicated noise reduction microphone on the back.

The Nokia 8800 Erdos will be available in October with tri-band GSM (900/1800/1900) and dual-band 3G/HSPA. The price is the other thing missing from the rumored specs, though this could easily top the price point of the Gold Arte.

The Sony Ericsson XPERIA X2 has been in the center of attention ever since its first unofficial shots leaked online. Much like most other gadgeteers, we've had our hands itching to get one and luckily our wishes just came true.
The Sony Ericsson XPERIA X2 is one impressive device full of industry leading features - it's the first Windows Mobile smartphone with an 8 megapixel camera and WVGA video recording and it's actually the first ever full QWERTY phone to have that sort of imaging prowess as well.

The XPERIA X2 most other features, though not as innovative, are a nice match as well. We guess they are worth going through one more time.

Sony Ericsson XPERIA X2 at a glance:
General: GSM 850/900/1800/1900 MHz, UMTS 900/1900/2100 MHz, EDGE class 10, HSDPA, 7.2 Mbps; HSUPA, 2 Mbps
Form factor: Slide-and-tilt QWERTY touch phone
Dimensions: 110 x 54 x 16 mm, weight 155 grams
Display: 3.2" TFT resistive touchscreen, 800 x 480 pixels
Platform: Qualcomm MSM 7200 528 MHz processor
OS: Microsoft Windows Mobile 6.5 Professional
Memory: 110MB storage, 256 MB RAM, 512 MB ROM, microSD card slot
Camera: 8-megapixels auto-focus camera, LED flash, touch focus, geotagging, face detection, image stabilizer, Smart Contrast, WVGA@30fps video recording
Connectivity: Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 2.1 with A2DP, standard microUSB port, GPS receiver with A-GPS, 3.5mm audio jack, TV-out
Misc: Optical trackpad, accelerometer for motion-based gaming, office document viewer and editor, XviD video support
Battery: 1500 mAh Li-Po battery
We just got the XPERIA X2 and we wanted to share with you our first impressions of the device. So consider this article as a quick and dirty preview, with a more detailed one coming up in the following week. We hope to get as much as possible from our encounter with the X2 and you can bet we surely won't keep anything to ourselves.

UPDATE 8 Sept: We decided to update this article with some new stuff instead of creating a new preview as the XPERIA X2 hardly deserves any further detailing at this early stage of its development. It still has quite a few software issues that will without a doubt be fixed in the future software builds.

So today we've added a whole new page on the messaging, web browser and 3D games and we've also updated our conclusion to take the most viable market alternatives into account. We really hope to see the XPERIA X2 again for a full-blown review, once its hits the stores all nice and bug-free.