Everything else, summary
As I have already mentioned in the introduction, we have rarely met navigation solutions. As for the bigger fish only Garmin had representatives, they showed us a non-functioning Nüvifon; well, they should really get themselves together.
Garmin Nüvifon
There’s only one company left, but hey are really interesting: modu. Our article about them resulted in fiery debates; there were who liked them (just like us) while others considered it useless crap. Due to space limitation I only sum up the essence of modu, those interested in it can get additional information by clicking here. It is a matchbox-sized mobile phone that can be plugged in to specially designed, so-called, jackets, which are practically phones without own memory and GSM module and are only functional with the modu. The company’s concept is, that we have a modu and lots of jackets, from which we always use the one we need. A few examples: GPS-jacket, MP3-jacket, camera-jacket, etc.
Conclusion
Many people have been thinking for years that the evolution of mobile phones will stop, as there is no new function that could be packed in a machine of such a size. But as we could have seen at the Mobile World Congress, there still are features that can be implemented. Larger manufacturers are moving towards touchscreen user interfaces, LG jumped this obstacle with quite good results and we should take a look at Nokia’s Series60 platform on a mobile phone to form an opinion about it. Samsung doesn’t really stress itself about all this touch-sensitive stuff; they are quite fine off with their demanding slider phones. Sony Ericsson is a bit fallen behind in this matter; they still haven’t announced a system controllable with fingers, although Xperia might have some surprises. Motorola is obviously trying to stay alive, we hope they succeed, the E8 doesn’t seem to be a bad device and although we don’t like the Z10, it has useful developments.
There are many things clearly visible regarding multimedia. On one hand large manufacturers are continuing the megapixel-war, all of them have reached number 5 and we can only hope that they will stop here and start to concentrate their efforts on other stuff we consider more important. On the other hand mobile TV is coming unstoppably, at Qualcomm we have seen the MediaFLO intended for the US market and device manufacturers are trying to launch handsets compatible with some kind of standard.
On the market of PDA-phone combos there is a never before seen dumping expected, so HTC should be keeping up. Although Asus disappointed us with the M930, but the P750 can still be a big hit. The i-Mate and the Toshiba devices are very promising; the latter company seems to think seriously the recovery of its somewhat faded reputation.
Of course the picture is not yet complete, but we can promise that we will be here with a similar article after CeBIT in early March.
Bocha
Translated by Szaszati
