Mobile Phone News

Filed under: Handsets, Nokia, Misc

OK, we’ll admit, we hate playing online flash games in hope of getting ourselves some dodgy prize. But look how freakin’ cute Kiano is up there! To win, all you have to do is drop push pins as quickly and closely as you can on 10 random cities. We gave it our bes. go and sadly came up pretty short as accuracy is — not for lack of skills — a tough nut. Nokia’s giving away weekly prizes of a full set of the three critters: Kiano, Maptor, and 2.0. The grand prize is a Nokia 6210 with a 12-month Drive and Walk license. Sounds easy, huh? It’s not, as apparently the world is full of geographically-gifted push-pin ninjas.

[Via allaboutsymbian]

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Filed under: Handsets, Features, Motorola, GSM, EDGE

Just like the press shots had us thinking, Motorola’s ROKR EM30 really is nothing more (and nothing less) than a dumbed-down E8. Oh, and don’t be alarmed by the utter blackness you’re presented with below the d-pad — the EM30 carries over the E8’s “ModeShift” morphing keypad, so it does some cool stuff depending on the mode you’re currently in. Legions of E8 loyalists are plan to pan the missing touch arc, but listen, guys — do you really need that to navigate music? Naw, of course you don’t, especially at the EM30’s price point. Rock on, Moto.

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Filed under: Software, Apple, OS X

at this time that 2.1’s out, your iPhone 3G is finally perfect — right? Well, that all depends on your definition of “perfect,” but odds are you still have a niggle or two poking out from behind that heaping pile of bugs and security flaws that were smoothed over with Cupertino’s putty knife in last week’s update. in this place’s a quick look at what we’re hearing so far:

• Excluding those of you who don’t know where you are, our poll on claimed reception improvements in 2.1 suggests that the majority of iPhone 3G owners (by a slim margin) are seeing no improvement or — gasp! — a degradation in signal strength since 2.0.2.
• Given that 2.1 patches up some bugs with third-party apps, it comes as no surprise that a few of ‘em are apparently breaking with the new firmware (a disappointment, yes, but not a surprise). It sucks that Apple whacked the ball into developers’ courts on this one, and we’re hoping for the sake of users and devs alike that it’s not plan to take many sleepless nights of re-coding and debugging to get the affected apps back on the straight and narrow.
• We’re at this time hearing some reports of email buffoonery ranging from an inability to add new accounts to 2.1-equipped phones, to failures of existing accounts that had previously worked, to total Exchange breakage. Are you folks seeing anything there? Any corporate types freaking out that they’ve lost access to their beloved ActiveSync setups?

We actually found another bug in 2.1 ourselves: we can’t find copy / paste anywhere. It’s anyone’s guess how that one slipped by the testers.

[Thanks to everyone who sent these in]

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