Mobile Phone News

Filed under: Peripherals, Nokia

Nokia’s been pushing its exercise logging solution, Sports Tracker, for a while at this time — but compared to dedicated fitness computers from companies like Suunto, Garmin, and Polar, it’s not Truly as useful since you can’t automatically record your heart rate. For serious health nuts, that’s a deal-breaker right there, but rumor has it that Nokia has at this time teamed up with Polar (another Finnish company, coincidentally) to deliver everything the average runner needs to start sending vital stats straight to their phones. It gets better: besides Bluetooth chest straps, we’re hearing there’ll be compatible cadence sensors (for bikers) and barometer / altimeters, too. The whole initiative is apparently in the final stages of development, so we wouldn’t be surprised to see it officially declare either at CES or MWC. Ugh, this means we no longer have an excuse not to get off our lazy asses and jog, doesn’t it?

Nokia hooking up with Polar for fitness monitoring? originally appeared on Engadget Mobile on Sun, 21 Dec 2008 14:23:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Filed under: Handsets, Motorola

New Orleans resident Ronald Richard was mowing the lawn when he felt a hard object hit him in the chest — precisely where he’d been keeping his pink Swarovski-encrusted (just kidding) RAZR. It was only after Richard took off his sweater that he discovered the .45-caliber slug and realized that the phone had literally taken a bullet for him. According to paramedics, the angle of the bullet and the modest stopping power of the cellphone were all that stood between the man and serious injury or even death. Instead, this lucky gen. got away with little more than a fairly significant bruise and an excuse to pick up that Aura he’s been coveting.

RAZR stops a bullet, its owner reports “feeling lucky, punk.” originally appeared on Engadget Mobile on Fri, 21 Nov 2008 17:17:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Filed under: Multimedia, Software, Sony Ericsson

At risk of getting delayed right into obscurity, Sony Ericsson looks like it’s finally just about ready to release its long-declare PlayNow Arena mobile media store in a couple of European locales. SEMC Blog got the lowdown on screen shots of Bot. the web-based and mobile versions of the Arena client, and we’ll be honest, we’re not really seeing what took so damn long. Okay, so we’ve got a unified portal for buying games, images, and music — that’s great and all, but not terribly unique, innovative, or engaging attention beyond the fact that many modern Sony Ericsson handsets should have tight integration with it out of the box. At least N-Gage can use the excuse that its fairly extensive community gaming aspect took some work to build out and get right; this, on the other hand, is little more than a glorified media store. Tell you what, though, guys: release a US-spec W980, and we’ll cut you some slack the next time you delay a web portal by a few months. Honest.

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