Latest phones and cell review

After more than a year ago Verizon Wireless had released the Samsung Glyde SCH-U940, its successor Samsung Rogue U960 is said to be announced by August 15th this month. Using the latest Samsung TouchWiz 2.0 user interface, the Rogue has a sliding QWERTY keyboard and a 3 megapixel camera with LED flash. Other useful connector are placed at the side of the phone body as well, letting you conveniently access to the microSD card slot, camera/volume button and USB connection.

[via slashgear]

Samsung and Intrinsity jointly announced its new ARM Cortex-A8 processor architecture in 45 nanometer (nm) Low Power (LP), low leakage process technology. This Cortex-A8 implementation, code-named Hummingbird, delivers 2000DMIPS at 1GHz. The Hummingbird comes with 32KB each of data and instruction caches, an L2 Memory cache, the size of which can be customized, and an ARM NEON multi-media extension. Performance and power consumption of the Hummingbird have been validated in silicon.

A multi-Vdd / multi-frequency design methodology was used to ensure the Hummingbird can run at a high speed even at the minimum supply voltage of 1.0V. The low power consumption and the high operating clock performance make the Hummingbird an ideal processor core for use in advanced mobile devices.

“The biggest challenge in mobile processor core design and implementation is to achieve high clock speed performance while keeping the power consumption low,” said Dr. Jae Cheol Son, Vice President, SOC Platform Development, System LSI Division, Samsung Electronics. “Collaboration between Samsung and Intrinsity combines the best design and implementation technologies in the industry in successfully meeting the aggressive performance and power consumption targets of the Hummingbird. Samsung’s forthcoming SOC products based on the Hummingbird will enable our customers to add many more advanced processing capabilities to their mobile products without sacrificing battery life.”

[via slashgear]

The worldwide mobile phone market recorded another quarter of year-over-year decline in the second quarter of 2009 (2Q09). According to IDC’s Worldwide Quarterly Mobile Phone Tracker, handset vendors shipped a total of 269.6 million units worldwide, down 10.8% from 302.2 million units in 2Q08. The second quarter results are an improvement from the 17.2% decrease seen during 1Q09, but ongoing challenges stemming from the economic crisis remain a factor to watch.

For the full year, IDC believes that the market will decline 13%, with the market outlook for 2009 remaining relatively consistent among the top vendors. The small signs of improvement were centered around consumer demand for high-end handsets and the manufacturers’ ability to shift portfolio to meet these needs.

“Among the big handset vendors, Nokia, Samsung, Research In Motion, and Apple, all beat expectations for smartphones within the second quarter,” said Ryan Reith, senior research analyst with IDC’s Worldwide Quarterly Mobile Phone Tracker. “This demand for high-end mobile phones has created a price war among large mobile operators and handset vendors. Apple’s price cut on the iPhone 3G reflects a trend we expect to continue in the upcoming quarters, and one that will effectively maintain competitive pricing within mature markets.”

AT&T and Samsung Mobile announced the upcoming availability of the Samsung Solstice, a compact candybar phone with full touch screen phone that provides users with an instant connection to social networking, messaging and multimedia features. The Samsung Solstice will be available and offered by AT&T in US beginning Aug. 2.

The lightweight and sleek Samsung Solstice has a full 3.0 touch screen, with a virtual, landscape QWERTY keyboard, and features Samsung’s unique TouchWiz user interface, which includes one-touch access to frequently used applications and social networks through new widgets for Facebook, MySpace and Yahoo! oneSearch. The Solstice features multiple messaging options such as Mobile Email, IM and MMS and comes equipped with a 2.0 megapixel camera with camcorder, perfect for capturing those spontaneous moments. The handset also features an MP3 player, video and audio streaming, preloaded games, Bluetooth® technology and a microSD memory card slot supporting up to 16GB.

More Samsung Solstice photos at next page

[via phonemag]

Quickoffice today announced the latest update to its Quickoffice Premier 6 product for Nokia Symbian (S60 3.x and S60 5.0) devices. The company’s latest release delivers a complete S60 office suite by adding PowerPoint 2007 viewing capabilities to the already supported Word, Excel and PowerPoint file formats. In addition, the product now offers both editing and viewing of documents on the popular S60 5.0 touch user interface.

All Nokia Symbian devices that ship with Quickoffice will receive a free update to the latest edition of Quickoffice 6. Selected Nokia Eseries devices will additionally receive editing support with a free Quickoffice Premier 6 update. All updates are available via Quickmanager, Quickoffice’s secure in-application download manager.