MOTOMING A 1600, in India.

After a flood of touchscreen launches in India this year, which includes Apple's iPhone, Samsung Omnia and BlackBerry Bold, US-based cell phone maker Motorola is out with its GPS-enabled touchscreen device, MOTOMING A 1600, in India.

Packing a host of multimedia features, the sleek A1600 which comes with a transparent flip cover is Motorola's challenge to other touchscreen smartphones available in the market.

And to add to the festive spark, the phone pleases buyers on the pricing front too. Here's looking into the features.

Motorola's touchscreen phone is GPS-enabled offering navigation maps and landmarks of 30 cities. The phone has satellite based GPS which offers users lifetime free GPS navigation maps.

The phone also offers voice-guided navigation and location based reminders across major national and state highways.

The phone supports turn-by-turn, voice-guided navigation, and easy search of points-of-interest like hotels, colleges, petrol pumps, airports, railway stations, cinemas and tourist attractions. It also provides coverage across national and state highways in India.

According to Motorola MobileDevices India and South West AsiaLloyd Mathias, the phone is Motorola's first GPS-enabled mobile phone. He added that the navigation service is free with no activation charges, independent of mobile networks and can be used even without inserting the SIM card.

The Linux-based phone has a 3.2 megapixel camera and 8X zoom for multiple capture modes.

Among the key multimedia features, the phone comes with MP3 player and Music ID, and provides users direct access to MOTOMUSIC service.

MING A1600 also provides video capture and video playback at 30 fps (frames per second). MOTOMING A1600 supports Class 2 Bluetooth wireless technology, support a talk time of up to approximately 405 minutes and a standby time of approximately 176 hours.More>>

Google phone to cost above Rs 20,000

Excited about the new Google phone? Wondering when the phone will hit Indian shores? Soon. HTC is planning to roll out Google Android-powered phone in India by December end.

According to a business daily, Taiwan-based cellphone major is currently in talks with a leading service provider in India. The company which has an exclusive partnership to sell phones in India with Airtel said that it is open to selling the phone through independent retail channels. The business model is still under consideration.

The phone which has widely being termed as Google's rival to Apple iPhone was launched by TMobile in US earlier this week. Google phone is priced at $179, $20 less than the 3G iPhone. It is, however, expected that the phone may sport a higher price tag in India, a pattern also witnessed in the pricing of 3G iPhone in the country. Apple's 3G iPhone sells for $199 8GB in US as compared to Rs 31,000 for 8GB in India. The G1 phone boasts of touchscreen, a computer-like keyboard and has Google's new open operating system, Android. It also hosts an array of multimedia features similar to Apple's iPhone and RIM's BlackBerry. The phone has a trackball for navigation, high-speed Internet browsing, WiFi, email, instant messaging and SMS texting. The phone functions on 3G network and is specially designed to offer high-speed Internet surfing. It also has a Global Positioning System (GPS), a 3 megapixel camera with photo-sharing capability and a slide-out QWERTY keyboard, a feature lacking on the iPhone. Like iPhone, in G1 users cannot shoot video. There's also a feature by which Gmail users will get instant notification whenever they receive a new message in their inbox. Available in three colors -- black, white and brown -- it includes familiar Google services, such as Google Maps, Gmail and YouTube. Like the iPhone and other smartphones, the device is meant to broaden the appeal of Web surfing on the go. Research firm Strategy Analytics has predicted that the G1 could sell 400,000 units by the end of 2008, accounting for 4 per cent of the smartphone market. Link to this post:

http://infotech.indiatimes.com/News/Google_phone_to_cost_above_Rs_20000/articleshow/3530200.cms

Whats 3G?

In a long overdue but very welcome move, India recently announced its first steps to becoming part of the 3G cellular services club. This issue, which has received a fair share of newsprint and TV coverage, is of vital importance for the future of for mobile telephony in India.

These days the use of the term 3G is common. Almost everyone who uses it knows it stands for Third Generation (in mobile phone standards and technology specifically). 3G technology opens the doors to the creation of a whole new mobile environment that isn't just fast but is capable of actually enhancing your mobile experience.

The path to 3G
3G is the result of nearly a decade of development and evolution of the GSM standard. It brings with it a host of changes, including near broadband-like data speeds, video conferencing – and, with the increasing complexity of mobiles, support for new technologies such as GPS and streaming video.

Image Source: Anritsu

However, before it reached its current state, GSM had to undergo a rather painful growth. GSM was conceived in the early 80s as a common standard to be deployed across Europe. This required the cooperation of 13 countries and sharing of knowledge before the first network went live in 1991.

After that it went through a lean phase with adoption being slow, as there were a pressing number of issues such as excess traffic handling ability, lack of network security and cost of deployment. Another aspect was the fact that 1G networks were purely analog networks. Thanks to these, the towers for these networks had to be powerful and put out some strong signals for the (bulky!) handsets to receive them. The lack of mass adoption meant call rates were high.

2G brought with it some crucial changes which included increased traffic handling, improved call clarity by a liberal use of voice codecs, and reduced power requirements which allowed handsets to become smaller and consume less power. 2G also brought with it call encryption which made 'wireless sniffing' next to impossible. All this was made possible as networks were now fully digital.

The introduction of 2G networks was a catalyst for the explosion of the GSM phenomenon. The rapid pace of adoption saw the cost of equipment fall, and deployment costs going down rapidly. The most important fact of this particular generation was the emergence of text messaging, popularly known as SMS. It became the one 'killer' feature on whose popularity alone GSM saw some explosive growth.

This growth was not smooth, however. Around this time the Internet had exploded and proliferated as a mass medium. As mobile telephony began to get more popular (and in some countries even overtook fixed line telephony) as the main method of communication, the need for 'always-on’ data connectivity was felt. This was made possible with the introduction of GPRS, a massive step up from the previous generation.

Thanks to GPRS, it became possible to be always connected via a WAP browser to the Internet and have anytime, anywhere access at usable speeds. To accommodate this, networks were enhanced to better support data connectivity. This generation also saw the evolution of the SMS standard into a multimedia-ready state (MMS). While MMS didn't have the same commercial success as SMS, it nevertheless came to define the 2.5G standard.

It is here that we see a curious fork in GSM evolution. UMTS was intended to be a direct upgrade for all 2.5G networks. However, due to the very high costs involved, a new form of data connectivity was offered to compensate and offer good standby service till 3G could be implemented. This service was called EDGE and was an evolution of the old GPRS format. It offered vastly superior speeds and far better connectivity for the newly emerging camera phone market and smartphones. This phase is now popularly referred to as 2.75G .

Image Source: Networkworld

This brings us to 3G. Technically it's a direct upgrade to EDGE networks, but it runs on a wholly different set of frequencies. It also employs a different underlying technology (WCDMA) and can make only part use of existing networks. Entirely new infrastructure has to be deployed for the successful roll out of 3G.
What 3G offers
From video phone calls to using the Internet to make calls (VoIP) to wide-area wireless voice telephony and broadband wireless data services, 3G offers it all. Just imagine being able to see on your phone screen someone you're in conversation with! (Of course, this may not always be in your best interests, should you be in the middle of something indiscreet, but nevertheless it is the next step in mobile technology.)

Very recently in India steps were taken to make 3G a reality by first enabling number portability. Imagine you are unhappy with your current service provider and would like to switch. The issue is that over a period of time you've built up a large contact base. What if you can simply change over and still retain your old number? Very convenient!

3G technology allows you do all of this and so much more. The technology also makes it a lot easier for mobile service providers to easily support a larger amount of voice as well as data users. To give you a clearer view, these are some of the services that 3G, as a whole, offers users:

• Mobile TV (DVBH)
• Video calling, video mail and video conferencing
• GPS and car navigation
• Digital catalog shopping
• B2B applications
• Remote medical diagnosis and education
• Digital audio and video delivery
  

To avail of these services, your mobile device has to be 3G compatible. Of course, these days most are. Switching to a 3G way of life also requires a hefty investment from the service providers. Perhaps that's why we haven't seen it in India yet. But, as we mentioned, it won't be too long now.

What lies beyond
While India takes its first steps towards 3G, the rest of the world has moved on. 3G already has an upgrade – 3.5G, which promises the introduction of streaming TV, the ability to stream video directly from your cellphone (similar to a webcam), and a whole lot of other amazing features. That sad part is that we may have to wait another 4-5 years before we see all this. Or hopefully not...