Mighty Gadget Blog: The latest technology news & reviews in the UK

Microsoft and Nokia joined forces today and had a brainstorm. The software and mobile giants have confirmed they will bring a mobile version of Microsoft Office to Nokia’s Symbian powered smartphones.

A few of Nokia’s phones already use Microsoft software (Exchange ActiveSync) so its no big surprise they’re coming together again. Next year will see the phone’s packing Microsoft Office Communicator Mobile. Not the catchiest of names but basically will allow to find work colleagues, instant message and something called “presence information”(ideas anyone???)

Further into the future mobile versions of your favourite office programs, Word, PowerPoint, Excel etc so you can view, edit and send documents from your mobile.

Source : Electricpig

We first saw the Sony Ericsson Satio back in February at Mobile World Congress under the guise of the Idou.

While I am not sure if the change of name is an improvement it should still be a great phone as it has some very impressive specifications including:

• 12.1-megapixel camera (World’s first)
• Xenon Flash 16x digital zoom and geo-tagging capabilities.
• 640 x 350 3.5-inch touchscreen LCD
• Symbian Series 60, 5th edition
• Micro SD support 16GB, 8GB included
• HSDPA, 7.2 Mbps; HSUPA, 3.6 Mbps

The Sony Ericsson Satio should start shipping from October.

While Symbian S60 phones may not be quite as exciting as the likes of the Pre or iPhone they can still be great phones.

The Samsung i8910 HD is arguably the pick of the litter when it comes down to S60 with its massive 3.7” 640 x 360 capacitive touchscreen AMOLED screen, an 8 megapixel camera, an S60-specific implementation of TouchWiz with 3D enhancements, and HSUPA.

So if you can’t wait for the iPhone, Pre or maybe even Microsoft Pink then this could fit the bill perfectly.

It is currently available on Orange and costs £97.50 on a 18 month £34.25 plan

Companies like Expansys and Play like to list products as soon as possible, partly for publicity, partly to get the search engine rankings and partly for the pre-orders.

Expansys are now listing the Nokia E75 allowing people to pre-order it for its expected release date of 13 Mar 09.

The features include:

• Quad-band GSM / EDGE, dual-band HSDPA (900/2100) at 3.6Mbps
• 2.4″ 240×320 QVGA display
• 3.2 megapixel camera with auto-focus, digital zoom, LED flash
• 30FPS QVGA video recording
• aGPS
• WiFi
• FM radio
• microSDHC
• 3.5mm headset, Bluetooth 2.0, microUSB
• Nokia Maps, PDF Document Viewer, ZIP File Manager
• Dual home screen (work/personal)
• 1000 mAh battery
• 630 mins talk, 408 hrs stand-by time

To be honest the specification seems a little weak especially if you compare it to the forthcoming Nokia N97, however it is an E-Series so it will no doubt be bought up by plenty of business users, also the 1000 mAh looks a little poor especially if you compare it to the excellent Nokia E71’s 1500 mAh battery.

Full specification from Expansys after the jump.

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There is a whole lot of chatter on the Internet today after Nokia announced the new N97 at the Nokia World Watch event in Barcelona yesterday.

There is no surprise that this device has people talking though it is a beast of a machine and from initial appearances seems to be the love child of my beloved E90 and the N95.

The phone is to be released in the first half of 2009 and will cost approximately €550.

As you can see from the above image that the phone uses a full QWERT keypad, it also used a 3.5″, 640 x 360 resistive touch screen and comes with 32Gb of internal memory with a microSD slot allowing you to upgrade the phone to 48Gb. Other features include:

• Tri-band HSDPA 3G
• A-GPS and Stand-alone GPS for directions and geo-tagging
• 5 megapixel camera with Carl Zeiss optics
• Flash Lite 3.0 support and Flash Video in web browser
• Music player up to 36 hours playback time
• Share and Ovi services support

The operating system is Symbian (as usual) and uses S60 5th Edition and is designed to make the most of social networks such as Facebook allowing you to utilise the homescreen for Facebook or RSS widgets.

The phone certainly ticks a lot of boxes for me, though with the release of Android I would prefer to see something a little better than Symbian on the phone. Though there is no surprise there seeing as Nokia now own Symbian. However according to Engadget Linux could become a possibility in the future for high end phones, but I will believe it when I see it.

Ok so this may not be as easy to remember as the name Omnia but Samsung have announced the new I7110. This is a S60 and Symbian OS-based, and will be showcased for the first time at London's Symbian Smartphone Show. This bar type Smartphone features 2.6’’ QVGA AMOLED screen, FM radio, DNSe 2.0, GPS Navigation (Geo-Tagging, Pedestrian & Driving), optical mouse, accelerometer, 3D games (FIFA 2008, Asphalt), with DLNA compatibility.

It also comes with Bluetooth v2.0, USB 2.0, WiFi, 50MB memory, an external memory slot (up to 16GB), 5Mpix camera (CMOS with AF and LED flash). It's equipped with a video player (DivX / H.263 / H.264 / WMV /MP4, RV), and music player (MP3 / AAC / AAC+ /eACC+ / WMA / RealAudio).

Press release after jump

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