Nokia

Are your cupboards full of old phone chargers? They seem to accumulate with every new mobile, and are rarely useful again. Hoping to change this wasteful scenario, the European Union have proposed – and ten leading manufacturers agreed to – a new standard that will see micro-USB charging devices used for all data-enabled mobile phones. The hope is that, within three to four years, mobiles and chargers will be sold separately in Europe, and they’ll all be compatible. Read More

If you haven't checked out The Mobiler recently you might've missed Samsung's TouchWiz 2.0-powered Jet, the IRS planning to tax employees for their business phones, Nokia working on the ability to charge phones using ambient electromagnetic radiation, Samsung's inexpensive Crest Solar E1107 for emerging markets, and our review of the Nokia E71. Read More

Recently on The Mobiler we've looked at the iPhone 3G S vs the Palm Pre, the Nokia N97 going on sale in the U.S., the MoGo Talk Bluetooth headset for the iPhone, AT&T's plan to offer tethering for iPhone OS 3.0, Qik coming pre-installed on the Nokia N97, a Wi-Fi hotspot for the Volkswagen Routan, a roundup of Opera Mobile 9.7 reviews, Postino for the iPhone turning pictures into postcards, the Fujitsu F-09A touchscreen, a security breach at T-Mobile, and Verizon's "COLT" portable cell site. Read More

Over at The Mobiler, we've recently looked at Lenovo's NVIDIA ION-based IdeaPad S12 netbook, Microsoft clarifying its Windows Marketplace app sharing policy, the Android Cupcake OS 1.5 being released for US T-Mobile G1s, leaked details of Nokia's N900 Maemo tablet, Virgin Mobile offering Wi-Fi on every flight, and AT&T's subsidized netbook program going US-wide this summer. Read More

This week on The Mobiler we've looked at iUnika's solar-powered UMPC, Novatel's MiFi 2200 personal hotspot coming to Sprint, AT&T and Apple crippling SlingPlayer Mobile for the iPhone, Peggle for the iPhone, the £24,495 solid platinum iPhone 3G, AirTran partnering with Aircell to offer Gogo Wi-Fi on every flight, the Samsung Alias 2 using E-Ink keys to solve dual-hinge usability issues, and the Nokia E71 arriving on Telstra Next G. Read More

Boosted by the buzz surrounding wire-free charging at CES earlier this year, solutions for powering up portable devices without the hassle of messy cords and multiple chargers are making the transition from curious concept to viable consumer product. One of the obvious problems with the early examples of this kind of technology was that each solution is tailored to a particular device, but now early mover WildCharge has released a Universal Adapter for Cell Phones which works with multiple devices across multiple brands. Read More

It looks like Nokia has pulled out all the stops in delivering a potentially paradigm shifting N86 cameraphone with a camera that they claim has SLR-like optics and is good enough to replace your current compact digital one. With 8GB of internal storage, and a lens system from Carl Zeiss, this device can capture still images at 8 megapixels, as well as 640x480 video 30 frames per second. The camera has a F2.4 aperture (so it's able to handle low light conditions) and includes a high intensity dual LED flash. Nokia is also using the internal GPS in the device to geo-tag all the photos. Read More

Nokia has announced two new E series messaging devices; the E55 and E75. Both devices feature 320x240 displays and Series 60 Symbian OS and build upon the excellent E71 device Nokia released last year. The E55 device has a"two letter per key" keyboard similar to the Bleackberry Pearl that it's targeted to compete with while the E75 includes a slide out QWERTY keyboard as well as an exterior 12 key keypad and is aims to be the successor of Nokia's iconic Communicator devices. Read More

Ray Kurzweil is one of the most amazing intellectuals and inventors of our time. From his teenage years he's been building a long list of extraordinary achievements, from his early work teaching computers to compose music, to his world-first font-independent optical character recognition system, to his pioneering electric synthesizers that are so accurate that even musicians can't discern them from a real piano in listening tests. In 1976, blind music legend Stevie Wonder bought the first production model of the Kurzweil Reading Machine, a tabletop-sized device that was able to scan text documents and read them out using a text-to-speech engine. Last year, Kurzweil teamed up with Nokia to integrate the reading machine and its synthetic voice into the N82 mobile phone, letting blind or illiterate users read documents, menus, bills, and anything else they could capture on the phone's inbuilt camera. Now, Kurzweil has announced that the kReader phone can translate text it captures that's in another language and read it out to you in your language. It also has new text-tracking abilities to make it even easier to capture all the text on a page. Read More