Fujitsu LOOX F-07C – the dual boot (Symbian/Windows 7) smartphone now available in Japan (with NTT DoCoMo)

The LOOX F-07C (despite the weird name and model) is definitely a wonderful and unique device to own (unfortunately not available outside Japan). NTT DoCoMo described it as “World's smallest Windows 7 PC”. As described in the post title it is able to boot either into Symbian or Windows 7 (Home Premium SP1 Japanese edition). User can switch between Windows 7 PC mode and mobile phone mode with just press of a button. Read more at Fujitsu official website.

For Windows 7 to run gracefully LOOX sports a 1.2GHz Intel Atom Z600 processor (running down-clocked at 50 percent only – perhaps to save the precious battery juice), 1GB (LPDDR400) RAM.

There is a 32GB eMMC SSD memory, expandable with microSD memory card

Screen - 4-inch SVGA (1024 x 600) TFT LCD display having 262K colors

Camera - 5-megapixel main (rear), autofocus camera plus a front-facing VGA camera

Battery – Upto 2hours backup when running Windows 7 and it automatically switches to mobile phone mode when battery is low

Other features include Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, two-year Microsoft Office Personal 2010 license, Internet Explorer 9 etc.

LOOX F-07C is now available with NTT DoCoMo in Japan.

iOS 5 beta 4 released with addition of some minor features including OTA update option

Apple released iOS 5 beta4 yesterday for all the supported iDevices (iPad 2, iPhone 4 and 3GS, 3rd and 4th gen iPod Touch). This release is unique in that it is the first OTA upgradable iOS version, however a ridiculous warning appears when using this option saying “All photos will be deleted on updating OTA”. Some other minor feature updates to this beta are – 

Improved location feature in Twitter app, MobileMe local contacts are deleted rather than being merged, iCloud file names have been made case sensitive etc. Now it would be interesting to see when this release is jailbroken to unravel some more new features.

If you are having trouble updating to this beta 4 update (perhaps due to running beta 3) then try going back to iOS 4.3.4 and then update to iOS 5 beta 4.

Iconography of Nokia (Symbian, S40 and MeeGo Harmattan) phones is getting updated (Slowly)

Nokia is busy updating the design of its UI (mainly icons), these days. If you have a Symbian phone and installed some latest apps (like PlayTo from betalabs) recently then you might have noticed the new type of icons different from the conventional Nokia ones. In fact all icons in Symbian Anna phones are the new ones. Icons are getting a little curvy as Nokia puts it – “The corners have become a little more rounded, and the styling a bit more simple.” All this change is due to the update of icon guidelines (at Nokia Developer site) for all the major Nokia platforms (Series 40 Touch and Type, Symbian and MeeGo 1.2 Harmattan).

All I can say about this change is – watch out Nokia, don’t make icons anymore curvier (iPhonesque) as Apple is “eager” to sue you of a patent infringement (like they did with Samsung’s Galaxy SII).

Another video of a Windows Phone 7 (Mango) Nokia device leaks – shows a brief overview of a N9 like phone

No doubt that Mobile-World is eager to see the first delivery of Nokia-Microsoft romance and this is the reason why we are getting “in-utero” ultrasound images of premature (or perhaps full-term) device almost on a daily basis. In this series this video surfaced yesterday showing a factory overview of a WP7 mango Nokia smart phone in a short duration. Phone shown in the video looks almost identical to Nokia N9 but with a difference of a dedicated camera shutter button. The person in video gets the device out of a stealth-case as if he was instructed to hide it. Phone is shown to boot up into Windows Phone 7 pretty quickly (also switch off saying goodbye with the same speed). Interestingly two textual messages (“OEM” and “Not For Resale”) appear at the phone screen during the video.

The question is whether this is the Elop’s super-confidential “Sea Ray” phone or just a test device.

LG officially announces two affordable Gingerbread phones – the Optimus Pro and Optimus Net

Android 2.3.3 (Gingerbread) has been a high-end affair until now with almost no cheap budget phone out there having the latest Android version. But not anymore as LG recently launched two new affordable Gingerbread smartphones. Both of these are of the popular Optimus series – the Optimus Pro (LG-C660) and Optimus Net (LG-P690), to be precise.

As was already known Optimus Pro is a candybar QWERTY, 2.8inch-touchscreen phone, looks like a BlackBerry and is described here in this post. It offers the best of both a physical keyboard and touch display. There are dedicated keys for email and scheduler. Optimus Pro will be available in white, titan and black colors.

While Optimus Net is a full-touch phone featuring “Next Generation of Social Communication” - the “LG Social+” combining all the popular social networking portals in one widget right at the homescreen. With a single click, it enables users to update their status on Facebook and Twitter while reading friends’ social media feeds at the same home screen. This widget also enables one-click photo sharing with multiple social media accounts from the home screen. There is also a “LG SmartShare” feature which makes it easy to share content with other DLNA-enabled devices. Following are its others specs in brief -

3.2inch HVGA (320 x 480) capacitive touchscreen display

800 MHz Qualcomm processor, 512 MB RAM,

150 MB internal memory, 2GB MicroSD Card supplied (Expandable upto 32 GB)

3 Megapixel camera with Geo-tagging support, VGA @24fps video recording

HSDPA (3.6Mbps), Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n, Wi-Fi hotspot, A-GPS

Standard Li-ion 1500mAh battery

Both LG Optimus Pro and Net will soon (Next month) be available all over the world.

iOS 4.3.4 jailbroken within 12 hours after release with PwnageTool on all iDevices except iPad 2

It looks like Apple is bitten even before it ripens and is picked from the tree. At least this is the story of every Apple iOS update. Folks at Redmond Pie have posted a how to tutorial (just 10 hours after the iOS 4.3.4 rollout) describing the Jailbreaking of latest iOS update (4.3.4) in iPhone, iPad 1 and iPod (but not iPad2 still). This jailbreak is a tethered one using PwnageTool 4.3.3 bundle. After the jailbreak is complete all the Cydia stuff get back to life for you. So if you had updated your device to the latest version of iOS (without thinking of the consequences) and to your horror Cydia was gone then you may try this jailbreak to calm down your stomach butterflies.

Unless you are a super-geek, it is not recommended however to use this process before a stable and more functional (untethered) workaround become available (and you won’t have to wait for long as usual). So stay tuned for the update.

BlackBerry Bold (Touch) 9930 specs and features – a dual network (CDMA and GSM) smartphone

BlackBerry Bold 9930 (aka the Bold Touch) is perhaps the first BB smartphone having both GSM (quad band) and CDMA (dual band) radios. At 10.5mm it's perhaps RIM's thinnest handset yet.

It has got the new BlackBerry 7 OS

Besides it sports a fast 1.2GHz Snapdragon processor

However the screen size is a disappointing 2.8-inch (VGA resolution)

Main Camera is 5 Megapixel

8GB of internal storage (expandable with microSD card)

Bold Touch 9930 also has WiFi 802.11a/b/g/n along and Bluetooth 2.1 (obviously), a faster browser and voice-activated search, NFC support etc

The Bold Touch is expected to be available soon worldwide.

Nokia releases software update (firmware) for S40 “Touch n Type” phones with new left/right swipe function for easy navigation

Nokia recently released SW (Firmware) updates for its latest S40 “Touch n Type” phones. Nokia C2-02, C2-03, C3-01, and X3-02 users will benefit from this update. The main feature added to this update allows users to swipe left at the home screen to see all (including 3rd Party) apps in the “Collection”, and swipe right to see installed Games (native and 3rd party).

Currently this update is available via Ovi suite but Nokia promised to make it available Over The Air (OTA) as well in the near future.

New phones (Touch n Type models) have this update built-in so you can enjoy it out-of-the box.

LG Optimus Pro pics and specs leak – a Gingerbread phone with Blackberry form-factor

Guys at Italy’s Android World have released some pics and specs sheet of LG’s upcoming QWERTY Android phone – the Optimus Pro. It definitely looks like a Blackberry device if seen casually. Specs wise Optimus Pro is a rather low end device sporting 2.8 inch screen, Gingerbread (Android 2.3 OS), 3 Megapixel camera, a 800 MHz processor and that is all we know so far. Wait there is also the price tag that is mentioned at the site and that is around €180 ($250)

Poor Blackberry is facing competition from all sort of mobile manufacturing companies – small or big, may be its high time that they apply for a patent of their “trademark” design (a la Apple style).

OPDA, cer.s603rd.cn and many other symbian .cer/.key file generator sites are not working anymore

Bad news for Symbian fans as OPDA (and other such sites) has stopped working to give you an IMEI specific cer/key file, required to sign an unsigned app sis/sisx file). In fact cer/key files are also necessary to hack the phone (required at least once to sign the hack_cert_installer.sis or helloox sis file).

This malfunction is the result of recent changes made by “Symbian Signed” (the official Symbian certificate issuer) in the rules and regulation of cer/key file generating process. I myself applied for cer/key file (for my swanky new N8) at all such sites earlier this month but still to get one (the status showing as pending).

Hopefully this change is temporary and these sites resume their services soon.

If you don’t know what is the importance of cer/key file then refer to this “Sis/sisx” signing tools and tutorial…

Blogger adds “Favicon” edit option under “Design” tab – now add a favicon easily to a Blogger blog

In a series of improvements Blogger recently added a “Favicon edit” option button under “Design/Page Elements” tab. Via this option one can upload a favicon image to a Blogger blog and it will automatically be added to template code as a favicon entry. Earlier favicon had to be added manually to a blogger blog by adding its code in the “head” section of template (While the favicon image had to be uploaded somewhere else). Now Blogger will host the favicon image.

However you can still add the favicon directly into the template code in case you want to. And of course no need to do so if you already have one.

For those of you who don’t know – favicon is a tiny image that appears just left to the URL bar of browser when a site is loaded. Favicon is used as a brand symbol or icon by most of the famous blogs and sites.

UC Browser version 7.8 (official English version for Symbian, Java, Android and Windows Mobile) is available for download

Yesterday UC browser team updated their popular mobile web browser to version 7.8 with many improvements and bug fixes. For Android, It is the first major release after version 7.2 with more stability, faster speed and enhanced UI

As usual, UC team has given more emphasis on faster browsing speeds, more features and btter user experience. A new “View Image” option has been added to the menu to view all the pics embedded in a web page you are browsing. Frankly speaking I am not a big fan of UC Browser, yes it is fast (loads pages quickly) and has a very good download manager but it still has not come at par with Opera Mini or Bolt in terms of visual appearance of loaded pages. It looks somehow that we are indeed browsing at a mobile, perhaps it does not support latest web standards (HTML5, CSS3 etc). Anyway here are the main new features of version 7.8

1. 30% increase in speed over version 7.7

2. Full touch support including “swipe left or right” to move back or forward at a page

3. See all the images on a page one by one by flipping over

4. An advanced “Bookmark manager”

You can download UC Browser (for Java, Symbian 2nd, 3rd, 5th and ^3, Android, Windows Mobile) English version from www.ucweb.com