While Judie is at Mobius getting here hands on Zincs and Advantages, the guys over at ePrice have managed to get hold of a HTC Diamond, and have photographed the unboxing for all of us to peruse.

Seems the wacky angles theme not only encapsulates the device but the box as well! I’m looking forward to giving one of these a go!

[via Engadget]

When I asked Nokia if I could review their 8800 Arte handset, I wasn’t quite sure what to expect. Some dumb phone that just looked a bit pretty, form and no function, a celebrity only famous for being rich?

I’m certainly not the target of a phone like this. I like my mobile devices to be able to do everything. Surf the web, get emails, keep my calendar, mind my address book, and keep everything in sync with everything else. These are things that typically flumix a Series 40 phone.

I was all set to be disappointed with the 8800 Sapphire Arte, and at first I was, until I realised what this phone is all about…

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[Sorry about the delay on this, I’ve been a bit swamped recently]

I’ve been fortunate enough to have had the chance to try out two excellent ultraportable notebooks recently, the MacBook Air and the Fujitsu P8010. Shortly after the P8010 went back, the mailman knocked on the door with year another ultraportable, this time the Toshiba R500.

The model I was sent included the 64GB SSD drive, just like the MacBook Air. I’m not sold on these priced-like-gold hard drives, they just seem too expensive for what they are at the moment, but to each his own!

The first thing I noticed taking it out of the box was it’s LIGHT, and I mean REALLY LIGHT. I have never held such a weightless notebook in my life. It is plastic though, and flexes rather badly, which is quite a shame. It may not be as solid as the Air, but it is noticeably lighter.

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Last night I decided to take another look in the box that the U1010 came in, just to see if there were any goodies I was missing out on. Unlike the Shift the U1010 came with reinstall DVDs, as opposed to having a backup partition. I like the way the Shift can completely reload itself without any outside help, but having DVDs is a good idea too.

Anyway, in the box I found install DVDs for both Vista Business (which came preloaded) and Windows XP Tablet Edition. Now the performance on the U1010 has been fine on Vista, but I was curious to see just how much slower Vista was than XP on the relatively slow processor.

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Judie: Here’s how it all started. I got a press release from Kevin Doel regarding FlipSide, a new Windows Mobile MP3 Player which features “”Swooshing” Album Art as Part of Acclaimed Visual Interface.”

FlipSide, the MP3 player from Electric Pocket that has had BlackBerry users buzzing, is now available to users of Windows Mobile devices such as the Treo 700xw, Mogul, Ace, and Blackjack. The feature that has made FlipSide such an instant hit among BlackBerry users is its iPhone-like interface that allows users to visually “swoosh” through their music quickly and easily.

Navigating through music and selecting tunes is a simple process with FlipSide: scroll through the Album Covers, or flick through them using your finger on the screen, then click on the navigation button to open up a vertical list of the tracks. The spacebar is used to start, pause and skip songs, while the navigation button is used to scroll either left or right to either fast forward or rewind within a song.

While FlipSide comes with the features expected of any MP3 player, the feature that gets the most buzz is the attractive user interface that makes FlipSide both visually enjoyable and very easy to use. Its ability to “swoosh” through the full-color cover art of an entire music collection within seconds using the navigation control button makes FlipSide stand-out as both a simple and fun MP3 player. FlipSide downloads and displays the cover art of each album and even links to FlipSide Extras to provide biographies of the artists, recommendations for similar artists and more.

FlipSide for Windows Mobile plays music stored on memory cards in MP3 & WMA formats. FlipSide retails for $19.95 and a free trial download is available now from the FlipSide website at http://flipside.fm.

As I’ll usually do when I get a product announcement, I forwarded this release to the team to see if anyone might be interested in covering the item or reviewing the product…and then their emails started rolling in. It wasn’t long before we had another full blown GearChat Roundtable on our hands.

Sit tight; this one was a doozy…

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In the spirit of reviewing, two nights ago I gave the HTC Shift restore feature a try. There are no discs included with the Shift, just a recovery partition containing an image of Vista Business, the original applications and the drivers.

Quite a good idea actually, sure it chews up a bit of the relatively cramped 40GB HDD, but at least you’ll know that if something goes wrong (virus, damaged system file, etc) you can just hold F3 while booting, and bring it back to the default state.

In my experience however, not all was moonlight and roses. Getting the recovery going was a simple matter, and it happened quite quickly too (less than 30mins). Booting for the first time takes ages, but eventually I hit the Vista desktop, straight into a driver warning.

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Anyone remember a time when Pocket PCs came with proper styli? They were thicker, stronger, and most importantly they didn’t fold up like a picnic blanket.

These days manufacturers have been stealing space from the old stylus slot to cram ever more stuff into their devices. While I understand they are under pressure to make stuff thinner and smaller, they need to consider how it compromises usability in the process.

I’ve really come to notice this stylus origami since trying to ink on the HTC Shift and the Fujitsu U1010. They include these tiny little toothpicks reminiscent of the CLIE styli that are too thin, too light and they are constantly collapsing when you use them! The Shift has the added excitement of an overly sensitive touchscreen that makes getting that tiny pointer onto the screen (without brushing your hand on the screen) very difficult.

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Jenneth has been busy over at the Web Worker Daily, this time finding out the best applications to turn your iPhone into a highly-capable business tool.

From the article:

Right now, the iPhone is mostly a consumer-oriented cellphone, but that’s set to change in June when the iPhone 2.0 firmware is released. This will likely add business-friendly features like support for Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync, Cisco IPsec VPN and remote IT configuration and security capabilities. More importantly, it’s going to give iPhone users the ability to download third-party application through the new Apple-run App Store.

This follows her excellent look at turning a Windows Mobile device into a web warrior, capable of making sense of the diversity that is the World Wide Web.

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