Taiwanese mobile phone company, HTC, lunched as many as three smartphones at the Mobile World Congress. According to speculations in the tech world, HTC is rumored to lunch over 10 smartphones in the year 2010. If Mobile World Congress lunches are any indication to go by, it might just be true.

The HTC legend is the successor to the hugely popular HTC Hero, although, it has many differentiating features. The chin is less prominent in HTC Legend, but the striking aspect of the phone is that it’s body is carved out a single aluminum block, making it the first Android based phone with a unicasing. The trackball has been replaced by an optical track pad.

HTC Legend

Legend boasts of a 3.2 inch AMOLED screen which promises a rich experience with it’s enhanced graphics and a capititive touchscreen. It runs on Android Eclair v2.1.

It has some other nifty features like smart ringer sensor. The phone hides a G-Sensor which on detecting that a phone has been picked up, reduces the ringer volume.

The Friendstream window gets all your contacts’ Twitter, Facebook streams on one platform, very similar to the SenseUI. With Friendstream, you don’t have to go to the contacts page to access the integrated contacts.

Leap is an application that allows you to get a thumbnail sized version of your home screen which is also a great addition as it saves time.

HTC Legend is expected to hit the markets in April 2010, i.e this month.

Sansung had previously lunched their proprietary Bada OS back in November last year and at this year’s Mobile World Congress we finally got to see it in action. as Samsung unveiled their first Bada OS enabled smart phone called the Samsung Wave (S8500).

Samsung Wave has a 3.3 inch super AMOLED screen having a 800×400 pixel WVGA resolution. Normal AMOLED screens have a glass layer and an electric sensor layer separated by air, but super AMOLED has merges these two layers. This, claims Samsung, to reduces reflections by five times than a normal AMOLED screen.

Samsung Wave S8500

The phone runs on a Cortex A8 1GHz processor which is the same that runs on iPhone 3GS and the Palm Pre albeit on lower clocks. A 5MP auto focus camera is located on the rear side with an LED flash.

Wave has features like integrated contacts – which gets all the various channels of communications like Calling, Messaging, Facebook, Twitter on one screen; push to calendar – which integrates Google, Yahoo and other calendars.

Samsung claims that their main idea behind developing Bada was to make the smart phones more accessible to the masses. It is partly built on a Linux kernel and the company planes to release the Software Development Kit (SDK) to developers in March for building applications.

Samsung Apps is the application store from where you can download applications.

Sony Ericsson lunched their credit card sized smartphones Xperia 10 and Xperia 10 Mini Pro at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. The most striking aspect about these phones lies in the Operating System. For the first time Sony Ericsson have used the Android OS on their phones.

Android seems to have become the preferred OS if the number of mobile phone manufacturers adopting it is anything to go by. Sony Ericsson is the newest Android convert on the block. While the Xperia X10 Mini has a touchscreen interface, the Xperia X10 Mini Pro has a QWERTY keypad which slides from beneath from it’s tiny body.

Xperia X10 Mini Pro

The basic specifications of the Xperia X10 Mini series includes a 2.55 inch TFT scratch resistant touchscreen, a 600MHz Qualcomm processor running Android OS v1.6. This sleek phone boasts of a 5 MP camera with auto focus and geotagging.

It has an interesting interface which has four contextual cornet buttons which can be customized according to your needs. Sony Ericsson’s Timescape is being hailed as an interesting feature which tends to integrate all your contacts in one place such that it is easier to access their call history, Facebook, Twitter, Messaging etc all in one screen. But then, we have seen this feature in HTC’s Sense UI, so its nothing really new.

“With the X10 Mini and X10 Mini Pro, we have pushed the boundaries of what is possible with smaller devices and are giving consumers exactly what they want; two high performance mobile phones with a fully customizable user experience platform and a stunning ultra compact design”, said Rikko Sakaguchi, EVP and Chief Creation Officer, Sony Ericsson.

Motorola Motoming A1600 is another Linux-based Motorola Mobile Phone. The A1600 has a rounded profile & comes with a transparent flip which allows one to peek at the screen it protects. The A1600 is touched-based & has a really well built exterior.

The call buttons are small but well laid out with good tactile feedback & the joypad is also easy to use. The volume buttons are on the side & comfortable to use with good tactility intuitiveness. The menu structure is easy to understand & simple. The A1600 has a large display (2.4-inches) that is quite crisp.

Motorola Motoming A1600

Although the fonts used could be better. The lack of a hardware keypad is also felt, although not as badly as on the ROKR E6 because this phone is wider, giving the onscreen keyboards a large area as well. One of the most noticeable features is the addition of a talking dictionary that can translate any world into another language & pronounced the word as it would sound very useful if you are traveling abroad. We tried it for some common words & the result were pretty good.

Other than that the 3.2-megapixel camera is useful & features auto focus & a slightly weak flash unit. Its antenna is strictly OK & call quality could have been better. The A1600 is a decent music player with good hands free quality and decent volume on the loudspeaker. If Motorola had thrown in a QWERTY package, this would be a feature-loaded device at a price of $329. As it stands, it is not a bad phone but has the odd quirk that keeps us from recommending it sans reservation.

The Diamonds looks like an HTC Touch pro on a sever diet. It misses out on the hardware QWERTY & has a smaller battery which is why it is slimmer & a lot lighter. The rear seems to be more solid & is finished in glossy black but a look at the front face & you cannot tell the Diamond & the pro apart.

The name Diamond comes from the sculpted rear that has been cut at various angles to give the appearance of many sides-like its namesake. Built quality is good & the touch Diamond looks clean. It has 4GB of internal storage but no expansion. The screen is a little devoid of colors but bright & crisp enough.

HTC Touch Diamond

Fonts are clearer than on the touch viva, although not the best around. Once again the lack of a dedicated keyboard cannot made up for by the onscreen one, simply because of the prohibitively small screen size. The call buttons are touch activated & very well laid out & amply backlit, while the home & back button also aid navigation. In fact most other non-HTC devices do not have a back button & we feel this is a nifty & very utilitarian feature that is simple to implement & should be standardized on all WM devices.

The camera on this phone is decent, actually a lot better than we expected; it out performs some of the other 3.2 megapixel units in this test. The antenna is of mediocre quality & we had slight issues with clarity in zone 2.

The earpiece volume itself is quite good. The hands free is good enough for casual music listening & to make calls but music lovers obsessed with quality will find nothing of interest here. The lack of Expansion beyond the 4 GB of inbuilt memory may also turn some people off.There,s nothing special about this handset to make it stand out.

At a price tag of $350 users would surely expect more & we would expect a QWERTY keypad to make usability better.

We already posted the Nokia N97 Review in our blog. Since then the craze has started building.

But, the wait is over, Nokia N97, the mobile computer is ready to knock the worldwide mobile market in June of this year. It’s an official announcement from Nokia that Nokia N97 will begin selling in June in more than 75 countries.

Nokia N97

Nokia N97 is more a computer than mobile. It’s the very first mobile from Nokia with fully personalizable and customizable home screen. Nokia N97 is a high end mobile that comes with 32 GB of storage and expandable upto 48 GB.

Nokia N97

Nokia N97 has 3.5″ touch display, QWERTY keyboard and N-Gaze gaming support. The live widgets on Nokia N97 connect you with social networking sites Facebook, Hi5. N97 will ship with Ovi Store, hence will offer instant access to the full range of Ovi services.

Nokia N97

Here is a snippet from Nokia’s Announcement

“The Nokia N97 is an important step towards our vision of delivering a highly personalized Internet experience,” said Jonas Geust, Vice President and head of Nokia Nseries. “Fuelled by a multitude of music, maps, games, media and applications via Ovi, the Nokia N97 transforms the Internet into an experience that’s completely tailored to the tastes and interests of its owner.”

Nokia N97 Black

Submitted Through Nokia 5800 Downloads

Nokia5800 XpressMusic

This is great video review of Nokia 5800 Xpress Music from GeekAnoids.The review is just great and you’ll get a clear idea about the device you are looking.

We, at Tech Freek also posted a review for Nokia 5800 XpressMusic a long ago, just in case you want to have a look at all the features and specifications.

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The Cookie is a clean looking phone at first glance. Its got a really uncluttered front facial with just three, small well beveled buttons. The phone itself is finished in matte black and has a Steel-Grey ring running right around the sides that adds a classy look.

LG KP500 Cookie

The camera and phone screen lock buttons are no one side and very easy to use despite their small size owing to great feedback, the volume up/down buttons aren’t as good. LG has added the ability to finger swipe through albums and this is called “Free Touch”, an obvious ripoff from Apple’s Multi Touch; but it doesn’t work anywhere at all as well which is why there’s a stylus provided. Its light years away from the flawless fluidity of Apple’s touch interface. Add to that a vary slow processor which becomes amply evident as you use the touch feature when browsing albums and such.

We were a bit disappointed with the touch sensitivity. On a more positive note touch accuracy is a bit better and acceptable for a phone in this bracket.
the screen itself is quite large and clear although we’ve seen bettr screens in the Xperia and the iPhone. The Cookie does make a strong point for itself by having a well laid out menu system with pretty good icons-not like some of the cartoonish icons we’ve seen from LG in the past.

LG provides a neat bunch of games and quite frankly we had a bit of fun playing these. This not camera phone and we’ve seen much better 3-megapixel units and there’s no flash. MP3 playback quality is strictly so-so and another pain is LGs continued use of a proprietary connect for the same rather than a 3.5mm jack. Call quality and signal reception strength on the Cookie isn’t all that great and nowhere close to Nokia phones. Priced at $300 it’s a mixed bundle.

Although not many phones can offer such a large touchscreen for the price there are other problems that prevent us from recommending you swallow this Cookie for one, it’s a mediocre phone, MP3 playback quality and the camera could be better. There are other alternatives for this price range that do far more as a phone and as multimedia devices.

Its on news again that Lenovo lunched its new Mobile Phone named Ophone. Is it true? or a hoax again? A small search in Google and Lenovo’s official site doesn’t return any result which we can trust.

At engadgetmobile, they showed us some pics of that piece of really cool looking mobile, but they can be easily faked. As long as we don’t get any official statement, we can not be 100% sure.

Lenovo OPhone

This mobile is expecting to run on Google’s Android Operating System which infact is a good OS for Mobiles and PDAs and can compete with Symbian Series OS.

It is powered by a good speedy 624MHz CPU and 3.5″ OLED display. The touchscreen navigation interface putting it closer to Apples’s iPhone, though we learn that its longer, wider and thicker then iPhone.

Its also has 3.5mm headphone socket, mini USB interface, bluetooth and WiFi for connectivity and a powerful 5 Megapixel camera.

With no official announcement of release, we better wait and watch till it comes out to the market.

Nokia, the world leader in manufacturing Mobile Phones, announced its next big thing today, Nokia N97.

Nokia N97 is running on Symbian Series60 5th Edition with touchscreen user interface and fully optimized for one hand operation. Navigation is pretty easy like Nokia 5800 XpressMusic Tube. There are only three buttons below the 3.5 inch screen. One is Menu and the others are Call Accept and Call Reject. There are several dedicated keys like Volume, Camera Shutter, Power are also present. This device has a full functional QWERTY Keyboard when you slide it from left to right making it the PDA.

Nokia N97

Watching video is also a great experience with built in support for MPEG-4 / SP and MPEG-4 AVC/H.264,up to 30 fps. Theres no issue for framerate according to Nokia. It also supports Real Video up to QCIF @ 30 fps and Windows Media (WMV9) up to CIF @ 30 fps.

The Music Quality is excellent, and supports MP3, AAC, eAAC, eAAC+, WMA formats. The N Series Music Player lets you create, edit your own playlist and save them. It also supports embedded Album Art into mp3 files and show it while playing. The built in FM Receiver is also good on producing excellent sound quality. Theres also an option to listen to Internet Radio stations of your choice.

The main Camera supports up to 5 megapixels (2584 x 1938), like former N95 or N96. It can save images in JPEG/EXIF formats with 16.7 million/24-bit colors. Video Recording is of DVD quality. It can record MPEG-4 VGA (640 x 480) at up to 30 fps. Theres also option to record in 3GP format for MMS and Video Ringing Tone. The camera aperture is F2.8 with Focal Length of 5.4 mm which is really very good. The Dual LED camera flash and video light is sufficient to shoot at dark.

Browsing Internet experience is improved since Nokia N96. Built in browser supports full HTML/XHTML encoding. Flash Lite 3.0 / Flash Video in internet browser lets you watch your favorite videos from YouTube, Google Video or any other sites. It also supports streaming video and audio.

The device comes with preloaded Nokia Maps and with integrated compass and A-GPS receiver. Other GPS features are Multimedia city guides and navigation services. Drive: voice guided car navigation, or Walk: pedestrian-optimized turn-by-turn guidance. (Navigation may need to be purchased separately.)

Nokia N97 supports both GSM 850/900/1800/1900 MHz and WCDMA 900/1900/2100 (HSDPA) mode. Internet Access is possible through 3G, EDGE (GPRS Class 1) and IEEE 802.11b/g. Local Connectivity is possible through WiFi, Bluetooth wireless technology 2.0 with A2DP stereo audio, enhanced data rates (EDR) and Micro-USB connector, Hi-Speed USB 2.0. A 3.5mm stereo headphone plug and TV-out support (PAL/NTSC) is also present.

Built in 32GB Flash Memory ensures you never have to delete your valuable data. If you feel that this is not sufficient, theres also a MicroSD card slot available and can be extended to 42GB with a 16GB MicroSD HC Memory Card stick.

So, the verdict, is the N97 worth it or not? Sure, arguably funkier looking, sleeker and has a high quality finish, in addition to having huge storage. The price is not yet disclosed by Nokia but can be estimated a little over $1000 since it’s predecessor Nokia N96 comes at around $750.