Nokia N8 to be previewed exclusively at MAC 2010

The latest offering from the house of Nokia, the Nokia N8 will be previewed exclusively for the Indian customers at the Mobile Application Conference (MAC) India 2010 on September 25 in Bangalore. The Nokia N8 is the first device in the world to run on Symbian 3 operating system.

The device boasts of a 12 megapixel camera with Carl Zeiss optics and Xenon flash. The camera also packs in special features like geo tagging and face and smile detection. The phone is capable of HD video recording. You can also edit your videos and share them all through the phone.

The N8 guarantees entertainment with Web TV and can also be hooked to TV or home theatre system. It also pulls feeds and updates from social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter.

What is more exciting is that you can personalize the phone by creating your own widgets. It also has voice-guided navigation for over 70 countries in the world. The phone is available in an exciting range of colors like Dark Grey, Silver White, Green, Blue and Orange.

Although the India launch date has not yet been revealed, you can be experience the smartphone here in your own backyard courtesy Nokia and MAC.

Sony Ericsson ditches Symbian in favor of Android

Android is gaining ground in the mobile operating system arena. And it is expected to reach the top spot by 2013. With this background, it comes as no surprise that Sony Ericsson has officially confirmed that it will stop producing Symbian based smartphones in future, and will switch over to Android platform for most of its products.

The last of Sony's smartphones to run on Symbian will be the Vivaz and the Vivaz Pro.

The confirmation comes from a Sony Ericsson spokesperson who said, "We have no plans for the time being to develop any new products on the Symbian Foundation standard or operating system."

Although Sony will continue to remain a member of the Symbian Foundation, the company's Chief Creation Officer, Rikko Sakaguch has also confirmed about its future with the Android platform.

Although Symbian is still the most popular platform for smartphones, popularized by Nokia, its market share has drastically fallen from 41.2 percent in Q2 this year as compared to 51 percent in the same period last year. Reports also mention that the markets for iOS and Android have increased significantly in the same time frame.

Other smartphone makers like Samsung and LG have also cut back on their support for Symbian.

As Sony prepares to gain market share by switching to Android from Symbian, the company has been condemned for its slow upgradation of Android platforms. At a time when device makers are releasing Android 2.2 ready devices in market, some of Sony's Android 2.1 models are yet to hit the market that were scheduled to hit shelves this month.

At this point, we can only hope that Sony gears up and shifts to Android 2.2 to be in the race.

RIM unveils its tablet PC, the BlackBerry PlayBook

San Francisco: The anticipation is finally over. The curtains are up. The much in talks Research in Motion (RIM)'s tablet, called the BlackBerry PlayBook, was unveiled at the Developers' Conference. The 'enterprise ready' tablet has a seven inch screen.

Weighing less than a pound, the PlayBook will support Adobe Flash Player 10.1 (a feature lacked by the iPad) and is expected to go on sale early 2011. Nothing has been mentioned about the tablet's pricing.

Although the screen size of the PlayBook is smaller compared to its able competitor, Apple's iPad (9.7 inch screen size) but it scores over the latter in the camera section. The PlayBook has two cameras including a 3MP front facing one for videoconferencing.

The PlayBook features computer monitors and TV outlets for it to display material. The tablet will use a new OS, called the BlackBerry Tablet OS, developed by QNX Software Systems. QNX was acquired by RIM early this year from Harman International.

The device will run on a 1GHz dual-core processor, with 1GB of RAM as well as HDMI and USB ports. The PlayBook can be synced-up with other RIM handsets through Bluetooth. The device will be Wi-Fi enabled and will be followed by 3G and 4G tablets in future.

Michael Lazaridis, Co-Chief Executive, RIM said about the PlayBook that the new tablet contained several features requested by corporate information technology departments. He branded the PlayBook as "the world's first professional tablet".

Lazaridis emphasized on the fact that the PlayBook was fully compatible with the special servers that corporations and governments now used to control and monitor employees' BlackBerry devices.

While Apple has always been ahead of RIM in terms of number of applications, the announcement of the PlayBook was followed by Amazon announcing introduction of Kindle e-book application for the PlayBook.