Mobile Phone Hunter

K-Touch V98 mobile phone is a flip one in design with a metal body plus spray paint, as well as FREE STOP rotating shaft technology. So that its quality is guaranteed. V98 has a 2.8-inch touch screen, and its ergonomic design can ease fingers and shoulders from much pressure, which is truly healthy cell phones.

K-Touch V98 mobile phone comes with gravity sensors from which shaking switching operation can enhance the user experience. Other functions of V98: Supports for EDGE Internet, Bluetooth, JAVA extension, 2 million pixels camera, dual SIM dual standby, e-books, calls attribution to, MP3, MP4, QQ and so on. All these features should satisfy your entertainment needs.

The idea that this “ smart phone” runs Windows XP is kind of a stretch, yet it’s being called the XpPhone. It’s pretty much a UMPC or MID, though, that happens to make phone calls because, man oh man, would you need some billowy Hammer Pants to carry this thing around in your pocket as your primary phone. Add to that the five hour battery life and a weight that I can only assume to be at least 1.5 pounds and you’ve got yourself a highly portable computer masquerading around as a gigantic mobile phone.

The device is running some sort of AMD CPU — perhaps the Geode processor or, more likely, the Atom-like Neo processor found in HP’s DV2 netbook. There’s also a USB port, headset port, SIM card slot, memory card slot, VGA out (via a mini adapter), camera, touchscreen, what looks like a little trackpad, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and SSD options from 8GB to 64GB.

No word on price or availability, as this unit is just a prototype. I’d guess it’s probably not coming to the US through regular retail channels anytime soon, but it does give a nice look forward about what’s possible. Convergence, synergy, buzzwords, etc.

You see, the name “xpPhone” is rather disingenuous here. At first glance, you may assume that you’re about to discover what’s likely the planet’s first cellular telephone to run a full-fledged version of Windows XP. Sadly, we’ve got to slot the device shown above squarely into the MID category — GSM support be darned. Still, we can’t help but applaud the engineering efforts; after all, this thing somehow packs an AMD CPU, 1GB of RAM, a 64GB SSD, 4.8-inch 800 x 480 touchpanel, WiFi, various cell radios, a 1.3 megapixel camera and a battery good for five solid hours of use into a device barely larger than the average, yawn-inducing MID found in every last corner of Computex. In fact, it’s so impressive that we’re beginning to question its authenticity as a real, working product. Much like the number of licks to the center of a Tootsie Pop, the world may never know.

main menu of xpPhone.

iPhones across Australia lit up with the face of ’80s crooner Rick Astley this week as a Wollongong TAFE student made international headlines for releasing the first virus to infect the popular smart phone platform.

The virus is able to reset the phone wallpaper to display an image of Astley (a practice known as rickrolling) on “jailbroken” iPhones.

These phones are unlocked so users can use non-Apple applications or service providers, and only those who had failed to reset default security passwords were affected.

Ashley Towns, the 21-year-old Australian who has taken credit for the high-tech stunt, wrote on his Twitter page yesterday that he created the virus to raise awareness of security issues related to iPhone passwords.

The student, who lives in Wollongong with his family, told Computerworld that he had no particular vendetta against Apple, and had created the virus out of curiosity and boredom.

“I had just formatted my iPhone and it told me to set the password in bold, big letters and I wondered how many people have actually done that,” he said.

The virus places Astley’s image into smart phones’ iPhone wallpaper with the words “Ikee is never gonna give you up”.

Towns tweets under the name ikeeex and an explanation embedded into the virus source code reads: “people are stupid, and this is to prove it so RTFM. Its not that hards [sic] guys. But hey who cares, its only your bank details at stake.”

In spite of claims by Towns that the worm was easy to remove, a number of iPhone users on the Whirlpool forum complained about its effects, the quantity of bandwidth it may have used, and the possibility of excess data charges.

“Perhaps I discover a way to break into your house. Does that make it acceptable for me to break in, mess the place up, then leave? Did I just do you a service by doing that, exposing the security flaw in the process? No. That would be a ridiculous claim to make,” Adamiam said.

Although the exact number of iPhone users affected by the virus is not known, it could have spread to hundreds of handsets in Australia, said Paul Ducklin, head of technology at Sophos Asia Pacific.

An online poll run by Sophos in response to the incident revealed that 75 per cent of the 721 respondents believed the worm author had done “iPhone users a favour”.

Graham Cluley, a senior technology consultant at Sophos, said it was a “depressing notion that most people think that doing harm and breaking computer crime laws is a good thing”.

He said every victim of the virus first had to take steps to repair the damage caused by the worm and restore their phone to normal use, and then pay for a potentially large data bill at the end of the month.

“But what’s worst of all is that the code for the worm is now available for anyone to download. The genie is let out of the bottle - and anyone could write a more dangerous version of the worm which could have a much more dangerous payload. My prediction is that we may see more attacks like this in the future,” he said.

The virus followed hot on the trail of a similar attack last week in the Netherlands where a Dutch hacker took over similarly vulnerable iPhones and demanded a small fee to release their data.

Were you affected by the virus? Do you think Ashley Towns did you a favour?

Thousands of Aussies who had naughtily unlocked their iPhones were suddenly greeted with a new wallpaper on their mobil phones featuring the ‘80s one hit wonder Rick Astley (who became famous for the song “Never gonna give you up”. It’s a far prettier site than the image of the worm maker, Ashley Town, a 21 year old student from south of Sydney:

The infected iPhone screen, Rick Astley virus wallpaper image (top right), and Ashley Towns (bottom right).

The successful worm virus has sparked a debate about whether Ashley did owners of the unlocked phones a favor by exposing the security flaw. A comment in The Age actually revealed that, “This news article fails to mention that not only does it set up a wallpaper, it also fixes the vulnerability in the phones.”

If these Aussies had shanzhai iPhone clones, would they still have been vulnerable to the goth hackers’ attack? By unlocking phones and going with shanzhai versions, are you just asking for trouble?

There are reportedly iPhone clones that do run the real Apple OS X but more commonly, they run Windows Mobile and what we’re seeing more and more now is that the shanzhai are choosing Google’s free Android OS. So far Android has appeared to be pretty secure, although anti-virus software has been developed and launched for it anyway.

W7phone

XpPhone releases that this smart phone will be positioned as follows: the first tri-mode tri-standby phone in the world, with 5 MP camera, supports for Windows 7…

To be honest, I have just received their official MAIL and I was scared by it. It has not been released but it is really unbelievable, and is said to have 4.3-inch, 4.8-inch, 7-inch size in option.

In short, we haven’t seen the real handset now, so let’s just wait and see…I will update it once there is any news.

We have already had iPhone, Gphone, Ophone, Cphone and so on. And now here is another one - Vphone: It uses a 624MHz PXA310 XScale processor, 512MB flash memory, 256MB RAM, 3.5-inch WVGA touch screen; supports for WiFi, a 5-megapixel autofocus camera, a front VGA camera, supports EV-DO Rev.

Although it is running Android 1.6 version system, next year it will be the direct upgrade to version 2.0 for user. At the same time from the application menu, you can access two kinds of video call mode selecting a carrier of Verizon. You might ask it seems a bit HTC Sense UI, but the Saygus answer is that these buttons from the Google interface is extracted from open-source projects; we have been impressed with its QWERTY keyboard. The price is not known now, but it should be lower than that of other large manufacturers in China mobile phone market.

Want to see that new Saygus VPhone in action? Can’t get enough QWERTY in your Android? Enjoy videos shot amongst a crowd of screaming trade show attendees? Boy are you in luck. Check out our video hands-on of the handset after the break, and please excuse the noise.

Video about this article

China Mobile officially passed the half-billion subscriber count mark as of the end of August, and we’d just like to present a couple staggering ways of looking at that figure:
     1. The carrier has a phone in the pocket of nearly 38 percent of the population. For comparison’s sake, the biggest carrier in the US clocks in at under 29 percent — never mind the fact that China has over 1.3 billion people.

     2. If China Mobile were a US carrier, it’d be providing every American man, woman, and child with about 1.65 phones (and OPhones).

Call us when you hit a billion, guys — we’re pretty amped to liveblog that party.

Purchase China Mobile Phones Online.

A report has revealed that Apple's iPhone have helped to make the US technology company more profitable than Nokia.

Strategy Analytics said Apple’s profits had exceeded Nokia’s for the first time in the United States. Nokia posted a third quarter operating profit of $1.1 billion from its handset unit, while sales of Apple’s iPhone generated $1.6 billion in profit over the same period.

Nokia, the world’s biggest handset maker, is facing increasing competition from the likes of Apple and Research in Motion, makers of the BlackBerry. The Finnish giant’s share of the phone market decreased by six per cent in the third quarter, and it reported its first quarterly loss.

“Nokia’s profit margin for its handset division has been shrinking during the global economic downturn in 2009,” said Neil Mawston, an analyst with Strategy Analytics. “We believe the United States, where Nokia now trails Apple in market share, is the key to Nokia’s recovery in 2010.”

Despite Nokia’s huge global sales, it has struggled to dominate the US market in the same way it does elsewhere. The company is planning to make its devices more open to change by carriers in order to win over big network operators who wish to add their own logos, software and services to the handsets.

“A successful fight on Apple’s high-profit home turf can simultaneously help to revitalise Nokia’s margins and help put a check on Apple’s surging growth,” said Mawston.

Nokia and Apple are currently locked in a legal dispute after the Finnish mobile phone company accused Apple’s iPhone of infringing its copyright and patents. Nokia is seeking compensation for the alleged infringements.

“By refusing to agree appropriate terms for Nokia’s intellectual property, Apple is attempting to get a free ride on the back of Nokia’s innovation,” said Ilkka Rahnasto, Nokia’s vice president for legal and intellectual property.

If you’ve been tempted by the iPhone but have not yet succumbed, you’re likely to be able to take advantage of some very appealing offers as first China cell phone Orange and then Vodafone add Apple’s handset to their range.

To buy or not to buy: the upcoming iPhone price war is good for the consumer.

The iPhone will be on Orange before Christmas, perhaps as early as this month, and Vodafone customers will be able to get it in the new year. Both networks will be relieved to stop iPhone-seeking customers leaking away to O2 but they will also want to tempt new subscribers.

So if you want one, when is the best time to buy? Are the best deals going to be available at Christmas, when Orange and O2 go head-to-head, or early next year when the iPhone goes to Vodafone as well?

Handset prices are unlikely to change – they don’t vary much in other countries where the iPhone is offered by multiple networks – and you’re unlikely to see more than a £5-a-month cut in tariffs. Expect instead to see the networks vying to offer the best package – for instance, more call minutes or texts included in the monthly fee. Internet tethering, the ability to use your iPhone as a modem for your laptop, could come into play too. Many of O2’s customers think tethering is too expensive, providing competitors with the opportunity to make cuts.

The networks are keeping quiet about pricing so far and we also don’t know how they plan to play their hands. O2 and Orange could offer their best possible deals at Christmas, hoping to lure into contracts those who might be tempted to wait for Vodafone. On the other hand they might keep a little back, ready for the three-way price war.

O2 has lost exclusivity on the iPhone but it at least has the Palm Pre, the iPhone’s closest competitor, to itself. However, O2’s 3G network, which has had problems over the last few months, is unlikely to improve once the Pre arrives.

But the dust may not have settled. In the coming weeks other networks, such as 3 and Virgin, could add the handset to their services.

If you’ve waited this long for an iPhone, our advice is to wait a little longer, and take the best deal available after Vodafone enters the fray next year.