Pantech's love connection phone

Who needs lovey-dovey chitchat or text messages of sweet nothings on the phone when you can send across your love through touch? Korean company Pantech may just have hit the sweet spot by tapping the gold mine of youngsters on hormonal overdrive, with too much money to spend. Its Touch-Screen Phone Love Canvas (IM-R300), the company's first touchscreen outing, not only lets one party draw little hearts and send them over to his or her significant other's Love Canvas, you can also express your emotional status with various emoticons and vibrations by touching the panel. We're just surprised this wasn't dreamed up by the Japanese, but otherwise it's a fully functioning handset with GPS, memory slot, M-Commerce and terrestrial DMB support and a 2-megapixel camera. Fortunately, though, this doesn't come with a built-in electric charge for when you're having a lover's spate.

Via Telecoms Korea | Picture credit: Sky

Move your body, charge your phone

There are several ways one can harness natural energy. For example, the wind, the sun, tides and geothermal activities, and increasingly, the human body to producer energy to charge all sorts of electricity-hungry devices.

Music company Orange and GotWind, a firm specializing in renewable energy, have teamed up to create Dance Charge. Weighing 180g, you strap it around your arm. Dance Charge then uses the kinetic energy generated by your body in motion to juice up your phone.

It also uses a system of weights and magnets to produce electric current to top up the storage battery, which can later be used to charge your handset.

A prototype of the device will be shown and tested on June 27 at this year's Glastonbury Festival, the world's biggest greenfield music and arts celebration.

Credit: ubergizmo and reuters.uk

Concept phone may be too weird even for Vertu

Vertu is one luxury phone maker that's not afraid to take risks, as evidenced by such creations as its US$310,000 Signature Cobra handset. But with competition in that space growing all the time, real or fake, it behooves the company to stay on the cutting edge.

That's why designer Christopher Tak Cheung Yue has proposed a phone that takes some new angles--seven of them, to be exact. The seven-sided Vertu Suave concept, which BornRich describes as a "classy balance of angular and organic shape," is aimed specifically at female consumers with casings made of gold, titanium, and a sheepskin backing. It's definitely eye-catching, but it somehow looks like the sole of a shoe to us.

Via CNET Crave

Details scarce ahead of iPhone 3G launch

A few tidbits about the upcoming iPhone 3G launch have trickled out this week, though unfortunately, none of them are particularly illuminating, taken individually.

Perhaps the most interesting one--if only for its lack of details--is the memo distributed to Apple Retail employees this week in FAQ-style concerning the July 11 launch of the iPhone 3G.

Employees are being instructed to answer "I don't know" to any number of pertinent questions surrounding the launch, such as how the in-store activation process will work, any upgrade offers from the original iPhone, or any planned price cuts to the iPod Touch.

AppleInsider reported that Apple is planning meetings for July 6 with its retail staff, presumably to share these details, once the company has finalized its plans.

Last year, the actual time of the iPhone launch was subject to much speculation until Apple finally settled on its "Happy Hour with the iPhone" plan.
Read more »

Motorola A810 smart phone to launch in Q3 outside China

In addition to the two new MING smart phones, Motorola will also be introducing a new candybar smart phone called the A810. While this was originally slated for the Chinese market only, Motorola Singapore has now confirmed that the A810 will also ship to other Asian markets (including Singapore) in the third quarter of 2008.

Based on the information posted on Motorola's China Web site, the triband A810 comes with pretty much the same features as the original MING A1200, though it does sport a smaller, simplistic design. Its onboard features include a 2-megapixel camera, 2.4-inch QVGA touchscreen, Bluetooth, microSD expansion card slot, 3.5mm audio jack and FM radio. Once again, 3G and Wi-Fi radios are omitted in the A810.

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