Wednesday, October 17, 2007

Motorola Concept Phone at the Symbian Smartphone Show

dsc00036-wince.JPGOne of the more interesting things to be found at mobile phone shows is when a company turns up pushing ideas, and concepts. Sometimes these things come through, other times they are incorporated with other features and sometimes they just get left behind in the fast changing environment of progressive technology.

Yesterday at the Symbian Smartphone Show I had the opportunity to look over some concepts Motorola are planning for future handset releases. The phone you see in the photos is just a concept phone, it has no model number, and may well never be released as a product. The idea in bringing the handset to the expo was to showcase the media capabilities that Motorola may be introducing in future handsets.

The Motorola Concept phone demonstrated some very high power picture and video editing capabilities.

dsc00038-wince.JPGOn most camera phones, there is a delay, sometimes of up to 5 seconds, as the camera loads and opens. The camera on the concept Motorola launched very quickly, and was ready to use straight away. When taking a picture the handset saved the picture, archived it to the designated folder and was ready to shoot, again very quickly. In a very non scientific test the concept phone proved to be much quicker than the Sony Ericsson K810i I had with me at the time.

The video capture was at 30fps. Once a video clip has been recorded, there are a wide range of options available on the handset itself to edit the clip. You can cut sections of the clip, join other clips together, use transitions as you fade from one clip to another; you can cut out pieces of audio, add a soundtrack, and on and on. The options were numerous, but the thing that made it great is the handset was so usable. Now, it is fair to say I have not always been Motorolas biggest fan. However the concept I saw yesterday was very good. It is not often you find Motorola and usability linked together in a positive way but the concept phone was just usable. All the features for video editing were simply laid out in a logical manner, and navigation of the menu was via a solid feeling circular 5 way joypad.

dsc00039-wince.JPGOnce you are happy with the editing, the Motorola phone offers one click uploads to popular online media services such as YouTube, Flickr, Facebook, etc.You can set the phone so all media is uploaded to one destination or split things up, so videos go to Youtube and pictures go to Flickr, for example. You can imagine for yourself the possibilities available. 21st birthday pictures immediately online to share with friends, wedding videos to share with family who cant be with you, sporting events, social parties, and so on. Even news clips, in an era of instant media, can easily be filmed and uploaded for the world to see.

If the features on show in the concept phone make it onto forthcoming Motorola handsets, then they are going to have some phones worth shouting about. It will be interesting to see over the coming months what they have to offer.



Read More...

[Source: The UK Mobile Phone Blog]