Mobile Mayhem

Tune into the world of mobile phones happenings in the month of May.

"Watson, please come here. I want you," were very first utterances ever made over the telephone by its inventor, Mr. Alexander Graham Bell to his assistant Mr. Watson. This was way back in the spring of 1876; Bell had just spilt some acid on his pants. Because this first telephonic device was fashioned out of a funnel, a wooden stand, some copper wire, and a cup of acid.

Even 200 years later, when black bakelite “baby” Bells were all around us, who could even have imagined those clunky instruments would metamorphose into the slick cell phones of today. No wonder they say, there is nothing in a caterpillar that tells you it's going to be a butterfly.

We tune into the world of mobile phones for some of the hottest happenings in the month of May.

Samsung’s Cell Piano/Drum Kit
According to US Patent Application 20060084218 filed by one Sun-Gi Lee of Samsung, the Korean giant promises to turn a cell phone into a full-size piano or a drum kit! To do so, it projects an image of the piano keyboard or drum skins on a flat surface through a small embedded video projector. You hit the keys/drums using the phone keys, the motion is picked up by an in-built camera and converted into appropriate musical sound. The phone will either play audibly in real time, or record the performance. And haan, the phone's camera will also be able to capture a video of the whole process. Drum roll, Shivamani! And over to Brian Silas…

Sony Ericsson SO902WP+ and W42s
Based by the number of times I have fished out the plasticy remains of my cell phone from the water depths of a toilet bowl and blow dried it with a hair dryer, this is one Sony I gotta have. Because the SO902WP+ is a waterproof phone. It can even function for 30 minutes under water at a depth of one meter and features a 1.3 MP camera. So you safely can go swimming or singing in the rain with it nidar ho kar. In Japan you can pick up the SO902WP+ for ¥35,000 I hear. So I’m getting me one. I’m not fond of swimming or croaking in the rain... But I’ll be able wash the phone thoroughly after any unsavoury future dunkings.

Psst! Sony’s launching another music phone too: The W42s. Slim, lightweight with a 2.2-inch TFT-LCD, 1.3Mp cam, 1GB memory, FM tuner, media player, and dedicated music keys.

LG KG320 and MFJM53
Thin is in. And the KG320 is a 9.9mm thick, 73gm to 81gm ultra-slim phone. (Allegedly, this makes it 0.9mm thicker than Samsung's SCH-V870 credit card-shaped handset, but the LG is lighter.) The KG320 features a 176 x 200, 262,144-colour display, 128MB of internal memory, a flash-equipped 2.2Mp, USB connectivity, and a MP3/MPEG/AAC media player.

The LG MFJM53, on the other hand, is setting out in life as an iPod killer with an 8GB HDD. Slickly designed, it has a 1.77 inches, 262,144-colour, touch-sensitive OLED screen and plays MP3, WAV, DRM and Ogg.

Nokia E50
Yeah baby, thin is in! Not to be left behind, Nokia has nipped in with the E50, the skinniest of the E series siblings. This business class quad-band mobile is replete with pre-installed corporate applications for voice, e-mail, mobile PBX solutions and the ability to have two numbers on one phone. Its GSM 850/900/1800/1900 bands make it viable for Europe, Africa, Asia-Pacific, and the Americas. For fun and photos, the E50 has a 1.3Mp camera and an MP3 player. The device is based on the S60 3rd edition smartphone platform and the Symbian OS.