MWC

Samsung have been busy lately, launching a raft of new handsets at MWC.

They all feature a full touchscreen interface, and the Ultra Touch (Tocco Ultra edition to us) pictured on the left also features a proper keypad, for those times when you just want to make a phone call!

In the middle of the photo is the Omnia HD which features the worlds first 720p video decoding and encoding on a mobile phone and a 3.7” AMOLED screen with the odd resolution of 360×640. It does produce very sharp, vivid images though. You also get GPS, Wifi, Bluetooth, a compass (nice augment to the GPS for navigational use) and an 8MP camera with flash.

Lastly we come to the “Beat” music phones. There are two models in this range, the Beat DJ and Beat Disc. The DJ edition includes software on board to let you scratch and remix any of your loaded tunes while the Disc edition cuts back on the toys but gives you a slide out keypad.

Both the Beat phones have audio technology from Bang and Olufsen and come with the Shazam music recognition application embedded.

Lastly, Samsung are showing us the way forward on the eco front with the “Blue Earth” mobile pictured right. They’re being cagy with the full specs but we do know it has a full touchscreen, is solar powered, is made from recycled plastics and includes a built in pedometer that tells you how much CO2 you’ve saved by walking instead of driving!

You can get the full specs on all the new Samsung releases on the MWC website they set up for the show.

Walking past the Sony Ericsson stand, I noticed somebody holding a phone looking very much like he wanted to show it to somebody. Turns out it was the new Idou making it’s first public showing.

It has the fluid touch screen UI that’s very much in vogue at the moment and the usual movie and music features you’d expect from a high end device. Top of the list though has to be the 12.1 megapixel camera.

It’s based on a future version of Symbian and should be available during the second half of this year.

Here’s an interesting twist on the standard bluetooth headset from Australian company BlueAnt. The BlueAnt V1 is “voice controlled” - Command the headset to voice dial (for example) and it will initiate that function on the phone. It’s pre trained to recognise voices from the region you buy it in, so we don’t need to sound Australian before it will understand us. It also makes the business of paring the headset with your device easy by verbally guiding you through the process, issuing instructions as it goes.

Debuting at this year’s MWC in Barcelona, Bitstream are bringing the Bolt mobile browser into public beta. Bolt offers full, a grown-up browsing experience including streaming videos. It will work on any Java (J2ME) enabled phone (there’s also a dedicated Blackberry version) and promises 25-50% faster page rendering than competing browsers, even on entry level phones.

The current closed beta is going to go public today, so starting this morning you should be able to can download it for free from www.boltbrowser.com