Pro Computer Geek

Normally £139.95, save £55 using voucher code QWERTY55 at the checkout when you buy from e2save. Voucher code expires this Friday.

The Samsung Genio Qwerty B3210 is a fun and simple messaging phone in a lightweight BlackBerry-style handset. This entry level phone from Samsung’s Genio range is aimed at people who love to text. The QWERTY keyboard is great for super fast typing. The 2.2 inch screen is basic but practical with it’s landscape aspect. The Genio Qwerty is supplied with two back covers, one brightly coloured and one plain black one.

Features of the Genio Qwerty include a 2 megapixel camera, an FM radio, multimedia player, 3.5mm audio jack and stereo Bluetooth. The phone has a funky cartoon-style interface, which is quite fun. The Genio Qwerty has 3G or Wi-Fi, there is however GPRS, HSCSD and EDGE, which makes it suitable for checking emails and occasional web browsing. This is a cool phone for keeping in touch with friends through texts, emails or instant messaging. This version of the phone has a black fascia with red detail and a white back cover.

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Only £79.95 on Vodafone PAYG. The LG Pop GD510, according to LG, is the most compact 3 inch full touchscreen phone ever made. LG have compromised on some features to produce a phone that appears to be high end, but is priced in the mid range. The Pop looks fantastic with the 3 inch touchscreen covering almost all of the handset and just one multi-functional button used to start and end calls, or to access the menu. The brushed aluminium frame is only 4.8 mm wide and gives the GD510 a simple and sleek look that is sure to stand out.

The LG Pop has style over substance, making it an affordable touchscreen phone with some mid range features. It has a 3 megapixel camera to capture all those unexpected moments. There’s video recording and playback, an accelerometer, Bluetooth, a very nice MP3 player and an FM radio. Memory can be expanded to 32GB using a microSD card.

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The Google Nexus One is now available SIM free at Pixmania for £599 plus delivery.

Manufacturered by HTC, Google’s first own-brand mobile phone is undoubtedly a superb piece of engineering. Ergonomically, it just slips naturally into the hand with its all-round soft curves rather than the hard edges of, say the Motorola Milestone. At 130g the Nexus One is lighter than an iPhone (136g) and Milestone (170g) as well as being narrower and thinner (at 11.5mm) than these two most striking competitors.

It has a fantastic 3.7 inch widescreen, AMOLED display, delivering 720×480 pixels resolution. Arguably crisper and clearer than any other display on the market, it delivers touchscreen responsiveness definitely in the ballpark of the iPhone and, moreover, it is fast. The combination of Android 2.1 sitting above a Snapdragon CPU clocked at 1GHz with 512Mb of RAM and ROM really does enable you to zap through opening up applications and then moving between them.

Its multimedia credentials, are quietly competent rather than superb - such as the 5 megapixel, autofocus camera with LED flash and its 32GB memory card capacity. Where the Nexus One really impresses, though, is in what could be called its charisma, if it could walk into a crowded room, heads would most definitely turn. Its Teflon-coated back and sides are simultaneously rubbery and tough yet soft and almost sensuous, a strangely compelling tactile experience.

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The widely used PC-EFI boot-loader has been updated today to version 10.6 by netkas himself. In case anybody needs a reminder, PC-EFI is a boot-loader which allows vanilla Mac OS X kernel to be run on not Apple hardware. This update adds support for desktop Radeon 4300/4500/4600 graphics cards via the GraphicsEnabler feature. It also adds a system-id fix which resolves the issue of your keyboard settings being forgotten, and finally, a fix for Lynnfield Intel CPUs has been added. As said by netkas, “So it’s ready for snow leopard finally.” You can download the latest update for PC-EFI here.

The new Nokia X3 has some fantastic deals on T-Mobile’s new tariffs. £20 line rental gets you a free Nokia X3 with 100 mins, 100 texts and unlimited mobile internet, plus £198 cash back. The deal is available now at e2save or Onestopphoneshop.

The Nokia X3 is the first S40 phone to be compliant with Ovi Store. The new X Series has been created for multimedia phones for ultimate entertainment. The X3 is a compact slider phone, measuring 96 x 49 x 14mm. It has been designed to make you stand out in the crowd with metallic colour accents and ‘high tech’ design. A key component of the X3 is its music player which boasts stereo speakers, dedicated music keys and a 3.5mm audio jack. There is also an FM radio that doesn’t require earphones for a signal as the X3 has a built-in antenna.

There is a 3.2 megapixel camera to capture those special moments and you can share them with friends by uploading them straight to Flickr or Ovi, or transfer them wirelessly with stereo Bluetooth. The phone comes with a 2GB microSD card but can be expanded to 16GB, providing plenty of storage for music and pictures.

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Available now on Orange from £15 per month with almost £200 cash back. Or buy it on Orange PAYG and save an extra £10, just use voucher code 10BACK at the checkout.

The Samsung C3510 is an entry level touchscreen phone. It’s similar in looks to the Genio Touch but it has a downgraded specification with a 1.3 megapixel camera and no 3G.

The C3510 comes with a 2.8 screen and Samsung’s Cartoon user interface, which allows users to scroll through the colourful widgets and menus with ease. The large navigation keys beneath the screen make it easy to use and the phone has easy access to Facebook and Twitter.

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Exclusively available from O2 and free on all tariffs, from £15 per month.

The BlackBerry 8520 Curve is a sleek new BlackBerry with a rubberized body.

The 8520 Curve has a full QWERTY keyboard for writing emails, texts and instant messages with ease.

With BlackBerry push email, the 8520 can send and receive emails from a host of different accounts anywhere in the world.

It also features an optical trackball for sensitive and highly accurate navigation, Wi-Fi, a 2 megapixel camera and expandable memory.

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After years of anticipation, the Apple tablet device has finally been unveiled as the iPad.

Essentially, it’s an iPod Touch on steroids – here’s some key facts:

• 9.7-inch LED-backlit multi-touch display with IPS technology (high quality LCD panel)
• 1024×768 resolution (compared to 480×320 on the iPhone/iPod Touch)
• 9.56×7.47 inches, and just 0.5 of an inch thin (242.8×189.7mm, and 13.4mm thin)
• 1.5 pounds for the Wi-Fi only model, and 1.6 pounds for the Wi-Fi + 3G model (0.68 and 0.73kg respectively)
• 16GB, 32GB, or 64GB flash drive
• 1GHz Apple A4 processor
• H.264 video playback up to 720p @ 30FPS
• 802.11 a/b/g/n Wi-Fi
• Bluetooth 2.1 + EDR technology
• 3G model featuring UMTS/HSDPA and GSM/EDGE
• Unlocked for all networks
• Digital compass
• Built-in 25Whr lithium-polymer battery
• Up to 10 hours of battery life during normal use, up to one month one standby
• Dock connector
• 3.5-mm stereo headphone jack
• Microphone
• GSM micro-SIM card slot

Head on over to Apple’s iPad web pages for further info. It’s very interesting to note that they’ve developer their own silicon to run the iPad in the form of Apple’s own custom-built “A4″ processor – I wonder where else we may see this make an appearance?

However, it’s also lacking a few things that the rumour mill had been hoping for such as:

• Built-in front-facing camera for video-conferencing
• Phone functionality as per the iPhone
• App multitasking, so that apps can be run in the background
• No support for Flash, although not necessarily a bad thing since Flash is on its way out

That said, it’s an interesting step for Apple to take as they seem to err more towards mobile devices. Whilst for many professionals the iPad will come across a casual toy or gadget, I can see people like my Mum happily using this given that it caters for all the use she currently gets out of her MacBook for instance, and in a really nice hardware package not to mention very straight-forward software too. It’ll be very interesting to see how this develops, and what Apple can do in the future for their desktop line of hardware. Check this video out as a starter for ten. I can possibly see a point, maybe even at the end of this decade, where we see convergence between the iPhone OS and the Mac OS…

Available now on Orange from £30 per month on a 24m contract, or £40 per month on an 18m contract. Mobile internet can be added for an extra £5 per month.

The Nokia X6 has an impressive 3.2 inch touchscreen that covers almost the entire front of the phone giving it a very innovative and unique design. The phone is pocket and palm friendly measuring 111 x 51 x 13mm and it’s great for watching movies with the 16:9 aspect ratio screen. With 32GB of internal memory there’s plenty of storage too. The X6 runs on Symbian OS v9.4 and has a 434 MHz processor, which is enough to compete with many of other smartphones on the market. The new X Series range from Nokia, will replace the XpressMusic range. As well as launching the X6, Nokia will release the entry-level X3 slider phone iearly in 2010.

The X6’s TFT capacitive touchscreen gives a crisp, bright image and comes with scratch resistant glass. There is a built in accelerometer for automatically switching the screen from portrait to landscape, for widescreen images and videos. For texts and emails the X6 also supports handwriting recognition. The 5 megapixel camera from the Nokia N97 is built-in, it has Carl Zeiss optics, auto focus, LED flash and geo-tagging to take fantastic images of your favourite moments and stamp them with their exact location. The camera also has video recording capabilities and there is the ability to edit images with software provided in the package.

Connectivity-wise, the Nokia X6 has all the usual feature you would expect in a smartphone, 3G, HSDPA, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, GPS and a microUSB slot to transfer files with or without wires. To ensure you never get lost the X3 has Ovi maps 3.0 satellite navigation software pre-installed. The X6 combines style and technology to bring a fantastic, feature packed flagship phone to the X Series.

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Originally ground up in the rumour mill and spat out as the Kurara, the first product announcement of 2010 by Sony Ericsson was actually a leak from PR agency Burson-Marsteller. No stranger to crisis management (think Bhopal and Tylenol for starters) B-M attempted to put the struggling genie back in its bottle but – too late! The good people at Sony Ericsson have confirmed the news and we now await the official launch.

So what is the Kurara? Ironically, given the genie poppers’ back catalogue it is a municipality in Uttar Pradesh. But no longer: the new handset has a brand new moniker: the Vivaz, after a collection of vintage 1960s cars from Vauxhall…or maybe not.

From its spec, the Sony Ericsson Vivaz is a smartphone to rival anything on the market, most notably with an 8.1 megapixel camera with image stabilisation and face detection and the ability to capture video in 720p HD (ultra-sharp, minimal to zero flicker). It is also said to offer autofocus in its video mode and a dedicated video capture key. The results can be viewed on the 3.2 inch, 640×360 pixel resolution (or WVGA, it’s not yet clear) resistive touchscreen.

At 107×52x12.5mm, the Vivaz is conventionally smartphone sized and nice and well weighted at only 97g (pretty amazing considering the technology within). All the usual smartphone gubbins are included, including HSDPA, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and A-GPS.

Expected within two to three months, you will be able to sport the Vivaz either in Vivaz Ruby, Moon Silver, Galaxy Blue or - trying a little too hard, perhaps - Cosmic Black.

Sony Ericsson had a hard time financially in 2009, despite the Satio still being arguably the best camera phone in the world. The Vivaz could revive its fortunes and rival the Satio for its camera phone crown.

Sony Ericsson Vivaz deals (coming soon)