Mobile Entertainment

FEATURE: The top handsets this Christmas

ME staff Sep 22 2008, 11:46am

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With the N96 being unveiled today and the Google phone tomorrow, what other rich media handsets will dominate Q4?

Nokia is celebrating the impending launch of its flagship N96 handset with a lavish party in London tonight, and T-Mobile USA is all set to unveil its much talked-about Android phone in New York tomorrow.

The devices are set to occupy both industry and consumer minds in the run-up to Christmas, but which other multimedia handsets will be plucked from stuffed stockings on December 25th?

Here's ME's pick of the crop:

Nokia N96
After 18 months as the undisputed ‘world’s leading smartphone’, the N95 is set to hand over, inevitably, to the N96. Like its forerunner, the N96 will pack an astonishing number of features inside it and instantly become the choice of most mobile execs. Well, certainly the Europeans. The N96 is the flagship for Nokia’s Nseries ‘multimedia computers’, which shipped over ten million units in the second quarter of 2008 alone. In addition to the phone’s awesome capabilities, it could also be the launchpad for Nokia’s Comes With Music project.

Headline specs
TFT display with 16m colours
GPS with A-GPS support
Wi-Fi
16GB memory
DVB-H
Stereo FM radio
Free downloadable maps of over 150 countries
5 megapixel Carl Zeiss Optics
Video capture in MPEG-4

HTC G1
T-Mobile USA will tomorrow unveil the first handset powered by Google's Android OS. It's called the G1, is being manufactured by Taiwan's HTC and is expected to retail for £199 when it goes on sale in October. There's been much excitement around the device (and Android in general), primarily because of its potential to upset the iPhone apple cart and Nokia's hegemony of the smartphone OS market. T-Mobile and Google are also widely expected to open an Android content store to showcase all the lovely apps they hope the open nature of the OS will encourage development of.

Headline specs
TBC

HTC Touch Diamond
Android aside, HTC has come out of the white-label shadows this year and transformed itself from a purveyor of frankly boring Windows devices to a manufacturer of wonderfully sexy touchscreen handsets. In the process the Taiwanese manufacturer has now crept into the big league of vendors. HTC sold one million Touch Diamonds in its first three months on sale. And the Diamond looks set to continue its sparkle into Christmas.

Headline specs
GPS
Accelerometer
TouchFLO 3D Home screen UI
4 GB of internal storage
Wi-Fi
Touch-sensitive scroll wheel

Apple iPhone 3G
A huge amount of fuss accompanied what was essentially a network upgrade for the iPhone, when Apple launched this 3G compatible device in July. But it sold a million in its first weekend of availability across 21 countries nonetheless. While faster download speeds will have helped, it’s probably the increasingly affordable tariffs that have helped push the iconic handset most of all. In some markets it’s now free on some price plans.

Headline specs
Built-in GPS receiver
Wi-Fi
8-16GB of storage
Accelerometer
2 megapixel camera
App Store

Sony Ericsson Xperia
Hard when writing from a UK perspective to believe that Sony Ericsson is losing market share, so popular are its handsets in Blighty. But suffering it is on the world stage. The company partly attributes this to over-reliance on Walkman and Cyber-shot brands and generally ‘samey’ ranges. So there’ll be much interest in its Xperia, which is not only its first Windows device (and the first to have a name, not a number) but is also a radical departure in terms of styling and UI.