Hasta La Gadget!

Toshiba is the latest consumer electronics giant to tout a new cellphone. The company is set to launch its new smartphone call TG01 later this month.

The phone is unlikely to be available in North America but it deserves a second look for its styling.

The TG01 will be slimmer than the iPhone, will have a 4.1-inch touchscreen and a luminous display with a 800 x 480 resolution, says PC World.

The phone will be the first to run on 1 GHz T-Snapdragon chipset, which would make it considerably faster than rivals. There will be the standard features–GPS, Bluetooth and Wi-Fi capability.

But what will make the device interesting is that thanks to the built-in accelerometers users can just shake the phone to answer incoming calls. Much like how the Urbanspoon app in the iPhone allows users to pick a restaurant by shaking the phone.

The TG01 is expected to be available in Europe this summer though pricing for it has not yet been disclosed.

Check a hands-on video for the device. It’s definitely drool worthy.

Photo: Toshiba TG01 (Cellulari World/Flickr)

Palm Pre, one of the most anticipated smartphones of the year, could be available as early as mid-March on the Sprint network. Sprint could be targeting to get the Palm Pre into its warehouses by then though that’s no guarantee that the device will be available in retail stores immediately.

More likely, Sprint could release the device in May giving it enough time to stock up and clear out inventory of older Palm phones, says the Boy Genius Report citing an internal document from Sprint.

Palm showed off the Pre at the Consumer Electronics Show last month to cheers from the audience. The struggling phone maker needs a hit desperately and even skeptics concede the Pre, if priced right, could be a blockbuster for Palm.

The sleek black Pre has a 3.1-inch touchscreen, a QWERTY keyboard and a powerful interface. The phone pulls together information, photos and current online status data from sites such as Facebook, Gmail and Exchange to seamlessly integrate them into the address book and contacts list.

Palm has said it wants to see the Pre on Sprint in the first half of the year. The company hasn’t announced any details related to pricing for the phone.

See also:
Six Reasons Why the Palm Pre is Special
Palm Unveils Its Long-Awaited Smartphone, the Pre
Video: Hands-On With the Palm Pre
New WebOS Is Palm’s Secret Sauce
Up Close and Personal With the Palm Pre

Photo: Jon Snyder/Wired.com

A man in China died when his cellphone exploded, severing a major artery in his neck, according to a Chinese daily newspaper.

The man’s identity was not disclosed, but Shin Min Daily News reported he was an employee at a computer shop in Guangzhou, China, where the incident occurred.

Another employee at the shop said she heard a loud bang and then saw her co-worker lying on the shop floor in a pool of blood. She said the victim recently replaced the battery in his cellphone.

Chinese authorities are investigating the death and have yet to determine the model of the victim’s phone and battery, as well as whether they were counterfeit products.

In an eerily similar incident in July 2007, 22-year-old Xiao Jinpeng of Gansu, China died from chest wounds after his cellphone exploded in his chest pocket. The incident occurred at his workplace, an iron mill. The Chinese government speculated the phone’s battery exploded in reaction to the heat in the mill.

China has been under scrutiny for a number of years for exporting cheaply made products that pose safety risks. In July 2008, the BBC reported that hundreds of thousands of potentially electrocuting phone chargers were making their way from China into the UK. Some of the chargers were generically labeled "Travel Charger."

Man killed by ‘exploding mobile phone’ [TimesOnline]

Photo: A man’s cellphone battery exploded after leaving his handset on top of a table lamp. DavisSeal/Flickr

One of the more interesting announcements at CES 2009 was Nokia’s Location Sensor concept, but since it recalls GPS location tech already available, it sort of flew under the radar. But new information revealed recently on the Nokia Research site suggests that the company has bigger ideas than just finding an easier way to find your lost keys through sensors.

The LBS (location-based services) concept is rounding out to feature a full indoor service for large buildings and institutions (like hospitals) that improves on current GPS tech. It will most likely aggregate a sensor’s location through a combination of RFID tags, bluetooth, and NFC to send direct info to your cell phone. The hybrid LBS system should improve upon the current limitations of GPS tech, according to a Nokia research doc: "[GPS devices] don’t work well in the structures in which we find ourselves every day, such as offices, shopping malls, hospitals. . . 80 percent of our time is spent indoors."

Among the limitations most often mentioned are transmission problems (with terrain, distance and interference effects), length of finding a location, and battery drainage. Adding multiple reference data points into one easily accessible app should greatly improve location accuracy. Other companies already have LBS locators that push location info to websites, but access is still restricted.

The current version of the concept includes sensors embedded in a keychain-sized box (see right) that is hitched to individual personal items. The sensor wirelessly sends the location info of each item to a smart phone app  that tracks and manages each item. The distance range of each sensor is around 100 meters for now, but they’re working on extending it.

The sensor concept also supports 100 individual sensors at the same time. There’s no word on how often it will update location data, or whether this only includes sensors provided by Nokia. The most useful application, of course, would be one that was open and compatible with other LBS services.

The potential applications for this tech are numerous.

The LBS advertising seen in Minority Report could make shopping more useful and promotions would be easily tailored to people walking through their doors. Of course, customers should have the option to turn it off and be OK on getting called on their last underwear purchases by a giant smiling screen saying your name for all to hear. I’d love it if the app automatically geo-tagged your pics down to specific halls of large museums, like NY’s Metropolitan. Currently, an LBS in Japan sends messages to sleeping train riders when they reach their destination.

According to Gartner analysts, the number of people receiving LBS services will move from 43 million in 2009 to 300 million by 2011.

But improved, hybrid LBS isn’t the only interesting application the Nokia research team is working on. Recently, the company demoed Point & Find, a tech that helps mobile users find info about show times and prices of movies by pointing their camera phones at movie posters.

Check out the Nokia LBS video after the jump:

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Photo: Conversations.Nokia.com

The memo we sent out regarding megapixels seems to have got caught up in the mail on the way to South Korea. Specifically — squeezing more and more photo-sensitive dots onto teeny-tiny chips is a recipe for noisy, low quality images with a perversely high file size. Who is guilty this time? Samsung.

It looks like the company will be announcing a 12 megapixel camera phone at this year’s Mobile World Congress show in Barcelona. The rumor is credible simply because Samsung has a habit of being first to market with such pixel-happy cameras. The photo above is a fake, by the way, photoshopped from a snap of Samsung’s Innov8.

However you look at this, it’s bad news. The resulting photographs will certainly be awful, and the only reason for this "innovation" is the show-off value of the number 12 on the handset. I spoke to the Nikon people at CES this year and they all agreed that camera makers are sick of megapixels, but that the buying public just can’t get enough. Which is why, in a naive attempt to change this, we go on and on about it. Do  not buy this phone.

Samsung to present the world’s first 12MP phone at MWC 2009 [Unwiredview via New Launches]