Arab-ware brings Motorola to Saudi Arabia
The sheer differences between the Latin and Arab alphabets have caused a great deal of head scratching amongst boffins trying to bring the same kind of functionality to mobile devices in the Middle East that we English speakers take so for granted. Arab-ware is the current state-of-the-art way to do this, bringing social networking e-mail and online shopping to handsets across the Arabic world in the Arabic language. Motorola’s Milestone and Milestone XT720 are both available in Riyadh and are said to merge Androids Linux kernel with the Arab-ware technology seamlessly. I’ve watched it running on the XT720, which is a cracking phone, by the way, with the thinnest qwerty slider i’ve ever seen – but i don’t speak Arabic so I can’t tell you how useful it is.
Everyone loves the current bun.
Its Cockney rhyming slang for The Sun, Britain’s favorite daily newspaper. Think of a cosy merging of news, soccer, soft porn and celebrity nonsense and you get a disturbing little insight into the British psyche. Interestingly they have released an Android app for their “Bizarre” showbiz column. I can live without daily pictures of Amy Winehouse falling over drunk, but if you can’t then its the app for you.
ViewTabs to dual-boot
ViewSonic Europe’s ViewTab 7 and ViewTab 10 (whose numbers reflect their screen sizes) are already receiving a lot of interest from pre-registering customers. They are both powerful machines with the 10 incher (pictured) packing Intel’s spunky little 1.6GHz Atom n455 and is said to dual boot Window’s and Android and I have to admit, I can see a lot of use for that.
Land of the rising Galaxy
I was quite surprised to see the gorgeous Samsung Galaxy S take so long to reach Japan – I mean if there ever was a nation that loved a good gadget… Well now mobile operator DoCoMo are promising it for this month and are making noises that suggest the Galaxy Tab may not be far behind – probably first quarter of next year.
Vodafone 945
Vodafone UK tend to either get things entirely wrong or entirely right – which makes it very difficult to maintain an opinion on them – this time they seem to have got it right with a new own-brand Android phone called the Vodafone 945 (pictured). Its marked improvement from its antecedent the 845 with a decent multi-touchscreen and 300MB of internal storage. There are no deals available as of five minutes ago but my guess is that the 945 will be competitively priced. Let’s hope so, I want one.