Gadgets

Barcelona — Nokia has unveiled a couple of new cellphones at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. One is a rather slimline QWERTY slider and the other one breaks easily.

First the E75, a business phone that is so dull that it actually has a picture of a desk on the PDF spec sheet. A real, wooden desk. This is a shame as the phone itself looks rather nice — a solid but lightweight handset with a positive and usable QWERTY hidden inside.

Apple’s iPhone application store is as crowded as a Beyonce concert, with more than 20,000 apps available. But one independent developer still managed to rake in $600,000 in a single month with a single iPhone game.

Ethan Nicholas, developer of a tank artillery game called iShoot, told Wired.com he quit his job the day his app rose to No. 1 in the App Store, earning him $37,000 in a single day.

“I’m not going to be a millionaire in the next month, but I’d be shocked if it didn’t happen at the end of the year,” he said in a phone interview.

Here at Gadget Lab we were thoroughly impressed with Micro-Star International’s latest netbook, the Wind U120. We’re delighted to see that MSI has added another color option for the netbook: A classy looking charcoal.

The Wind U120 is the successor of the popular Wind netbook. The main difference with the new model is its design, which MSI reworked to appeal to professional users. The other option is a white model with black accents.

Leave it to Microsoft to make netbooks complicated.

It appears likely the tech giant will offer three different versions of Windows 7 for netbooks. HP officials told Computer World about its plans to offer three different configurations of Windows 7 for netbooks, which suggests Microsoft will roll out this structure for other companies’ netbooks as well.

According to HP, the following three Windows 7 options will be available: Windows 7 Starter Edition, which will only be able to run three apps at a time; Windows 7 Home Premium for consumers; and Windows 7 Professional edition, aimed at business users.

Rumors of Microsoft launching its own phone have been doing the rounds for the last few weeks. First came the buzz about a Zune phone and then the chatter about a new smartphone.

Now Microsoft is responding and its answer is No. "Microsoft is not doing a phone," a Microsoft spokesperson told the Wall Street Journal.

Speculation about a Microsoft phone recently intensified. Microsoft could release a Zune phone at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas based on its struggling media player platform, said Trip Chowdhry, an analyst at Global Equities Research two months ago.

Nikon doesn’t just make cameras. The company is split into some rather more scientific divisions, one of which makes microscopes and scientific imaging equipment. The latest from Nikon Vision is this stereo microscope which can be hooked up to a camera — a previous version worked with compact cameras but this is the first to pair with a DSLR.

Essentially the ’scope — named the "Fabre Photo EX" — is a beefed-up version of the previous Fabre Photo: bigger, heavier and possibly more productive.

An iPhone developer is highlighting an issue in the App Store that he calls "sockpuppet reviews" — negative reviews presumably written by competitors disguised as customers.

Njection, developer of NMobile, an iPhone application that alerts drivers of speed traps, claims that a negative review left for its app is clearly working with the developer of a competing application called Trapster.

Here at Gadget Lab we’ve been blessed with an early test unit of the
MSI Wind U120 — the successor to the popular MSI Wind netbook. Our first impressions? We like it plenty. The improvements from the first model are very minor, but they make a significant difference on something as small as a netbook.

Here’s a rundown of the MSI Wind U120’s features, accompanied by beautiful photography courtesy of Wired.com’s Jonathan Snyder.

The next upgrade to Apple’s iPhone will have a strong focus on gaming, analysts and developers agree.

That’s because the gaming market is an increasingly juicy segment of the mobile multimedia space — and it’s one that Apple’s phenomenally successful iPhone is well-positioned to dominate.

"The iPhone and iPod Touch are becoming a major new handheld gaming platform, and if you look at the App Store and look at what’s doing well, that’s reflecting," said Bart Decrem, CEO of Tapulous, developer of the popular Tap Tap Revenge iPhone game. "I would look forward to improvements in the device as a gaming platform both for the phone and iPod Touch."

Apple made clear its plans to seize the gaming market in November 2008 when Apple marketing executive Greg Joswiak called the iPhone and iPod Touch "the future of gameplay," posing a serious threat to dedicated gaming consoles such as the Nintendo DS and Sony
PSP.

Despite some user complaints, MemoryUp, an application available through the Android Market to HTC G1 phone users, is no rogue software, says Google.

"We have investigated and determined that MemoryUp is not malware," a Google spokeswoman said in a statement to Wired.com. "In the versions we tested, MemoryUp cannot perform any of the malicious things it is reported to have done."

MemoryUp, a program from eMobiStudio, bills itself as a memory optimization tool for Android phones.