When Nokia announced the partnership with Microsoft last week, they only mentioned that they’ll be using Windows Phone 7 as the OS for their flagship smartphones, and that concept phones are already underway. However, they fail to mention about customization of Windows Phone 7, stuff that Samsung and HTC do, which is the result of HTC Hub and Samsung TouchWiz.

In an interview with Nokia VP Niklas Savander at Mobile World Congress, Phone Scoop managed to understand a bit more on the company’s plans to rework the Windows Phone user experience — a user experience that’s been essentially closed to OEMs thus far apart from the occasional tile here or added menu item there.

Turns out that Microsoft has given Nokia outright full authority for deep customization of the platform, though it’s likely only to do that by pushing changes back to Microsoft for inclusion in future releases that would be available to every manufacturer, not just Nokia.

Apparently Nokia doesn’t want to do anything to the software that would put the company at risk of getting delayed updates.

SOURCE via Phone Scoop

New York Times carries some nice iPhone news today. According to them, “Apple is not currently developing a smaller iPhone,” and that the company is “not planning to introduce a smaller iPhone anytime soon.”

While the publication doesn’t outright deny the existence of such a device at any point in the story, it does quote an anonymous Apple executive as saying that it doesn’t make sense for the company to create multiple iPhone form factors at any given time, and an anonymous Apple engineer as saying that cheaper components, not a smaller size, would make for a cheaper overall price. That sounds more logical than a smaller version iPhone anyway.

Not to say that it’s a cheaper version iPhone, but Apple is probably trying to reduce the overall cost of manufacturing iPhone, probably by recycling parts from the iPhone 4, and bulking other parts through very huge buy from companies like Samsung. But the most important news of all is that the next iPhone is very much near completion. Exciting news indeed.

SOURCE via New York Times

E-tailers have started listing out Samsung’s next babe the Galaxy S II for pre-orders. Thus far, price in UK has been rather consistent, at £650, and it’s the 16GB variant only. The cheapest we can find would be £528 (inclusive of VAT), but that’s about a hundred pounds cheaper, which makes me rather skeptical. There’s no mention of 32GB variant (usually reserved only for carriers), but I can guess the price will be rather sky high. The price is about right, which resembles the MSRP of the original Galaxy S. A lil’ math will do the trick, revealing the price to be around SGD1, 199 (MYR2, 699). This price is obtained after removing the VAT that Europe has, and they’re in reference to the 16GB variant, unsubsidized.

It seemed that the war of fastest train will continue. Few months after China announces the world’s fastest train operational at about 302 miles per hour (486 kilometres per hour) during a test run on a still unopened line between Beijing and Shanghai, Japan has yet again stepped up front to announce a new challenger. This time, it’s going even faster (8 miles per hour more, to be exact), as the train will be running up to 310 miles per hour.

This train will be connecting Tokyo and Nagoya on a 178 miles rail extension line. The project is estimated to cost about $64 billion, and will effectively cut down journey time by 40 minutes from the previous one and a half hour.

Now, how the hell are they going to make the train go so fast? Quad-turbocharging with 200 units of radiators cooling the twin-W16 engine? Well, that might be the next Bugatti Veyron, but this new rail will be using magnetic levitation force borrowed from Magneto. Powerful magnets will be used to elevate the train above the track, cutting down friction while still preventing the train from going off-rail.

SOURCE via Inhabitat

Solid State Drive has come quite a long way, though adoption rate is still not high. Every now and then we hear about newer SSD and controller that beat the previous generation by that slight bit. But when people call a certain new SSD “the first drive that really needs a 6Gbps interface”, you know it’s going to be a very fast SSD. That’s the OCZ Vertex 3 Pro drive.

It touts a mad 550MBps maximum read and 500MBps maximum write speeds, mostly thanks to the brand spanking new SandForce SF-2500 controller chip it has onboard. It’s been put through the benchmarking wringer by a number of sites today and the resulting conclusion has been lucid and unequivocal: the Vertex 3 Pro is the new champion among standalone 2.5-inch SSDs.

The V3Pro isn’t yet on sale and the hardware looked at it in these previews was not final, but the next generation of SSDs looks to be keeping the breakneck pace of development that’s characterized the storage medium so far. Like someone say, you don’t know what’s fast until you use SSD.

SOURCE via Anandtech

Is the navigation unit in cars these days not enough, besides having infotainment units? Apparently not, as Hyundai and Samsung is planning to stuff a tablet into your car’s dashboard. Now we knew all along that using the smartphone while driving is bad enough, and I do not know who came up with the idea of stuffing DVD players into cars. But now they’re planning to squeeze yet another very game-centric device into cars. Not like tablets don’t have navigation apps and stuff, but we all know what we usually use our tablets for anyway. But at least this is done by Hyundai and Samsung, so it should be gooding stuff.

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People has been using it since October, and after quite some time, Microsoft has finally gave its Windows Phone 7 Connector app a ‘gold’ status. What does this ‘gold’ mean? Well, Mac owners will get a rock solid and stable (hopefully) method of hooking up their Windows Phones without firing up Boot Camp. Thus far, there hasn’t been any notice of new features, probably some bug fixing and it’s done. It’s now on the Mac App Store, and you still get the same three options: media synchronization, iTunes compatibility, and support for Windows Phone firmware updates.

SOURCE via iTunes