The push towards mobile games

At a time when most of the handset makers are offering similar features to their users, the companies are looking at mobile gaming to differentiate themselves.

Even the hardcore gamers have started converting towards the mobile games — partly due to sheer need, after all the consoles cannot be carried everywhere, and second, the mobile gaming segment is being taken seriously by even the handset makers.

It's good to be a part of the market which is being pampered by the mobile companies, right?

Sony Ericsson has launched a dedicated gaming phone, called Xperia Play, which has dedicated slide out keys for gaming. Since users are also able to make calls on the same device, gaming turns out to be an added bonus.

Acer BeTouch E210 touch and type Phone

After BlackBerry Acer unveils it's Touch and Type smartphone for the Indian market based on Android.

After Nokia and BlackBerry, Acer has announced a new touch and type interface based Android smartphone for India, named as BeTouch E210.

The new Acer BeTouch E210 is a 3G capable phone based on Android 2.2 Froyo and has a full Qwerty keypad along with a 2.6 inch big capacitive touch screen that supports multi touch gestures like pinch to zoom and more. 

Best capacitive touchscreen phones in India

These three handsets have the best capacitive touchscreens among all the brands available in the world today.

Touchscreens were initially introduced to understand how people would feel if physical buttons were removed from their beloved devices. And things took a totally different direction altogether. Today touchscreens have become main-stream, replacing physical keys and buttons in mobile phones, laptops and tablets, all of which have touchscreen variants that are loved by people the world over.

Karbonn launches two touchscreen phones

Named as K1414 and K1000, the mobiles are priced at Rs 3,990 and Rs 3,600 respectively and are packed with lot of features.

Karbonn Mobiles, a local handset player, has launched two new touch screen handsets. Named as the K1414 and the K1000, the new mobiles come with support for a wide range of social network websites such as Facebook, Twitter, and e-buddy.

Available across India, the new range combines sleek black design with dual SIM capacity. With their A2DP Bluetooth technology, which allows high-fidelity audio to be streamed from one Bluetooth device to another, one can easily share high quality audio like music from mobile phone to a wireless headset or car audio.

Both phones have 2,000 phonebook memory and video player.

In addition, the Karbonn K1414 and K1000 have an extendable memory upto 16 GB and 8 GB respectively.

Just turn Nokia phones to silence calls

Users can also snooze alarms using this control, so they do not need to look for the control when they are feeling sleepy in the morning. They can just turn over the Nokia phone and steal some more sleep.

Even those, who live their life with Nokia phones all the time, cannot claim for sure that they know all the features of their handset. Chances are that you may have missed to identify the presence of 'Turning Control' feature in the Nokia phones. 

Turning control asks the phone to perform a specific action, just by turning the phone over. Thus the users are spared the need to find the correct button for the task. 

On most Nokia devices, the turning control is used to switch screens from 'Portrait Mode' to 'Landscape Mode' and is switched on by default. For other controls, the users need to go through the following path on their phones: Menu > Settings > Phone > Sensor Settings > Turning Control.

Two other options available for the users are Silence Calls and Snoozing alarms. For example, if the users are in a meeting and have forgotten to silence the phones, somebody may call them and it may turn out to be quite embarrassing. If you have enabled the Turning Control function, you just need to turn the phone with screen facing downwards to silence it.

The alarm can be snoozed off in the same way. So when the users are rudely awakened by phone in the morning, they need not fumble with the phone looking for the right button. They can just turn the phone and the alarm is snoozed.

BlackBerry in a hurry to re-establish itself

The BlackBerry's problems have been obscured by sales figures so far. But with the iOS and Android onslaught, it needs apps fast.

The shift towards the perception that BlackBerry makers Research In Motion are in trouble due to the onslaught of Android and iOS phones is natural, but premature. Only some time ago, BlackBerry made a serious effort to take younger users into its fold as well, and the campaign seems to have hit it off in the UK, in India, South Africa and in some other countries (that don't include the USA).

In these countries, the new trend started with younger people getting their BlackBerrys through their seniors or parents who were buying new devices and handed their old BlackBerrys to the kids. These youth found BlackBerry messenger to be very useful and the fact that it was free was an added bonus. Despite the new-found popularity among younger users and, of course, the enterprise segment, Research In Motion is definitely having some problems due to the increasing popularity of iPhone and Android phones.

However, the growth rate of handset sales has obscured some of the company's problems so far. The operating system is all important when it comes to smartphones, because where hardware is concerned there are only touchscreen devices and those that have Qwerty keyboards.

The BlackBerry operating system looks good but dated, and that's why the company has come out with BlackBerry OS 7. 

Research In Motion recently made a slew of announcements at the BlackBerry World event, and in addition to that, BlackBerry Messenger is its hidden social network, which has a community in everywhere, including in India, and the members of this community are not likely to trade their messengers for anything else.