The Lumia 900 comes with a single core 1.4GHz CPU, 512MB of RAM, and an 8MP camera with dual LED flashes. The most distinctive thing this phone is its large 4.3-inch AMOLED ClearBlack display, which is simply gorgeous. All of the tech is packed into a polycarbonate shell, which is similar to the Lumia 800, thought the 900 will come only in black or cyan for now.

The phone is powered by Windows 7.5 OS (Mango), which is definitely the best version of the Windows Phone OS released to date. The Lumia 900 will be available exclusively from AT&T, and will provide support for 4G LTE connectivity, but there’s no word yet on pricing or availability.

We do know that it features the familiar bat-logo on the back, along with Dark Knight packaging and there is a movie tie-in Live Tile visible on the screen in the video. They are certain to be super expensive if you ever do have a chance to buy one, and they don’t just end up being some sort of prize in a movie promotion.

[Photo and video by Jon Choo via Slashgear]

The vision behind Nokia GEM concept seems to be full customization and adaptation. For example, in the video below, the user takes a picture and then uses it to cover the entire phone. Solid Snake would love that feature. Watch the oddly animated and soundtracked video below to find out how a literal touch phone might work:

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Seriously though I think power management or battery capacity will be an issue with this design. I’m also not convinced that a touchscreen on the back will be significantly useful. If we’re talking about phones that are all screen I’d rather go with this design.

[Nokia via Crave UK]

The Nokia Twist smartphone concept looks like a pool toy or surfboard to me. It could also be a gel insole for your shoes. The concept comes from Nokia Design and Nokia Research and was designed as an exploration of the promise of nanotechnology. I’m not sure how nanotech would be used to contort your phone into different shapes, though.

It appears that the device can be twisted and flexed to perform different actions, and it would have a flexible see-through touchscreen display. There is a ton of research going into flexible electronics today, so who knows if 10 or 20 years from now our smartphones might look like this. Check out the video below to see what Nokia is up to with the Twist.

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It’s got a 3.7-inch 800×480 AMOLED display that’s actually curved. The rear-facing camera is 8MP and comes with Carl Zeiss optics. It’s capable of shooting video in 720p HD, and the device also includes 25GB of Skydrive cloud storage on top of the 16GB internal memory. It included 802.11 b/g/n Wi-Fi, and built in GPS navigation, too. The CPU inside is a single-core 1.4GHz Snapdragon processor, so it may or may not be as fast as the iPhone 4S.

The Lumia 800 is a world phone, so will work on CDMA and GPRS networks around the globe. It’s expected to retail for €420 (~$585 USD) unlocked, and is scheduled to be released in Europe later this year. It will be available in the US sometime in 2012.

[via Designboom]

The licensing of the tech will allow Vuzix to work on glasses with see-through waveguide optics for its near-eye display systems. The glasses will use the Nokia EPE optics tech and will being new products to market.

Vuzix has some big goals in mind and is talking up the ability to make glasses that “Hollywood and Sci-Fi writers have only been able to imagine.” It would be cool if the glasses had screens you can see through when you don’t want to watch video and when you did the images could be played right on the lenses without sacrificing quality.

[Press Release]

Brennan was motivated by the number of post-diagnosis deaths of patients afflicted with tuberculous pericarditis, a condition affecting about 2% of TB patients that could lead to cardiac arrest. He wanted to develop a cheap and easy way for patients to record their heartbeats on their own. The prototype you see above was made using a headset and an egg-cup.

A rubber O-ring and a piece of clear plastic are attached to the listening end of the egg cup to “ensure a good seal” to a patient’s chest. The custom software developed by Brennan, Clifford and Springer lets users record the phonocardiogram – the sound from the heart – then send the file to a specialist. It also has a built-in signal processor so it can identify poor recordings and ask the user to repeat the procedure, as well as a custom algorithm to “reliably identify heart rate and heart sounds.”

Brennan and company conducted a clinical trial from January to April of this year and compared the results that their device – connected to a Nokia 3110 Classic and then to an iPhone 3G – obtained with those from an actual electronic stethoscope. Amazingly enough the readings from the lowly Nokia bested the ones from the dedicated stethoscope, although the former also had a lot of low quality recordings. Brennan isn’t stopping here – he and Springer are working on an Android app version of their software. He also wants to see if their invention can be used to analyze other heart-related diseases.

[University of Oxford via Medgadget via Ubergizmo]

The speaker itself looks quite good. If there are more than one of these around, they’ll start booming out in stereo, which is a cool trick. They weigh 18 ounces each, so they’re reasonably light and portable (4.3″×4.3″×4.9″).

The speaker itself can be charged via a microUSB port. A complete charge of 3 hours should last just over 20 hours of play time. In addition to wireless audio, they come with a 3.5mm audio jack as well.

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Each of these speakers will cost you €149 (~$213 USD), so they don’t come cheap. They’ll ship in Q3 of this year. Well, they might work well, but a pair of these would set you back almost enough to purchase a Bowers & Wilkins Zeppelin dock (!).

[via designboom]

The screen is made from curved scratch-resistant Gorilla Glass, set into a polycarbonate body. Under the hood is a 1GHz Cortex A8 CPU, and a PowerVR SGX530 GPU. The MeeGo OS recognizes a swipe gesture to return to one of the three home interface screens. You’ll unlock it with a double-tap. You’ll have an ‘event’, ‘apps’, and ‘open apps’ view. Nokia has implemented NFC (Near Field Communications) which permits the sharing of images and videos between devices just by touching them. The phone comes with an 8MP camera, with a Zeiss sensor and two built-in LED flashes. It can capture HD videos and display them on its 16:9 widescreen, and Nokia claims the camera has the fastest startup time of any phone.

The phone also is the first to feature Dolby Digital Plus decoding and headphone post-processing. There are free maps and navigation included for over 90 countries thanks to the Drive app. The Docs app can visualize Word, Excel, Powerpoint, and PDF files. Sounds pretty cool, but only time will tell how well the OS holds up. The hardware looks impressive though. Full specs can be found here.

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[via designboom]

Using the GPS inside of the Nokia N8 smartphone, along with additional sensors on the snowboarder’s body and board, PushSnowboarding is able to report on critical stats like speed, airtime and altitude and send them back to the N8 for later review. The sensor kit can actually measure heart rate, orientation, pressure, and even the “rush” the rider senses.

The kit uses a variety of sensors connected to Arduino processors, each of which transmit data back to the phone via Bluetooth.

Most of the sensors measure real physical statistics, the “rush” sensor simply measures galvanic skin response – which is often used in so-called “lie detectors”, so it could just be telling us the snowboarder is about to tell a terrible lie too. Snake oil science aside, the whole getup is still pretty cool.

This week, the team has headed out to the Burton Snowboard US Open to show off the system in action, and to capture a bunch of new rider data. For now, we’ve got footage from their last outing, back at the European event back in January so you can see how it works:

Click to View Embedded Video Clip

Click to View Embedded Video Clip

What’s really cool about the Push Snowboarding project is that it’s an open platform, so you can actually go up on their site and grab the code, schematics and even sampled rider data to play with.

The new software is called Nokia Bubbles and it’s both ingenious and very simple. Bubbles puts little bubbles on the screen you see as soon as you wake the phone from sleep mode. Rather than unlocking and then navigating to the feature you want to use, you can just touch the right bubble and drag it to unlock and go right where you want to be.

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This will save lots of time for users. I would like to see it work for phone calls too. It would rock to be able to put a phone number you call a lot into a bubble to drag allowing you to unlock and call the number at the same time. Nokia owners with compatible phones can download the application right now.

While its name makes no sense – E stands for environment, and Cu, as you are no doubt aware, is the chemical symbol for copper – its main feature is very practical. Its copper case is designed to absorb heat from the environment. An integrated thermo-generator will then convert the heat into electrical energy that will be used to power the phone.

Hyland chose to make the back of the case look like dried earth, which looks nice I guess. What I’d like to know is if this is the optimum shape and form for the case, i.e. will this form maximize its heat-absorbing property? I honestly am not sure, because I’m no physicist. I’m just a guy with a fever, looking at something that could make his damn sickness useful.

[via Dezeen via Inhabitat]

iSuppli has now offered up its estimate on how much it costs to build the new Nokia N8. According to the firm’s breakdown, the materials in the N8 cost about $187.47 (USD). That’s just 4 cents less than the $187.51 the firm pegs the materials cost of the 16GB iPhone 4 at.

The most expensive component is the touchscreen with the AMOLED provided by Samsung costing $39.25. The 16GB of flash storage costs $37.12, the camera adds $31.08 to the bottom line, and the chipset for the OS operations is $22.

With an unlocked N8 selling for $549.00, it seems that Nokia is making a hefty profit, but I think the smartphone still has little chance of being a real factor in a world dominated by Android and the iPhone.

[iSuppli via Bloomberg]

The device is the Nokia Mobile TV Headset, DVB-H. As you can gather from the product name, the thing has a DVB-H TV tuner inside. That TV tuner will let you watch TV programs on the go without needing a data network or WiFi connection. That means other than the cost of the headset, the mobile viewing is free.

The rub is that the DVB-H programming is only available in certain countries. The headset can also be used for making and receiving phone calls. It should land in Europe by Q4 and sell for a price of 40 euro. That is actually not that expensive. The headset only works on compatible Nokia Symbian^3 devices along with an app on the Ovi Store.

To quote the ad:

…And most importantly, it comes with a double antenna design. The kind that allows you to hold the phone any way you like and use it just about anywhere to make crystal clear calls. You have a voice. And you deserve to be heard.

All kidding aside, from what I’ve seen and heard, the Droid X looks like a really nice phone. I like the fact that it’s got an 8MP camera, a big screen, and, of course, double antennas. I wouldn’t want to hold my phone wrong and get my calls dropped. Of course, it doesn’t run iMovie…

[via BGR via Ubergizmo]

On the other hand, I don’t think we can really say that the smartphone was “running” OSX. It was more like crawling:

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I was half-expecting to see the phone explode or melt down. Still goes to show that today’s portable devices can be powerful enough to install a “full” operating system. Obviously the interface needs to be modified, but a full OS does give you legit web browsing, multitasking, and you’ll be able to browse your files and folders *hint hint*.

[via Make:]

The KINGK N99 has a screen that’s unlike most phones I’ve come across in my travels. While it’s definitely not ideal for watching conventional 4:3 or 16:9 video content, it’s enough of a novelty that I thought I’d at least give it a mention. In addition to its offbeat screen, the N99 has a shiny steel body which conceals its keypad beneath a sliding metal door.

Plus – in appropriately Engrish form – it’s got a 1.3 MAGAPIXEL digital camera. Sweet. I wonder how many megapixels there are in a magapixel. And if you’re really lucky you might get this special version I found floating around on the web, complete with misappropriated Nokia logo…

So the one thing to keep in mind if you decide to plunk down your hard earned cash on one of these is that this is a GSM 900/1800MHz phone, which means that it works in most parts of the world other than the Americas. But if you live anywhere where you can use it (and read the Chinese interface), you can order one over at importer SZprice for $158.99 (USD), less in wholesale quantities.

I wish Nokia would add HSDPA connectivity as well. Portable USB modems – the ones as small as a flash drive – are becoming popular here in the Philippines, but the 3G speeds suck donkey dong, with a very theoretical maximum speed of 384 Kbps. Good thing the Booklet 3G also has WiFi. What I find most interesting about this netbook is the 12-hour battery life. 12 hours! If that is indeed true, then we should thank Intel for coming up with the Atom. Unless of course it turns out that the netbook only lasts an hour when it’s playing HD content.

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Please let it be below $400 please please please. With that kind of battery life plus an HD-capable processor I’ll gladly take back all my netbook-bashing and buy one for myself.

[via Ars Technica]

So why is the SPPS200 200 Wh Portable Power Station the BMW M6 of battery packs? Because its little brothers, the 118 Wh and 130 Wh models, are the BMW of battery packs, that’s why. So why are they the BMWs of battery packs? Because they’re expensive. So why are they expensive? Because they can power your laptop, for up to 30 hours. Vrooom.

The SPPS 200 can power PC laptops for 20-30 hours, while MacBooks owners can expect 16 hours of extra runtime. BMW of runtimes if you ask me.

And that’s not all: As you may have guessed from the picture, you can adjust the output voltage of the PPS so that aside from giving your laptop the BMW of battery lives, it can also power and recharge your cellphone, your PDA, your PSP, your iPhone, your iPod and other mp3 players.

And that’s not all: You don’t even need to bring the chargers for any of those devices because the PPS comes with adapters that will fit with your gadget. You can check out the link to Battery Geek below for the BMW of supported laptops and mobile devices. And that’s not all: while Macbooks are supported, Battery Geek charges an extra $20 for the Macbook/Macbook Pro adapter. G4 and Powerbook adapters are already included with the PPS.

And that’s not all: The PPS weighs only 4.4 lbs. and is just over an inch thick. What’s the catch? The BMW M6 of battery pack prices, of course. The list price of the SPPS 200 is $800 (USD). Fortunately, you can buy it straight from Battery Geek for the BMW of discounted prices of $500. And that’s not all: when you buy the SPPS 200, you’ll get the BMW of freebies, a free leather & canvas travel case.

And that’s not all: Here are the BMWs of introductory videos for battery packs:

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Click to View Embedded Video Clip

Now you know the BMWs and the BMW M6s of the tech world. Next time we’ll take a look at the Scot Pollard of rap.

Update: a couple of commenters have pointed out that the spps200 may in fact be the Ford Edsel of battery packs. Apparently Battery Geek also has poor service. Caveat emptor.

The phone’s most striking feature is its illuminated numeric keypad, concealed beneath a smoked glass slider. In keeping with its minimal design, the phone uses a single microUSB port for charging and syncing, reducing the number of connectors on the device to just one.

While it may be a heavy hitter in the design department, the phone is really pretty “middle of the road” in terms of features. Unlike many high-end phones, the Luna doesn’t have a keyboard, touchscreen or other input device. It’s got a decent 2-megapixel digital camera, and a 240 x 320 color display. Plus, it offers a music player for MP3 and AAC audio tracks. The phone is designed to work on all GSM networks, and supports GPRS and EGPRS for high-speed data connectivity. Bluetooth wireless connectivity is also included.

Priced at €700 (appx. $942 USD) before subsidies, it’s certainly not for everyone. However, if you’re rolling in dough and looking for a phone that makes a strong design statement, the Luna is one to check out.