Wireless News

Everyone has that occasional color that either causes nausea or just hurts to look at.  It turns out, Panasonic found mine in this charming shade of pink.  However, the phone does come in other colors and it happens to have 3G.

The phone also has HSDPA connectivity, 1Seg support, Bluetooth, GPS and a 2MP camera.  The phone will come in four different colors, pure white, cherry pink, marine blue and lime green.

Hopefully the rest of the colors will look a bit better than this one.  There is no word on the actual release date or the pricing just yet.

Looks like someone let the plasma cat out of the proverbial bag too soon, and is now desperately backtracking to try to salvage a business relationship: the press release issued yesterday for Panasonic and AbleComm’s venture putting tiny plasma screens into cellphones has been thoroughly denounced as “completely false”.  The release, which described the compact plasma screens as a “pre-emptive” strike against OLED gaining the next-gen portable display upper-hand, suggested Panasonic had been working on the technology for a decade, and that AT&T had expressed interest in handsets using such screens as part of their mobile TV service.

“We are advised by AbleComm, Inc. that journalists and other readers should disregard the news release, Panasonic To Put Plasma Video Displays in Cell Phones, issued earlier today over PR Newswire, as the entire news release is completely false” Updated press release

It’s unclear whether this was a deliberate or accidental occurrence, though the release was sizable and contained multiple quotes from all the parties involved which lends weight to the idea that it was an authentic document prematurely distributed.

In the regular world, plasma TVs are large and cellphones are small; in Panasonic’s world, however, a cellphone is just another opportunity to squeeze in a tiny, plasma-based display.  The new, low-voltage screens – developed with AbleComm, Inc. – have apparently been a decade in the making, and rival OLED displays for brightness, contrast, thinness and, most importantly of all, cost less to produce.  They’ve already found interest from AT&T, using the screens with the carrier’s new Mobile TV service.

Cellphones aren’t the only devices Panasonic envisages getting a tiny plasma injection:

“Our plasma expertise and our large-scale, efficient manufacturing will allow these new small Panasonic plasma screens to replace LCDs in many applications — gasoline pumps, automated teller machines, camera viewfinders, MP3 players, vending machines, automotive displays, digital photo frames, appliance touch screens and even the little pop-up screens on printers. In fact, I am pleased to announce that we will be supplying mini plasma screens to HP for an exclusive two-year period for use in their printers. We view our thin low-voltage PDP technology as a pre-emptive strike against OLED technology” Robert A. Perry, Senior Vice President of Panasonic Consumer Electronics

The dinky plasmas sip just 1.5v and don’t require any additional wiring or special power supplies.

Reviewed by Gadgetell’s JG Mason, Link to Cell consists of a Bluetooth-equipped base station and up to six DECT handsets; it can plug into your regular landline, if you’ve still got one, but the clever part is that it can simultaneously connect to two cellphones and funnel any incoming or outgoing calls on them through the DECT handsets.

Of course, nothing is perfect and while JG seems bowled over by the system as a whole, there’s still room for improvement. Not being able to access the cellphone phonebook from the DECT handsets seems a pretty big issue to me – I have an appalling memory for numbers – and the design of the units themselves is pretty clunky compared to some DECT systems I’ve seen. Just two cellphones might not be enough for the average family, too, although other Link to Cell equipped phones I’ve seen in Panasonic’s range can hook up to five simultaneously, each having their own ringtone so you know when yours is calling.

Panasonic’s Link to Cell is shipping now, with a base station and single handset package priced at $99.99.

Have Panasonic given their new P905i cellphone a dubious champagne casing? Nineties colour choices aside, the P905i is another of those damned intended-for-Asia handsets that most of us are forced to admire from afar: glorious VIERA 3.2-inch 480 x 854 screen with a 2,000:1 contrast ratio, HSDPA, GPS, 5.1-megapixel camera and 1-Seg mobile TV, it’s enough to make you vomit over your dull Nokia.

Intended for NTT DoCoMo, the P905i runs the LiMo open-source Linux mobile OS and supports Windows Media video and audio files. There’s a full internet browser, document viewer, Bluetooth and the ability to record mobile TV direct to a microSD card. As a triband GSM (900/1800/1900MHz), W-CDMA/HSDPA (800MHZ, 1.7/2GHz) device you could probably pick one up on import, but don’t expect all the shiny features to work. No, just covet from a distance like the rest of us.