The body build is almost same as of HTC HD2, and 4.3 inches screen gives up a charm to this handset. Another attraction to this phone is the HDMI Port (though you will require a small adapter to make it really work with your HDTV. The phone sports 1Gb of memory and 512mb of ROM to make the android apps run at their best.

Links:

Early Reviews of HTC Evo 4G: HTC Press Release, Huffington Post, Engadget, PC World. Engadget has got a picture comparison between the Nexus One, iPhone and HTC EVO 4G.

Our Take:

We truly have loved this phone (who won’t?). Android, Double Camera’s, HDMI, 4G (though 4G is very limited today, but you can say this phone wont be old in coming future) and its backward capable with 3G too. So we would call this as the father of all phone’s out there in market yet.

Price and Availability:

No details on its price and availability are available as of now. This phone is basically launched for the Sprint customers and will be available around July 2010. In India this phone is not expected to launch any soon as the phone is launched in partnership with Sprint, however HTC is expected to come up with a unlocked version of this phone for other parts of the world.

According to Mr. K. Srinivas, Joint President-Telemedia Services, Bharti Airtel:

We are massifying the broadband experience by enabling users to access higher speeds at affordable rates. Our data shows that more and more customers want higher speeds. Average usage per customer has also increased by 40 per cent.

Therefore, we are redefining broadband speeds in India by upgrading all our subscribers to 512 Kbps even as the telecom regulator defines broadband as 256 Kbps.

Airtel has also launched new 4Mbps unlimited plans ranging from 899 to 1799. The complete details of the new plans are given  in the table below:

Over the past six months, telecom players have got engaged in a battle for speed. Recently a Mumbai-based Internet Service Provider –Tikona launched a 2Mbps speed connection priced between Rs 299 and Rs 1,249 depending on the download usage. Tata Teleservices Maharashtra had introduced a 100 Mbps line in Mumbai, while State-owned BSNL is offering 24Mbps connection for Rs 9,999.

Links:

The Hindu Business Line, Theitechblog.

Valentine’s Day is also round the corner. This move proves to be fruitful for the fixed line customers of Airtel. So go ahead and enjoy endless conversations with your valentine’s or closed one’s on these Sunday’s.

Interesting part is Virgin Mobile uses the network of  Tata Teleservices and still being able to provide calling at such a low rate. So now you can imagine how telecom operators used to fool us with high charges an year back.

The group will start its services from southern region of India and other parts will be followed up till end of March 2010. Virgin Mobile will provide STD calling rates at 20p/min without any top-up packs, in order to capture the market space, however the other tariffs details are yet to be declared.

Not only this but they will also be offering itemised bills to all their customers at no extra charge. Also if the bill complaint is now answered with a span of 48 hours, the bill will become the liability of  Virgin Mobile. Now this generates a true win-win situation for the users.

The big players such as Airtel, Reliance are creating a no-match for the cheap rates provided by the new telecoms. Its interesting to see where this competition is going to end. ”India is the first country where Virgin Group will be offering both CDMA and GSM services” said Richard Branson, founder of the Virgin group.

Number portability is also expected to launch by the same time i.e. March 2010 end, thus creating a new room for Virgin Group to grasp customers from other teleco’s.

How will you respond to this move – Stay with current 1p/sec plan (60p/min) or go with the new scheme as 20p/min?Leave your thoughts in comments.

Well you can figure it out from my words above, how special this handset is and how much am I personally excited about this release from nokia. N97 features ultimate features making us not to call it a phone but a internet tablet. We checked out the features of Nokia N97 when it was officially declared and now we have its official release date and price.

If you are located in India you have a great chance to win a Nokia N97. The contest will start from June 15 and will continue till June 19 across the 5 most popular tech blogs of India. You can enter at any one of the five sites which will be giving away two Nokia N97 each and answer some very simple questions by digging the site’s archives. Each participant can enter only once per day at one site and multiple entries will be discarded.

List of sites running the contest:

The list of blogs where contest are being held are provided below:

1. Digital Inspiration : http://www.labnol.org | Contest Details.
2. Techtree : http://www.techtree.com | Contest Details.
3. FoneArena : http://www.fonearena.com | Contest Details.
4. Thinkdigit : http://www.thinkdigit.com | Contest Details.
5. Brajeshwar : http://brajeshwar.com | Contest Details.

Official Release Date & Price of Nokia N97:

Nokia N97 will be available at all Nokia Priority Stores and Nokia Dealer in India on 23rd June 2009. Nokia N97 is priced at 35,000 INR. You can also fill your details here to get notified by Nokia about the launch.

Update 1 of Day 1 [15-06-2009 8:00 AM]:

The contest is up and running. The question for Day 1 is It makes your Internet experience more personal and the the correct answer is Widgets. Do try you luck on any one of links above.

Note: Do not post on multiple sites, this will get your entry discarded. However, different family members can apply.

Update 2 of Day 2 [15-06-2009 8:15 AM]:

Today’s question is Thanks to this feature, you won’t need a keypad. What is it? and the answer is just Touch (not Touchscreen). Wish you all the best!

Update 3 of Day 3 [16-06-2009 9:00 AM]

Nokia is today busy in popularizing their Ovi Store. The question for today is ” A virtual store that lets you store, share and access content”. And the answer is Ovi Store.

Update 4 of Day 4

Q: The first six characters on a modern keyboard.

A: QWERTY

Update 5 of Day 5

Q: Largest phone storage available for any Nokia.

A: 32GB

We will keep a watch at all the five sites above and provide more updates on this contest daily so stay tuned at LifeBaker.com don’t forget to subscribe to our feed here. You can also visit the official site of this contest at http://www.searchforn.com/.

We all know about the first Google OS (Android) based mobile – T-Mobile G1.  Though it has been only launched in US as of now, but it has created an impact all over the world. Recently, phandroid has reported about the cool deal going on at Costo. They are giving away G1 for just $80.

The phone costs $79.99 but the condition remains same. You have to subscribe to the T-Mobile service for two years and requires a $24.99 plan to activate it. How ever the plan can be changed from the next following month.

Another thing to check out is Amazon is giving away the same deal at a bit higher price – $98 which can be useful for those living in the exterior region. T-Mobile originally costs $179.9, so that takes a big $100 off through this deal

Though its not so great deal but if you are located in U.S. and are thinking to grab a smart phone with QWERTY keyboard, touch screen, Wifi, etc. Its a fair deal to go through. Still no bet for India and other regions, making the way for the grey market to expand its sales.

We all use torrents to grab some of the coolest stuff over the net. The files are generally huge in size and thus it takes lot of time to download a torrent. We leave are computers running for hours over days and nights to download torrent consuming a whole lot of power.

Now imagine a small device running aside your bed, downloading torrents for you even when you are sleeping. It does not whole consumes watts of electricity and what if you get such a device for free. Voila! Well you may have one but you didn’t knew.

Well Symtorrent is the open-source torrent client application for Symbian devices which resides in your cell phone and keeps working silently without consuming loads of power. As the application is open-source under the GNU license, it does not costs you any money. Here is the main developer of the Symtorrent explaining about the application and its uses:

Symtorrent is like having the Bittorrent client on your phone. Torrents can be directly launched from your phone’s browser. You have the choice to download selective files only from a torrent having multiple files. The files are saved on the memory of your phone itself.

With all such yummy features its a must have app for your S60 3rd and 5th Edition mobile phones. (You may check your device edition here.) Now whether its your Nokia N95 or N85 or E61 or even 3230, symtorrent is ready to make your phone the most-happening torrent device ever.

Download Symtorrent.

N97 meets the need of a person who need an all-in-one device which can handle each and every task. It can entertain you in times, it can get your mail read quickly, it can find you places or even remind you of washing your car.

Nokia’s N97 is equipped with the latest technology. Its virtually a mini-computer with two input options – The multi-touch display and the full QWERTY keyboard. The geeks were already in a demand of such phone from Nokia and in order to stay in the market Nokia finally came out with the N97.

The phone has a 5 Mega Pixel Camera with dual LED flash and has a huge internal storage capacity which will never let you in lack of memory space. The phone can hold upto 48 GB of data at a time with 32 GB internal memory and extra 16 GB can be expanded with a microSD card.

The phone also sports an accelerometer that can be used for playing cool games without a touch of a button. N97 also stays ahead in the matter of connectivity. It has various connectivity options like Bluetooth 2.0, WLAN (Wi-fi), micro USB, etc. You can also watch videos and pictures directly on your television as this device supports TV-out functionality.

Technical specification of Nokia N97:

The phone is itself unique in its class. It will be giving serious competition to the recently launched Apple’s iPhone and the HTC Touch PRO. Not only the phone but it is also capable of replacing the netbooks. Netbooks are small laptops suitable for net surfing & for some basic computing tasks and N97 is well ready to challenge them. However netbooks will surely be bit cheaper than the N97 but N97 will be offering even more portability as its even more smaller than the netbooks. Here is the man who developed this ultimate phone. Lets hear it from the person itself about his feelings for this stunning device.

Nokia N97 Video Gallery

Here is a collection of couple of Nokia N97 videos available over Youtube:

Price

Surely with its tempting features this phone makes its image of a “Dream Phone” in every geek’s mind but the only negative point in this phone as of now is its price. Nokia N97 is expected to ship with a price tag of ~$712 which is 33,500 INR in the First Quarter (Q1) of 2009. This price will surely go down following the trend of previous Nseries devices after the cream crowd is wiped off. But for that you will have to wait for Quarter 4 (Q4) of 2009.

Now here is something which can help the Windows Mobile owners. An app named VirtuaMouse One-Hand will create a cursor on your phone which can be operated by the directional pad. You use the D-pad to move your cursor on screen and activate the clicks. Thus easing down the job of taking out stylus every time making this app the choice of lazy perks.

This app is surely is good utility for Windows Mobile but the only downside here is the price. You can buy the app for $24.95 which is nearly 3 times the pack of three additional stylus. However, you can also try the app for first 30 days for free. Thanks Kevin.

The reviewers were however disappointed with the lack of an on-screen keyboard. It seems like HTC was in a hurry of releasing the G1 to capture the tag of “World’s First Android Handset Maker” and didn’t want to wait till Android completes its on-screen keyboard. Android platform is still in development and the team is currently testing the On-Screen Keyboard. The video we got from Talk Android reveals the all new keyboard of the Android.

The downside of on-screen keyboards is that while pressing against a character we exactly don’t know which character is being pressed as the width is very low and the keys are very compact. Android guys have came up with a technique to overcome this problem, when we press a character it will popup the character being pressed and thus we get an idea of which character is being typed.

It looks useful so-far but the Apple’s iPhone keyboard looks much more intelligent. It actually determines the next character while we are typing and widens the width of next possible characters. This makes the chances of spelling mistakes greatly reduced.

Soon T-Mobile owner will get this update of on-screen keyboard, till then they have to stick with the hardware keyboard only.