We were lucky enough to get a few days with the Aava / Intel / Meego phone earlier this year and our tests with the handset UX showed that there was a lot of work to do. In a presentation at the MeeGo onference in Dublin today, we saw progress, a good working demo and future planning but still, there’s so much missing. Granted, these user-experiences are just baseline builds to show how the core features can be used but still, it seems to us there are some hooks that need to be added.

With no active icons support (showing number of unread emails for example) and a single homescreen with no widget support it means that product developers will have a lot of work to do to implement these features. On the other hand, the notifications subsystem looks good with support for multiple notification types triggering multiple different notification methods including notification lights, haptics and of course, dialog boxes. We didn’t see any dialog box handling mechanism though so we’re hoping this will be well controlled when it gets implemented.

The demo was done on a Moorestown based Aava Smartphone platform.

“But Ben, my iPhone already has Bluetooth!”, I’m sure you are saying right now. Thanks to Apple, you can barely use it for anything, and support for A2DP audio streaming and AVRCP is definitely not included. Luckily there are ways around this. Take the wiRevo Stereo Bluetooth Adapter for iPod and iPhone, which you can buy today on Woot.com’s Yahoo partner site, sellout.woot.com. For anyone who has managed to avoid hearing what Woot is, it is the most famous deal-per-day site on the interwebs. They offer one item per day with a limited stock, and when it sells out, it is gone for good (translation: if you want one of these, buy quick!).

The wiRevo Stereo Bluetooth Adapter for iPod and iPhone supports A2DP and AVRCP, which roughly means that you’ll be able to listen to good quality stereo music through a pair of Bluetooth headphones. There is also a pass-through for your power adapter which means that you can charge your iPhone/iPod while the adapter is plugged in. It is sad that Apple couldn’t build this functionality directly into the iPhone’s bluetooth stack, but $9.99 isn’t a bad deal if you want to remedy Apple’s flaws, and an even better deal if you have an iPod that doesn’t have Bluetooth to start with. I’m not sure exactly which generations of iPod this works with so I’ll leave that little mystery up to you before purchasing it. Seems like this same accessory is selling for around $39 elsewhere on the internets.

I’ve been having a look (or should that be listen) to the music capabilities of the BenQ S6 MID device. With a stereo headphone socket and a music player as part of the built in software, the device can be used as a portable music player.

But is it any good?

A good music player needs to have a couple of areas where it has to perform. The audio quality, the navigation of music on the device, and transferring music from another computer.

Audio quality output is good, the speakers on the device happily fill my kitchen and taking it outside there’s enough volume to listen comfortably when in the park. It’s when you start listening on headphones that there’s a problem. The headphone socket (which also carries the microphone socket as well) is only a 2.5mm jack socket. The standard size on pretty much any consumer device is 3.5mm, and my favourite headphones (including my custom moulded monitors) are all that size. While you can get adaptors, I fail to see any design reasons to go for the smaller jack plug that benefits the end user.

Looking through your music on the device is not a pleasant task. Although all my MP3 files have the correct ID3 tags, with the artist, album, track numbers and album art, the S6 does not use any of that information. Once you open the media application and start navigating music, you are using the directory structure and filenames of the MP3 files, with little option to search through the meta-information.

The controls only show up on the screen when you tap the play icon next to a media file this places the controls over the the screen for a few seconds before disappearing again. It’s not at all intuitive. What’s more, once you switch away from the media player, there are no on-screen controls you can pop up to control the music.

Finally, transferring music to the device. I had to resort to using a blue tooth transfer from my PC to get a connection to the memory card or internal memory of the S6. While I know many people will be able to do this, it is not a consumer ready solution.

Compare the hoops you have to jump through when compared to the iPod Touch and iTunes, the ease of controlling the music, and searching through with your eyes or filters, and you realise that the BenQ has some work to do to make the S6 acceptable as a music player.

I’m sure we’ll see more pics of this over the next few days but this one (from a set at GottabeMobile) shows the slim casing, the low-profile keyboard and the hinge. The 9″ version of this is said to be under 1KG making it very interesting in my book. I guess it’s not carrying a 6-cell battery (It’s probably using flat Li-Poly batteries to help the design) but if it’s got a 30whr battery, it could be a 3-4hr device if it uses (as indicated by JKK) the Z520 CPU.

Update: Note that the 10″ version is shown as using the N270 (Diamondville) CPU.

Check out a few other pics at GottabeMobile.

All the specs we know along with news links will be placed in the T101H page in the database.

Fear not, ultra mobile PC Portal isn’t going to start reporting on audio player news, instead we’re just mentioning the iPod Touch refresh as it pertains to the MID category.

That being said: Some of you may have followed the Apple event today. In a nutshell, they dropped some new iPods, iPod Nanos, refreshed the iPod Touch, and released iTunes 8. I’m actually pretty disappointed at the minimal updates to the iPod Touch. Oh well, if it aint’ broke, don’t fix it, right? The new iPod Touch is very similar aesthetically to its predecessor. The back is rounded and it is ever so slightly thinner. Nike+ receiver is built in (this is the accessory that you put in your shoe and it feeds running info to your iPod). Probably the biggest change is the built in speaker, and volume buttons on the side (just like the iPhone), no silent switch though.

On a related note, Apple also mentioned the latest 2.1 iPod Touch/iPhone firmware, which will come on the new iPod Touch, is currently available for old iPod Touchs, and will be rolled out to iPhones on Friday. Apple is apparently charging $10 for the update (if you are an iPod Touch owner), unless you are already running 2.0+, in which case the update will be free.

Thanks to Engadget’s live coverage of the event for the info.
Image courtesy of Gizmodo.com

Fans of total mobile device convergence might want to check this out as it looks like an interesting alternative to the Sony Ericsson Xperia X1 that Kornel tested out a while back.

VGA touchscreen, keyboard, HSDPA, 3.2MP CAM, rotation sensor and GPS running on a Qualcomm MSM 7201A @ 528MHz (ARM11+ARM9) platform running Windows Mobile 6.1. Available in Europe, late summer and in North America after that.

With a little Opera 9.5 love this could keep a lot of people happy for a very long time! I think we should drop it into the database as an alternative solution don’t you?

More info at Engadget and TheUnwired.