As well as supporting Android, Windows Mobile, having a mobile site, and having a mobile widget (more below), lastminute.com have announced today they have released their fonefood for iPhone client, and also a Symbian fonefood application.

The fonefood for iPhone client will show you nearby restaurants and any deals or offers that are available, and can also be used to search for the same information at other locations.

The Symbian application works in a similar way, offering to show you nearby restaurants, deals and offers.  To access this version, simply go to m.lastminute.com from your phone and it should offer you the option to download and install the application.

We didn’t cover much detail on the mobile widget before, but on the Nokia 5800 XpressMusic, this will also determine your location.  It’s also clever enough to set the language of the widget based on your phone’s language.  As this is a Symbian S60 5th Edition Web Runtime widget, it should work on all S60 5th Edition phones, including the new ones announced at MWC when they become available.

Good news for O2 UK, they have announced this week they have sold over 1 million iPhones.  Of course, that may not actually be 1 million customers, as some iPhone 3G users will still have their old iPhone in their cupboard somewhere from when they upgraded.  Either way, that’s still a lot of iPhones sold in the UK.

Of course, we mustn’t forget that it only took Nokia 7 months to sell 1 million Nokia N95 phones in the UK back in 2007 (across all operators), so although this is a very good figure for O2, it’s not a unique position to be in.

Although lower end phones are generally more popular across the whole mobile marketplace, these 2 phone ranges do stand out as the most popular high-end smartphones, and both stand head and shoulders above many other phones on the market. We wonder whether 2009 will bring a new champion…

Here’s the new Nokia E75 promotional video…

Interesting that Nokia say that the E75 is “Designed for email”; we say it’s designed for the connected person, as this device should prove useful for those using social networking sites, as well as those who just need access to email.  The QWERTY keyboard will be the key selling point for this phone, although some people are concerned about the slightly smaller battery and less internal memory compared to phones such as the Nokia E71 or the new Nokia E55.

If you are thinking the Nokia E55 is the phone for you, then this short video (again by Nokia) might be interesting…

Unlike the Nokia E55, which is not due for a few more months, the E75 should ship in the UK around the middle of March, and is already on pre-order direct from Nokia UK (currently in Red only, although the Red colour is growing on us) for £379, or you can pre-order the Nokia E75 (no colour stated) from Mobile Fun for £350.

E75 video provided courtesy of Just Another Mobile Phone Blog.

Over at Symbian Guru, they have documented a step-by-step guide on how to add an RSS status feed to the Nokia 5800 XpressMusic’s Contacts Bar.  Although they concentrate on Facebook, it could equally apply to other RSS feeds, although the Nokia 5800 limits you to 1 RSS feed per contact, so you need to choose wisely.

The walkthrough is documented here as an article, and within their forums as well here.

I’ve been a big fan of TripIt for the last year or so. Whenever you receive an email confirmation of a flight, a hotel booking, hire car, even a train ticket reservation, you can forward this email to TripIt and they will convert it into a travel itinerary for you. This puts all your travel information into one single location. As they support iCal and RSS feeds, you can then get this information into other sources, such as your Calendar or other services.

About a month ago, TripIt announced a developer API program, which allows other companies (with your approval) to access this data, and the fruits of this are already starting to show with 2 iPhone applications now offering TripIt integration to enhance your travelling…

FlightTrack Pro (shown above, currently £5.99) is the first such app, which is designed to track all your flight details for you, with the ability to not only access the flight information, but also live weather, flight route maps, real-time flight status updates, airport time difference information, airport delays and closures, and will, in their latest version, also support importing the flight information from TripIt. Some of these features, including the TripIt support only come with the Pro version, so this is likely to be more useful to the regular traveller.

Now, most of this information is already available, but this app brings together a whole raft of different websites to bring that information onto a single screen, and that’s key to us; that little extra effort in integrating all that information can be so useful to some people. FlightTrack Pro should be able to link your TripIt information to airport information, thereby providing additional information such as last minute gate changes etc. It even features an offline mode to work whilst you are travelling at 30,000 feet and want to check the details of the airport you are arriving at, or even your next flight (although you won’t have information to the real-time updates).

If your travel plans don’t always revolve around flights, then TravelTracker (below, currently £11.99) may be a better app…

This covers all type of travel, allowing you to enter information on flights, trains, hotels, car rentals, meetings and driving, but again, offers that ability to integrate with TripIt to collect the data. Given that TripIt can pretty much handle all of those types of travel, it seems a nice combination to provide easy access to your trip data. It’s not as polished in some areas, eg accessing real time flight status takes you to a web page, whereas FlightTrack Pro builds the information into the application itself, but it does support some simple expense management, and even will track your frequent traveller cards and programs. As well as supporting the iPhone, they also support the iPod Touch.

Which one would we choose; well that’s the nice thing; use TripIt to automatically process the emails you are sent when you book the travel in the first place (they also support the major travel agents which are commonly used by corporate travellers), and then get the data fed seamlessly into both application; given you the best of both worlds; FlightTrack Pro for the best handling of the flights, with TravelTracker handling the rest of the travel.

What about once you’ve arrived, and you want to make notes and record information about where you have been, and what you have seen; well, maybe Geotags for iPhone is a good solution for you…

Geotags for iPhone is a free map-based application for the iPhone, allowing you to keep a record of places and things you have seen of interest, by marking on the map where you found them. As well as written notes, it supports photos and short audio files. Once you have collected the information, it can be viewed in Google Earth. Of course, you can achieve similar things with other services, such as Brightkite, which also offers a wider variety of method of locating yourself, and offers more of an overall social networking experience via their Brightkite for iPhone client, which is also free.

Finally, if geocaching is your thing (and if not, why not?!) then we’ve covered geocaching for the iPhone before here.

This level of integration with services such as TripIt, potentially resulting in not having to enter the information by hand on any system appeals to me, and I hope that over the next few months, we start seeing similar TripIt integration into Android, Symbian and Windows Mobile applications for non-iPhone using travellers.

Some content about Geotags for iPhone from TUAW; thanks to Mark at Automated Home for the link.

If you fancy leaving a USB car charger device in your car permanently, but don’t like the look of a normal device that sticks out (both physically and asthetically) then this might be the solution for you.  This miniature USB car charger is exclusive to Mobile Fun at the moment (in the UK) and is less than £15.  That’s more than a normal USB car charger, but in this case, you are paying for something that is more discrete.  If your current mobile phone / mp3 player charging cable has a car cigarette adaptor on the end, then Mobile Fun also have a range of USB based charging cables to help you out.

Head over to Mobile Fun for more information, although don’t forget the UK Gadgeteer Offers page currently includes a Mobile Fun offer.

Garmin have hinted about their Garmin nuvifone and their integrated location services, and how now provided more information on some of the functions that will be provided.

Firstly, “if you open a contact’s name on a nüvifone, you’ll have three primary options: call, text and go.  The call and text choices are traditional options found on most phones, but if you press “go” it launches the navigation screen and you’ll be navigating to the contact’s address.”

Another example is having the nuvifone’s location integrated with the calendar; “You can find an event in the area via the “upcoming events” option, then add it to the calendar with the click of a button. When it’s time to attend the event, your calendar will prompt you of the event and then you can navigate to the event by touching a button on the calendar page.”

These may only be little bits of information, but it certainly looks like Garmin have thought through what could and should be achieved, and are making a well integrated device.  Other phone vendors should be taking note of this information, and hopefully will be offering similar integration where it’s not available today.

3UK have launched a special offer in their 3Store.  You can sign up to an 18 month contract for a Nokia N95 8GB and get a free set of Nokia mini speakers as part of the deal.  This deal is highlighted on our new UK Gadgeteer Offers page, which will list all the special offers and discount codes we have managed to obtain with various online vendors.

fring have negotiated that their multi-IM / chat client will be pre-installed on the new Samsung OmniaHD we covered last week here.  fring have a similar arrangement with the current Samsung INNOV8 S60 phone, but since then, fring have extended their client to now provide add-ons, which include support for facebook and last.fm.

fring have also recently announced that they support xpenser, a free online expense recording tool which allows you to record your expenses via IM, Email, SMS and even twitter.  In fact, you have two ways of linking fring with xpenser, as fring can either provide the information to xpenser via GTalk or via twitter.  As fans of both fring and xpenser, we’d like to see even more support, where fring offers an add-on which provides a template to complete and then sends the information to xpenser.

fring is constantly developing it’s client, and things are looking good for the future.

Samsung OmniaHD information from Symbian Freak; xpenser information from fring and xpenser.

As part of their MWC coverage, LG also announced plans for greener phones.  They plan to release a solar powered phone at the end of this year, which will feature a solar panel embedded in the battery cover, which they claim will give 3 minutes of talktime from a 10 minute solar charge.  Obviously, it will give a much longer standy time, and LG claim it should even be possible to not need to charge the phone from a conventional charger “if left in natural light for long periods”.

Interestingly, they showed the phone alongside an LG LC-910 (LG Renoir) box and user guide, but the actual phone looks more like an LG Secret to us.  We suspect that the picture is simply a mockup, and we’ll actually see the solar powered technology embedded into a currently-unreleased phone.

LG have also announced a Solar powered Bluetooth Handsfree Kit for the car, and are planning to move to greener packaging on all phones during 2009.

On top of the £9 per month budget contract that we covered here, 3 UK have now announced a SIM Only version of the same contract.  The 3 SIM Only 100 contract will also cost £9 per month, and come with 100 minutes or texts.  As with many 3UK contracts, it also features 300 3UK-3UK minutes, free voicemail, free Skype (*) and free Windows Live Messenger (*).

(*) Limits apply as always, and both functions are only available on phones that 3UK support these functions on.

The key point about this SIM Only contract is that, like many other networks’ offering, this is a 30 day rolling contract, so you only have to give 30 days notice of leaving, or changing to another tariff, and you can still port your number to this contract allowing you to keep your existing number.  You’ll need to bring your own 3G phone too.

It’s not currently available online, but is available in most 3 Stores up and down the country.  Until the offer becomes available in the 3Store, you can read more about it here [Via Pocket-lint and 3mobilebuzz]

Garmin have been slowly rolling out native Mac support for their range of applications, and last week, Garmin moved a step further towards full Mac support by releasing the ANT Agent for Mac software.  This allows the ANT USB Wireless stick to communicate between the Mac and the Garmin Forerunner 405 or Garmin Forerunner 50 for use with the Garmin Connect website.

Garmin have also stated that they will hopefully be releasing Mac support to allow these devices to keep their firmware and GPS firmware up to date, which today still require a Windows PC to achieve.

The Garmin ANT Agent needs an Intel Mac running OS X v10.4 or newer, and you need 256MB of RAM and at least 150MB disk space free.

Nokia and Skype have announced an interesting partnership, whereby we should see Skype pre-installed on many high-end Symbian phones from Nokia.  This will start with the Nokia N97, which although it will not ship in June with Skype, will have a firmware update in Q3 which will include Skype.  It’s fair to say that network operator branded phones will either never get this update, or will not get Skype (except maybe 3UK who support the use of Skype).

With Nokia’s Ovi plans, including the Ovi Store, it’s looking like by the end of this year, many Nokia phones will come with a good range of applications and services, and this should help keep Nokia’s sales bouyant.

Last, but definitely not least, is the news from LG, who, although without as much fanfare as Nokia will achieve, have made a number of key announcements, including statements over their plans for the next year within the mobile space…

Firstly, as we have already covered, they have announced the LG Arena, which will take over from the LG Renoir as their lead phone.  This features the new 3D menu layout and UI, which is also said to be a lot faster than their current UI, and they seem to have made good use of this new interface and the 480 x 800 3″ touchscreen; for example, in the image gallery, if you move the phone from vertical to horizontal, it will make the photos cascade off the screen, and then reappear bigger.  Sliding a finger from top to bottom will show photos taken on different days, whereas sliding left to right scrolls through the pictures taken on the same day.  They’ve also used similar functionality in the Tactile Analogue Alarm Clock and Radio Tuner, where you get the sensation of moving the hands, or turning the dial.

More information in the rest of the article…

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We covered the IDAPT I3 charging device before; it acts as a cable free (apart from it’s power cable) way to recharge your gadgets, and even allows up to 3 devices to be charged at the same time, which we think is a fantastic way to handle the multitude of different charger connections in use today.

However, hopefully, one day this may not be so necessary.  This week, the GSM Association and 17 mobile phone manufacturers and network operators have agreed that they will work towards adopting the microUSB port as a standard data and charging connector, which will hopefully negate the need for every device to ship with a charger in the box (allowing smaller and lighter product boxes, which is good for the environment) and will allow you to use existing chargers with a new phone purchased.

The organisations involved have set a date of 2012 for the adoption of this new connector, which is a little further into the future than we would have liked, but it’s a start, and we suspect we’ll be seeing more and more devices moving over to this connector in the next year or so.  With some phones on the market for over 12 months (especially via the mobile networks) and with the likes of Nokia announcing phones for release in nearly 6 months time, it’s understandable that the manufacturers cannot commit to a date much earlier than 2011 anyway.

The list of companies involved in the UK market includes 3 Group (3UK), LG, Motorola, Nokia, Orange, Samsung, Sony Ericsson, Telefónica (O2), T-Mobile and Vodafone, with some of these manufacturers already using microUSB for at least part of their range.

Vodafone have even produced a short video on how they see this affecting CO2 emissions and reducing energy…

These companies have agreed that the majority of their products will use the Universal Charging Solution, and we can only hope that other companies producing consumer rechargeable gadgets look to adopt the same connector for their convenience too.  The only main player missing is Apple…

As we first covered a few weeks back, Samsung have announed the Omnia HD (aka i8910).  This is a Symbian 5th Edition touchscreen phone, featuring a bright AMOLED (Active Matrix Organic Light Emitting Diode) 640 x 360 3.7″ touchscreen display.  In fact, Samsung are claiming this is the largest AMOLED screen on a mobile at the moment.  As well as an 8 megapixel camera, it features the ability to record full HD quality video (1280 x 760 pixels), although obviously can’t play it back on screen in full HD quality, but does support HD TV Out.  It also supports qik.com for users to produce real time video.

It’s 123 x 58 x 12.9 mm and has a 1500mAh battery, DivX and XVid support, Dual Stereo speakers, an FM Radio with RDS support, a light sensor, a compass, an accelerometer, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, A-GPS, and includes Samsung’s Advanced TouchWiz UI with widgets to enhance the standby screen.  As we mentioned before, it will come in 8GB and 16GB version, both of which will support a microSD card slot.

This puts this Symbian smartphone in direct competition with Nokia’s finest devices, and it will be interesting to see how popular this model gets.  In fact the only questions remaining are price and availability, and whether Samsung will offer regular firmware updates for this device in the same style as most Nokia-based Symbian phones.

This is the HTC Magic, launched this week at MWC.  The key interesting thing about this phone is that it is an Android phone, and will be launching on Vodafone UK to be on sale in April (for the UK, but it will also be on sale by Vodafone in Spain, Germany, France, and non-exclusively in Italy).

The HTC Magic has a 3.2” QVGA touch screen display and features a trackball and navigational buttons for quick, easy access. The HTC Magic includes a variety of email options such as Google Mail, POP3 and IMAP as well as Google Talk for instant messaging.

The HTC Magic has a variety of powerful mobile internet capabilities beginning with an Android-optimised Webkit browser. It also features the popular Google applications, Google Maps and Google Search as well as favourites like YouTube. In addition, Android Market allows for quick and easy downloading of games and applications.

The phone does not have a keyboard (like the T-Mobile G1), so it will be interesting to see how the OS adapts to this touchscreen only method of input.  It does, however, have a very similar spec to the G1 in other areas; GPS, 3.2 megapixel camera, and it’s dimensions are 113 x 55 x 13.65 mm.

Unlike Nokia, who seem to be releasing their phones in many colours, Vodafone will have the White version available in the UK, Spain and France, the Black version in Germany, and both colours in Italy.

Although not yet available for sale, it is possible to pre-register interest in the phone in the Vodafone Store.

On top of the other phones Nokia launched on Monday, they have announced the N86, the 8 megapixel cameraphone.  Although the main feature of the phone is going to be the camera, the phone also includes N-Gage, and is an updated dual slider design.  It features the OLED screen from the N85, and has 8GB of onboard storage whilst also supporting a microSD card slot.  It also features the builtin kickstand that the N96 has, allowing the device to be used for easy video watching (and it includes TV-out support).

The camera comes with a Carl Zeiss Tessar lens, and even has aperture control, possibly a first on a cameraphone, and features dual LED flashes.

As with many of the current Nokia phones, and new launches, this phone will be available in Indigo (above) or White (below), which also shows the new media keys design.

It looks like the Nokia N86 will cost €375 and be released in the 2nd quarter of the year; so to summarise, we should see the Nokia E75 next month, and then before the end of June we’ll have the Nokia E55, Nokia N86 and Nokia N97.  If the UK networks don’t cherry pick (or sign exclusives) we should see some strong competition for the Summer phone-of-choice (especially to compete against the rumours of an updated iPhone or two being launched in June).

This is the new Sony Ericsson Symbian phone, due out later this year.  With a 12megapixel camera, a xenon flash, a 3.5″ 640 x 320 touchscreen display, and running a Symbian Foundation OS (ie the next version on from the current S60 5th edition), this is currently a pre-production device from Sony Ericsson, and it’s likely that the OS, the phone itself, and even the name are likely to be tweaked before it is released in the second half of this year.

This device looks to beat the specification of the Nokia N97, and with that not due for another few months (June 2009) and not much planned immediately afterwards to compete, it’s looks like this might end up running headon with the Nokia, and on paper it looks like it might have the edge too.

More as and when it’s released by Sony Ericsson, with the the current details available direct from Sony Ericsson.

Skyfire has updated it’s Symbian browser to v0.9.  The two key features they have added are easy access to Facebook and Twitter from the application homepage.  Although I personally prefer dabr.co.uk as a mobile twitter interface, the lack of dedicated S60 applications for both these social networks is still a little strange, and at least Skyfire is starting to offer a solution to this.

Last week, Nokia has been in talks with Facebook about working together somehow.  It’s unlikely Nokia will buy Facebook, but one of the options Nokia said could happen would be Nokia trying to create it’s own equivalent of Facebook, which would, in my opinion, be the wrong thing for Nokia to do; they should work with the existing popular sites to encourage people to use their phones, in a similar way 3UK has with the INQ1 phone by adding various social networking website support into the phone.  However, it looks like the Nokia Ovi Store may well feature a dedicated Facebook app when it launches later this year, and we already know the Nokia N97 will support widgets, which will include a Facebook widget.

However, in the meantime, one option is to consider Skyfire.  The only thing we would draw your attention to, though, is barneyc’s article on potential concerns over some privacy issues with the T&Cs that Skyfire are using.