From February 13th 2007
BARCELONA -- Here at the 3GSM mobile phone trade show, everybody's getting the mandatory questions about the iPhone. Motorola, Nokia, and Microsoft all give bland answers about how they hope Apple will help convince more people to buy expensive, powerful phones. But one company seems to have the iPhone straight in its sights: the tiny Swedish manufacturer, Neonode.
The Neonode N2, being shown at 3GSM, is a tiny, light phone with an innovative gesture-based touch screen. Not only can you click on buttons with your fingers, you can sweep your fingers over the screen to open and close menus -- it's quite slick. There's also a 5-way cursor toggle below the screen, but you don't use it.
The N2's touch-screen abilities even surpass what we've heard of the iPhone in that it has haptic touchscreen dialing. Like the iPhone, the N2 has a virtual keypad to dial on. But this keypad bites back - when you press a "button," the phone vibrates a bit to give you the feeling that you pressed it.
The iPhone runs some variant of Mac OS X, but the N2 runs Windows CE 5.0. Not Windows Mobile, mind you, but a customized version of mobile Windows with Neonode's own user interface. That means it supports Windows Media audio and video, and ActiveSync for connecting to PCs, but doesn't run standard Windows Mobile third-party applications.
And the iPhone's storage is fixed at 4 or 8 GB, but the N2 is expandable -- with a mini-SDHC card slot under its back cover, it can take flash cards up to 32 gigabytes. (8-GB cards were announced here at the show.)
