In the wake of Nokia’s artsy and luxury phones, some time back, comes a new pair of Nokia.  This time the luxury comes in the form, now so timely, of 3G connectivity.  Also appropriate of these times of iPhone mania, the Nokia 8800 Arte and Nokia 8800 Sapphire Arte models offer touch-screen capability, what the industry now coins as haptic.  And one of the haptic moves is so unique.  You don’t want to answer a call?  Just turn the display facing down.  And the touching doesn’t just stop at the 2-inch QVGA 240x320 pixels OLED display of 16 million colours.  You tap on outside and below the display to bring up a clock!  Also, no more fingerprint smudges – anti-fingerprint coating, on the screen and on the metal.  Other features: 8x zooming 3.2MP camera, built-in 1GB.

Something a little different from your usual Walkman bunch of phones. Recently the most interesting update is SenseMe, which detects the transferred music’s mood. Now, you can tap or touch on the 2.6-inch display, which has an improved UI (user interface) or UIQ, based on the Symbian OS. When not in use and the screen is idle 5 to 15 shortcuts can display, including one that goes to more applications. Probably inspired by the recent spate of iPhone copycats and whatnots, you also move your finger over the screen to get to the music stored in the 8 GB worth of onboard flash. You can add more external memory, and the internal RAM is a good 128 MB. The camera at the back is 3.2 MP.

Sony makes phones, Toshiba too, so why not Sanyo, having come up with its own M1. Well, The M1 certainly stands out, what being not slim at all. It’s not waterproof for sure, so what’s with the rubber bungs over the AC power, headphones, and a data cable ports? On the large note the internal memory is very nice, at 1GB, and the camera is 2 MP, with a plethora of settings, even a long 16 times zoom, like some video camera. No microSD or any external card support though. The screen on the flip cover is 1.3 inches, but the one inside is just a little bigger than 2 inches. Music control should be intuitive for the iPod generation, with a circular wheel.

If there is one company giving Nokia a tough time in the high end smartphone / business phone categories it’s got to be HTC.

It tightened the screw recently by launching its new HTC TyTN II in Kuala Lumpur recently.

Powered by Windows Mobile 6 professional, the TyTN II is a powerful device that features full connectivity such as HSDPA/3G/EDGE/GPRS and WiFi.