With the likes of HP, HTC, O2 and Asus all having equally impressive specifications for their smartphones, what’s another competitor like MIO going to do to stand out and be noticed? It could give their Mitac A502 device a cool name, like DigiWalker. The aim here is to steer the potential customer from comparing some of its specs with those of the mentioned companies’ phones. Rather, you should see its device as a GPS device that can call out, play games, music and video, and run PDA applications. Just like its competitors, it uses one of the most popular GPS receiver, the SiRFstarIII, with up to 20 channels.

Nokia calls the 6120 their Classic model as the design has not supposedly altered ever since its earliest classic and enduring designs. And these are the all-encompassing curves, the 3-by-4 rows of keys, with a navigation button between the keypad and the display. The screen is now colour, 16 million of it, and lengthened to 2 inches of QVGA TFT, with a 320 x 240 pixels resolution.

A brand-new smartphone from Asus for the start of the new year: the Asus P550.  The designers haven’t bothered with slapping on some tiny QWERTY keyboard.  They don’t need to, as the virtual one will pop up in the large 3.5 display.  And you can tap on its QWERTY layout – it’s touchscreen, care of Windows Mobile 6 Professional.

Don’t take this to be the colour for these gadgets. Think environment-friendly.

Start of February next year a special conference, Greener Gadgets, will be held for only one day to discuss this issue in New York. The attendees will comprise mostly designers, leaders and entrepreneurs from the industry, along with journalists who’d be reporting and interpreting the talks.