Nokia X5 Arrives in India; Priced at Rs. 10,499

After Five months its unveiling, the Nokia X5 is finally out now . The X5 slider phone looks like a cross between a Nokia E series smartphone and an XpressMusic handset. Nokia X5 is on sale for Rs. 10,499.

It supports a 5 megapixel camera with LED Flash, 2.36 inch QVGA display and a slide out QWERTY keypad. With an internal memory of 200 MB and bundled 2 GB microSD memory card.

The phone supports dedicated music keys, and comes with a year's worth of unlimited music from Ovi Music. Nokia X5 music oriented features include a built in 'Surprise me!' option that plays random tracks when the phone is spun around. 'Playlist DJ' feature allows playlist creation tools. When music is not playing, you can shake the phone to see the number of new SMSes in the Inbox.

It runs the same Symbian Series 60 OS found on the E-series smartphones, which gives access to slew of social networking services. Connectivity options include Bluetooth 2.0, Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g and USB 2.0. Nokia X5's battery is claimed to last 16-days on standby and gives 24 hours of music playback.

Read More

160by2.com Launches Free SMS App for iPhone

Popular free SMS website 160by2.com has launched its very own iPhone app. Their website allowed people to send SMSs from their website via the computer or the mobile phone (via a mobile-optimized site). The app will allow direct access to sending free SMSs across borders, and within too. Another advantage of using the app over the mobile site is that you can select contacts from the ones stored in the phone directly. It works only in a few countries at the moment; namely U.S., UK, Canada, Singapore, Malaysia, Philippines, UAE, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. All these countries can send SMSs free to cell-phones in India. 

iPhone users in India can also send free SMSs to anybody in India. The funny thing is that it isn't clear whether Indian users can send free texts to other countries. This service is ad-based, so 80 characters from the typical 160 in a single SMS are available for you to type. The rest 80 are given to advertisers to append contextual ads afterwards. The International SMS facility sounds lucrative to people residing abroad and wanting to communicate with the people of India. But with local SMSs, most post-paid operators these days have lucrative plans that have a couple of hundred SMSs free. Some even have an absurd 15,000 SMS per month limit. So, I really wonder if many people will be keen on using this app on a day-to-day basis for sending local SMSs.

The service does have its share of cons; other than the ads after every message you send, the message sender name is 160by2.com. So, the receiver cannot quickly hit reply - one would have to create a new message. So, do you think this app is worth keeping in your iPhone? Download it from here and let us know.

Read More