I didn’t even know there were so many athletes in the Olympics. Samsung just gave away 1000 phones to the Olympics team, 600 for athletes, 400 for coaches and other staff. Those phones aren’t going to last long if the “phone-throwing” game is played in the Olympics.

Samsung is from South Korea, but gives the phones to China, so obviously this isn’t any patriotic sign, but it’s to secure the use of Chinese Olympic symbols and people for marketing. This couldn’t enough to seal the contract, so an estimated US$20 million to US$35 million were sponsored to the team.

A Samsung G618 Olympic phone was given to each one of the participants, but there were expected to be 15000 handsets to be delivered, of which the F268, M128, and F480. You can always see the ‘8′ digit there as it’s the opening day of the tournament, 8 of August.

Apart from the China team, Samsung has sealed a contract to secure the Olympic symbols use until 2016.

Source: Unwired View, Forbes

The BlackBerry Bold, Nokia N96, and Skypephone S2 have been announced to retail by 3, the UK network. We all know their specifications, especially Skypephone S2’s as it was talked about yesterday.

The BlackBerry Bold has HSDPA, WiFi a/b/g, is black with a leather effect, has a 2 megapixel camera with flash, and obviously push email. The BlackBerry Bold’s release date on UK is November (that makes it release month).

The Nokia N96 is a dual-sliding beauty with HSDPA, 16GB memory, 5 megapixel camera with Dual LED flash, a kickstand, Symbian OS9.3 with S60 v3.2. The Nokia N96’s release date for 3 is September and the price should be around 15 British Pounds per month.

The Skypephone S2 will be released on the 18th of August and will cost 69 British Pounds.

The Nokia E71 has already been released today by the same network.

Source: SMS Text News [1] [2] [3] [4]

If you really don’t want to get the iPhone 3G, either because you don’t like it, or you don’t want to fall into a hype, there is always hope for you. Well, there’s actually 5 hopes for you, if that’s English enough.

David LaGesse brings us the Samsung Instinct, LG Dare, HTC Touch Diamond, LG Vu, and Sony Ericsson Xperia X1. For some reason he left the Finnish giant out. Is it justified? Nokia doesn’t have any touchscreen device, but there’s always the E90 or the newbie E71.

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I’ll go straight to the specifications that were “unveiled”: There’s a 5 megapixel camera visible on the images, but the UA profile points out to a 3.2 megapixel, or maybe I’m just reading it wrong.

The N85 has HSDPA, WLAN, Bluetooth 2.0, and possibly not 2.1 with EDR. It runs on S60 v3.2 (Feature Pack 2), on Symbian OS9.3, and the display has a QVGA resolution (240×320). We have seen quite a lot leaked images of the phone, and we know it’s a dual-slider.

Is there anything else you would like to point out?

Source: Mobile Royale