Nokia launched the E71 and E66 mobile phones to the press here in South Africa today, and had a launch in Argentina  as well, where the IDC Latin America Telecom Director Romina Adduci spoke about his company’s research regarding the balance needed between personal and professional life.

Seeing that mobile telephony services were much more used that fixed telephony services, IDC set to find out the reason of the mobile services growth, and found out that it is justified by the “access to personal and professional communication resources, ranging from email solutions, messaging and Internet navigation to more complex, business-related applications, including CRM, ERP, Workforce Automation, etc., which are supported by the corporate intranet in the mobile environment”, which is one of the focuses of these two phones.

We will present you our coverage of the event handled in South Africa by next week. The press release is available after the jump.

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The shortly leaked Samsung i8510 with an 8 megapixel camera and 16GB internal memory, which runs on Symbian OS9.3 with S60 3rd edition has been officially announced by the company under the INNOV8 label. INNOV8 is read “Innovate”, and I guess there might be an ‘8′ there symbolizing the camera resolution.

The device has a 2.8″ display with 16m colours and QVGA resolution (240×320), which is quite disappointing. You can choose between a 8GB variant and the 16GB variant, and a memory card which can go up to 16GB. Black is the only colour available, which looks just stunning on the device.

The i8510 features built-in A-GPS for navigation and geo-tagging, WiFi, HSDPA at 7.2mbps in terms of connectivity. In terms of multimedia, it has a 3.5mm audio jack, DivX, WMV, Real Player and MPEG4 playback, external dual speakers and 3D surround sound supported by DNSe 2.0, and Asphalt and FIFA 08 games.

The Samsung i8510 INNOV8’s release date is scheduled for August in Europe, and September for other markets. One thing is sure, it beats the N96, and any other phone, for that matter (that don’t have touchscreen). Sounds like a fantastic phone, but the first reviews will dictate the verdict.

Press release and more pictures after the jump.

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For those that do not know, Neotel is the second national operator of South Africa, it has just began offering services to the retail market few months ago after a long delay, which was not only their fault, but also the national regulator ICASA’s fault. They have extended today their coverage to Cape Town.

I am planning to get it for myself, I live in Johannesburg, but only the Lite package is available, and there were some kinks on the upgrade procedure from Lite to Prime (when it is available).  Thankfully Neotel has one of the best call centres and representatives I have ever spoken to, in terms of respect and help. They are currently assisting me to meet my needs. I will report on my experience on getting Neotel internet as soon as I sign that contract.

The press release, as well as fact sheet and data sheet are available after the jump, so that you can inform yourself about the differences between the Lite and Prime packages. The Lite package doesn’t seem to be available in Cape Town though.

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We continue with our Nokia N810 Internet Tablet review, and we discuss the multimedia features of this device, both hardware and software.

The N810’s multimedia capabilities aren’t put to full use by the Maemo team, even though it can be a device marketed heavily in that area. The multimedia player continues the same as the one we saw in the N800, but thankfully, Canola saves the day.

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