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Visa and Nokia team up for mobile payments
It's not as foreign of a concept now that PayPal is offering mobile payments in the good ol' US of A and RFID credit cards abound, but Visa and Nokia are getting their own little project off the ground in Malaysia for credit card payments from a mobile phone. The "Mobile Visa Wave Payment Pilot" is based on the simple idea of smart card payments, but embeds the radio inside a Nokia phone instead of a credit card. During the trial, 200 Visa Wave cardholders will get to spend their monies with the wave of a special Nokia 3230 phone, with 2500 retail outlets accepting such payments. Visa of course claims a great deal of security for the project, but we're still leaving that blink card at home for now.
Fujitsu-Siemens' 3G-enabled Lifebook E8210 reviewed
With most manufacturers concentrating on making smartphones ever-smaller, it's refreshing to see Fujitsu-Siemens flip the script and release what may be the world's biggest Windows-powered handset, eschewing CE for XP in the process. Actually, F-S is marketing the six-pound Lifebook E8210 as a laptop, what with its 15.4-inch, 1,680 x 1,050 display, 2GB of RAM, and full-size keyboard, but any data-centric device that can make cellphone calls (thanks to the built in HSDPA-compatible 3G card) is a smartphone in our book. Whatever you wanna call it, the E8210 impresses on many fronts, says Trusted Reviews, who give the 2.16GHz, Core Duo T2600-powered model nine out of ten stars, highlighting its connectivity (802.11/a/b/g, Bluetooth, HSDPA/UMTS/EDGE/GPRS, PCMCIA/ExpressCard slot, four USB, and even serial, parallel, and D-SUB ports), security (fingerprint reader and Smartcard), and benchmark performance. The only downsides here seem to be the lack of a 3G CDMA option and the ATI Mobility Radeon X1400 graphics, which definitely makes this Lifebook anathema to gamers -- but at over $3,500, the E8210 is clearly being targeted at corporate, and not LAN party, deployment.
