And the winner of the GSMA’s best handset of the year award … surprisingly was not a smart phone.
A panel of judges for the 2009 Mobile Innovation Global Awards chose the INQ1, a pretty normal slider 3G phone, citing for the way it integrates social networking applications like Facebook, Live Messenger and Skype. The INQ1 (pronounced ink-one) was launched last November in Britain through the telecoms operator 3.
The runners up were none other than the Nokia’s hot E71 and T-Mobile’s G1, the first phone with Google’s Android to hit the market.
“The importance of this announcement is we wanted to give a message to the market that it is not about technology any more. It’s about services. It is about user experience,” said Francisco Jeronimo, one of the judges.
Jeronimo said what is special about the INQ1 is that all the applications are integrated around the contacts, so when a user browses the contacts they get the different items without having to open other applications. “I can see if someone is online on Skype or Messenger,” Geronimo said.
iNanny
Anyone who has lost sight of their small child in a crowded store for even a few minutes — or worried when an older child was late coming home — will immediately grasp the utility of this gadget.
The iNanny, designed by a small German startup Leoworx, is a small assisted GPS locator weighing less than 50 grams slipped into a child’s pocket or bag that allows parents or minders to quickly locate a lost child.
“Let’s say a child gets lost. Five, six, seven hours mean everything,” said Leoworx CEO Rolf Kiehne.
Among the options: the user can define an area where the child habitually goes — say a route to school and back — and if the child strays from that predefined area or route, the…