Infotainment

An intriguing bamboo mobile phone named ADzero is set to launch in the UK before the year is out following a positive response to the design, which was originally intended for the Chinese market. Though the intention is that the phone will run Android, relatively little is known about the phone itself. ADzero's Jerry Lao indicated to Gizmag that the designers are leaving all hardware options on the table until production is ready to ro UK newspaper the Telegraph has one or two details, though. Apparently the phone will be made from treated four-year-old organic bamboo, and will be half the weight of an iPhone. Its camera will feature a ring flash surrounding the lens to minimize shadows caused by the flash. And judging by the size of the display, the ADzero will almost certainly feature a touchscreen interface. "Bamboo may seem like a strange material to use for a phone," the ADzero's designer Kieron-Scott Woodhouse told th

Although it can't be denied that smartphones are ... well, that they're really smart, the fact is that not everyone wants to play games, shoot and watch videos, surf the web or use apps every time they step out their door. For many people, the ability to make and receive phone calls is all that really matters. It was for minimalists like these that Austrian electronics company emporia designed its very basic, large-keyed mobile phones. While they were previously not available to North American consumers, that changed with an announcement last week at CES. There are two phones scheduled for release in the new market - the emporiaCLICK and the emporiaSOLIDplus. The CLICK has a clamshell design, and incorporates features such as: Digital camera One-touch Call for Care emergency function - push to dial emergency services or up to five stored numbers until someone picks up SMS and MMS texts LED flashlight Incoming call alert with LED light, high-powered vibration

More from CES 2012, Sin City, where we've briefly had a chance to get familiar with the Nokia Lumia 900, the Finnish corporation's sacrificial offering at the increasingly cluttered LTE altar to the gods of 4G. The Windows smartphone features a large 4.3-inch AMOLED touchscreen, 8-megapixel camera with a wide-angle Carl Zeiss lens and seven hours of talk time, according to Nokia. First impressions? Really rather good, actually. With its announcement, the Lumia 900 becomes the central prong to the Lumia trident of Windows smartphones (between the Lumia 710 and Lumia 800), with which Nokia hopes to address its collapsing market share. A run-down of the key specs: Body: One-piece polycarbonate unit Dimensions: 5.03 x 2.7 x 0.45 inches (127.8 x 68.6 x 11.4 mm) Mass: 5.6 ounces (160 grams) Processor clock speed: 1.4 GHz single-core Qualcomm Snapdragon (the same as inside the 710 and 800) Key connectivity: LTE, 3G, WLAN b/g/n Touchscreen: 4.3-inch 800 x 480 AM