Recently Philips as a consumer electronics manufacturer announce that they will demo their successor to Ambilight, the ambient lighting technology that generates light effects on the sides of a television at European expo IFA on August 30.

From early photos, the new sets incorporate the lighting directly into the frame, instead of using the previous method of a glass frame around the set. The new technology called Aurea is a quantum leap forward integrating the lighting directly into the frame.

But Gordon Kelly said,

beyond the naming Philips isn’t giving much away simply saying “Aurea brings light and color to life in an unparalleled, highly visual and immersive fashion, drawing the audience into the full emotional experience Ambilight offers. Aurea marks a departure from the world of television as we know it today”. None of which really helps.

So is Aurea just Ambilight in a neater package which “won’t have that huge white piece of board anymore” as our original tipster described it…?

Philips has announced the Xenium 9@9m phone model last few day. It comes with an interesting name and also with an appealing design for all those that want a more evolved mobile device. It certainly combines a lot of familiar elements, but combined in a way that you might not expect.

The new Philips phone resembles some other models coming from Sony Ericsson, but make itself outstanding compare others through its smaller size and some special features. It looks similar as Sony Ericsson P900 and P910, but it is only two thirds of the size and weight, where it only weighs 109 grams and comes in at 105 x 50 x 17mm.

On the other hand, size has been reduced means that the screen is also smaller. It has a 2.5 inches touch screen TFT display with 176 x 220 pixels resolution.

The Xenium is a versy simple and fancy handset although it looks like a PDA-style smartphone. It comes with a set of personal information management functions that are very common as other standard phones, but it is more convenient and stylish. It supports neither Symbian, nor Windows, only Java. This makes it not very impressive, but still reliable and with other important features included.

The Xenium has it’s special feature which is must be mentioned about the touch screen. It recognise handwriting. Yes, it recognises Chinese (simplified and traditional) abd Latin characters.

The Xenium has a multimedia player capable of playing back MP3 and AMR files, with a 2 megapixel camera with flash on the back. Furthermore, it has an internal memory of 70MB, but it is also capable of supporting microSD cards as to further improve that performance. There’s a web browser and email client too.

The Xenium is not capable of 3G support, EDGE data or even WiFi, although it does have Bluetooth support. Even more, the USB port is capable of 1.1 connection, which means low transfer rates.

The Xenium has up to 8.5 hours of talktime and a staggering 30 days maximum standby time, which means that you’re not continually worried about recharging the phone.

For more details of the Philips Xenium 9@9m, please refer to here

The Philips Xenium 9@9e is part of Philips’ Xenium series of business phones designed with long battery life in mind. It is quite similar to the Philips 9@9i model, varying mainly in looks and colour scheme. How long is the battery life we are talking here? More than a month’s standby time and 8.5 hours of talk time, long enough?

Functions that business users will most likely find useful include a calculator, money converter and voice memo recording.

The cellphone comes with an interesting feature that is the Firewall. This is not the regular firewall associated with PCs, but rather a feature with which you can specify the phone numbers that you wish to block - both as calls and as SMS messages received, or as one or the other.

The Philips 9@9e is also equipped with a 1.3-megapixel camera with 4x progressive zoom.

Detailed specifications of the cellphone follows:

General features:-

• ЕGSM900/1800
• Battery type Li-Ion 1100 mAh
• Battery life: standby mode up to 850 hours, talk mode up to 8.5 hours
• External screen the resolution of 80×48 pixels , monochrome OLED
• Internal screen UFB, shows up to 65K colours, the resolution is 128×160 pixels
• Integrated camera 1.3 MP (the max resolution of 1280×1024), multishooting, effects, recording video
• Colours - silvery blue
• Java (MIDP 2.0)
• Dimensions: 89,9×47x25,5 mm
• Weight: 82 gramms

Memory:-

• Phonebook for 1000 of entries, for name you can enter up to 5 phone numbers with icons of various kinds, set e-mail address, and a small text note.
• Call log of las 30 calls of all types
• Phone memory 20 MB, is distributed dynamically among all applications

Call management, ringing tones:-

• Vibracall
• 64 tones polyphony
• Fast dial for 8 numbers
• Minute minder
• Voice dial
• Automatic redial
• Voice code FR / EFR / AMR / HR

SMS:-

• SMS to multiple users
• EMS
• SMS chat
• Message templates
• Predictive text input Т9

Connectivity:-

• WAP 2.0
• E-MAIL client
• IrDA
• GPRS class 10 (4+2)
• Synchronization with PC

Organizer and extras:-

• Date, time, and alarm clock
• Organizer 1000 of entries (memory joint with a phone book), monthly and weekly views, supported various events, you can set a signal.
• Calculator
• World time
• Dictaphone
• Games

In short, the 9@9e lives up to its claim of extra long battery life, but apart from that it’s just a normal cellphone.