Get over to the other side and get updated in the mean time.

Nokia X6 To Land In The UK This Friday

If you have been eyeing Nokia’s latest touchscreen music phone – the X6, it is coming to the UK Friday. As is usual with many phones there, it has found a carrier who will be offering it for free against a long-time contract. This time it is Orange for £35/month.

For the SIM-free version you will have to pony up £449, which is roughly around $670 at today’s exchange rate. You can pre-order it from shop.nokia.co.uk from today. [read]

Skype Nokia N900 Demo Video

Nokia N900 comes with Skype built-in. So now you have more reason to buy the N900 for $649, that is if you can wait for the next shipments to arrive. The last I heard of it was that it was pre-ordered to capacity and new orders were behind huge queues. At least now you can get one for $480 on Amazon ($530-$50 mail in rebate). [read]

Skype has demoed Skype for Maemo on an official video. Since Skype is already available on Linux, this port could not have been all that hard to execute. [read]

UK Retailers Pull Satio, Big Bugs Need Squashing

Bad news folks, Sony Ericsson’s Satio is now as good as off the shelves right now. This decision had to be taken after numerous customers came in with complaints about freezes, mysterious powering down of the phone and other problems. The two major retailers of the Phone in the UK – Carphone Warehouse and Phones 4U – have decided to offer replacements to customers who are returning the Satio.

Official word from Sony Ericsson is that the issues will be fixed before Christmas. The bugs are apparently to deep for normal updates to tackle. Well, I guess that’s what we get for lusting after a too-good-to-be-true 12MP camera phone.

Kurara Reviewed, Is OKAY

Like he promised, the man behind mobile review has posted a more detailed look at the Kurara. From Murtazin’s post, it is clear that the phone sounds good on paper but it is pretty ordinary in person. It definitely fits the bill for an understudy of the Idou and should be priced somewhere around half of the high-end offerings. That said, if this phone is priced right, it could become a hot-selling phone for those who are looking for an entry-level touchscreen experience that is slightly better than the Samsung options.

The ARM Cortex Ab with 256MB RAM still is powerful enough to breeze through the Symbian UI. So that part is covered I suppose. Read the extensive review of it right here.

O2’s ‘Free’ HTC HD2

The Brits are at it again. They are really good at giving away phones for free as long as you promise to pay them a hefty sum. If you are in the market for the HTC HD2 and if you are in the UK, you can get it for free from O2 against a long-term contract. You will have to pay a nice £45 per month on it though. So far, I do not think the HD2 retailing SIM-free there. So O2 looks like the only option right now. [read]

Right after Sony Ericsson made the XPERIA X10 (AKA Rachael/X3) official, the rumor mill threw out another leak at us. This time it is as model called the Kurara. Kurara seems to be the basic version of the flagship model Satio. For those who don’t know, Satio is a new phone from Sony Ericsson that centers around a 12.1megapixel camera and a 3.5inch screen 16:9 aspect ratio. Over all, it is pitched as a multimedia phone that has a great camera and a great screen that allows you to immerse yourself in the experience.

So the Kurara offers an experience that is more like a toned down version of what you get on the Satio. The rumors peg the camera on this phone at 8.l megapixel and screen is said to be 3.5inch. The other interesting part about this phone is the fact that the screen is apparently AMOLED. The OS is Symbian S60 5^thGeneration, again as per the rumors.

The camera is apparently capable of recording HD video. I agree with SlashGear’s Chris Davies here – it probably means that it does 720p video. From the side, you can see the phone has an oblong shape, plus there are dedicated buttons that make it look like a point and shoot instead of a phone. The teardrop profile also makes it look pretty sleek and stylish. That is one thing that Sony has always tried to keep up through almost all its phone – good looks.

The big question is what the UI would be like. Sony Ericsson has already declared that they are making a whole new line around the X10. They have also said that the new UI and UX (User Experience) is going to be cross-platform, so that means it is coming to their Symbian phones as well.

So, to make two plus two, this phone might have the new UI built into it. Won’t that be fun – to have a nice amd basic camera phone with the new fangled UI. In any case, the Kurara does seem like it will be ready for a show ‘n tell at the WMC (World Mobile Congress) 2010.

Sony Ericsson has declared that the Satio will not receive any updates and hence will remain excluded from this new UI endowment. One more bad news is that it looks like the Kurara will not have an USB port. That means yet another phone with the proprietary port. It is called a Universal Serial Bus for a reason you know.

After the initial leak, the phone got a new set of photos where its size was put into perspective by propping it up against a beverage can. The close up of the device further confirms the HD imprint on the back of the device.

Whether these leaks are hurting SE’s development cycle can only be speculated about. It did look like the company was hurried into announcing the X10. Since they are going to bring it out way after the holiday season, there was no reason to make it official so soon. They could’ve taken their time and sprung a more finished product on us.

But our expectations tend to get pretty wild with such continuous leaks and that can hurt the product instead of help it. So companies are always forced to taken some kind of measures to curb the unreasonable expectations. Apple seems to have done that by intentionally hinting at things about the tablet without really leaking anything. So SE perhaps thought it best to let everyone know what they were doing, set an ETA and then get back to working on it. All in all, this year’s WMC is shaping up to be a promising one device-wise.