MOBILE MILEAGE: (From top) Sony Ericsson W980i, Samsung Touch Wiz, Motorola E8, LG KF600, HTC Touch LR, Nokia N78,Nokia E66; Samsung i780; Sony Ericsson C902; Motorola ROKR U9; LG Secret; HTC P3350

Does your mobile phone auto-sync — or automatically synchronise — with your PC without the benefit of USB cables? And, hey, does it offer you Auto Rotating Display that shifts the image on the screen for viewing in any position? That is, does it simply switch your view from narrow to wide when the phone is held horizontally?

Also does it adjust the screen lighting according to ambient brightness with its Auto Luminance Control feature so that you always get a clear view? If the answer’s no — guess what — it’s time to get a technology update and catch up with the latest in mobile phone technology.

There are a slew of Gen Next features that are now taking the cellphone experience onto a higher plane. And they’re doing a great job of cramming an increasing number of useful and exciting features into bodies that are getting smaller. In fact, these changes will redefine how you listen to music, navigate cities, take and show photographs and a host of other things.

So here’s gawking at some Gen Next features that you can carry around in your breast-pocket or your Dior clutch.

LOCATION TAGGING

So you’ve just posed with the known-to-be-volatile, but for-the-moment dormant volcano, Mount Agung, in verdant and impossibly beautiful Bali — and want the world to know virtually immediately? All you need to do is — to begin with — shoot the picture with your hotshot location tagging enabled mobile phone.

Uploading the picture on the Net, the location tagger application will automatically tag location data to the picture — saving the picture by date as well as by precise geographical coordinates.

After touting five megapixel cameras, phones are now integrating GPS and a neat range of location-based imaging frills that are changing the way we shoot, manage and display the pictures taken with them. Now in full-show-off mode, you can easily share your best holiday (or otherwise) moments with your friends/family according to the exact latitude and longitude of where the shots were taken.

Two phones leading the pack with this feature are Sony’s C702 Cyber-shot (Rs15,745) and Nokia’s newest launch, the super-slim N78 (Rs 19,999).

NAVIGATORS & MAPS

Trying to hunt out a hotel or a new club in an alien city? Now even in every Indian city this task is no challenge if you’re armed with a cellphone ready to show you the way courtesy Google Maps for Mobile. Today’s phones are also coming to you pre-loaded with maps of major Indian cities and 3D navigation features. This means your phone can now tell you the best route to take to reach a location. Here’s how: direction arrows on maps as well as clear voice assist instructions (even in Hindi) will help you find the fastest way to your destination.

For these features, take a look at Nokia’s 6110 Navigator (Rs 20,689). The Navigator — as also the N78 — is pre-installed with free maps of eight cities covering Delhi and the NCR, Jaipur, Ahmedabad, Pune, Mumbai, Chennai, Bangalore and Hyderabad. In all that accounts for some 10,000 restaurants and hotels, 10,000 banks and ATMs, 3,000 petrol pumps and much more.

HTC’s P3470 (for Rs 19,990) is another power-packed GPS-enabled PDA phone loaded with a fully functional satellite navigation experience. Meanwhile Sony’s W760i’s built-in GPS with Wayfinder Navigator lets you search over 20 million points of interest around the globe and can talk you to your destination every turn of the way.

Some other phones like Sony’s C702 Cyber-shot too ensure that you are never lost on your travels as Google Maps show you where you want to go. Google Maps can be downloaded on several phones and come pre-packaged with others.

MOTION CONTROL

Another bonus — and user-friendly — feature? Shake and tilt control. Now phones allow you to shake them to control some applications. If you want to change any media — be it songs, videos, photos or even the wallpaper — just shake the phone. Or, if you want to bring the images to wide screen mode, just tilt the phone.

New generation games programmed to respond to the motion sensor allow you to control the game by simply tilting the phone in the appropriate direction.

You can get a piece of this gaming action with Sony Ericsson’s W760i (Rs 15,745) and the C902 (Rs 20,139) in its Cyber-shot Series. These phones allow you to play in landscape mode, with sound from stereo speakers and use of dedicated gaming buttons like a games console.

There’s more sensor motion coming up with LG Secret (to be launched in India next month at anywhere between Rs 15,000 and Rs 20,000) which will come with motion games enabled by the accelerometer sensor. With a tilt or rotation of the handset, you’ll be able to throw a dart, hook a fish or navigate a maze.

For music buffs it’s back to Sony Ericsson W760i with shake control features to help you select the right music. The soon-to-be-launched W980 (for some Rs 23,500) will also flaunt this feature.

DHAK-DHAK BEATS

If your pockets haven’t run deep enough to buy you gadgets from deluxe brand Bang & Olufsen, make a small start with cellphones powered by the ultra-smart brand. Check out Samsung’s SOUL or the U900 (Rs 20,035) and its BeaT450 (Rs 16,799) which offer you a “mobile theatre” experience — helped along with power amplifiers by B&.

Over the years phones have became the new dream-come-true devices for music buffs — and they’re being fine-tuned all the time. There’s a higher level of experience to be enjoyed what with the three-dimensional stereo features or effects courtesy on-board audio managers, audio boosters and equalisers. You can also expect them to download music and audio-visual content off the Net at high speeds.

You can enjoy music in style with the HTC P3350 (Rs 17,490), a PDA phone that meshes business with leisure into its compact, slim shell. It comes with an audio manager and an audio booster with a 10-band equaliser range.

Or you will be able to tailor Sony’s W980i — as well as phones from other manufacturers — to the music you’re listening to. These phones offer a choice of equaliser presets that let you choose the best sound for a specific type of music — be it jazz, pop or heavy metal.

Motorola is another brand focusing big time on music lovers. It’s new generation ROKR E8 (between Rs 13,999 and Rs 15,455) is powered by MOTOMUSIC and once you access this on-line music portal www.hellomoto.com/in/music through GPRS you can download from a cache of — count-’em — 3,50,000 full song tracks (though this is not a free service). The ROKR E8 offers three-dimensional stereo, an on-board equaliser and built-in speaker.

Another small and lightweight phone from Motorola, the curvaceous ROKR U9 (Rs 11,535), has an external display with touch-sensitive, digital keys that let you control the music from “outside” the phone. You can do the same with the E8.

INSTANT EMAIL

Now with a lot of cutting-edge new devices you get reliable real-time access to your email, calendar, contacts and tasks, and can download attachments like Word, Excel, PowerPoint or PDF files directly on the phones. There’s more: some also enable you to edit office documents.

Nokia has just unveiled two new, stainless steel e-mail-optimised devices — the Nokia E71 (at Rs 22,949) and Nokia E66 (Rs 23,689). While the Nokia E71 comes with a full QWERTY keyboard, the E 66 is a stylish, slide-to-open cellphone.

The Nokia E71 and Nokia E66 come fully equipped for easy-to-install and easy-to-use professional and personal email. People who use Microsoft Exchange at work can access their email using the Mail for Exchange mobile email client, which comes preloaded with the Nokia E71 and Nokia E66.

The phones support email accounts from hundreds of Internet service providers (ISPs) around the world, including Gmail, Yahoo! and Hotmail.

The new HTC Touch homescreen too provides one-touch access to emails, text messages, calendar appointments and contacts, as well as current weather conditions and forecasts for hundreds of cities around the world. The Touch (Rs 16,990) features TouchFLO, and you can simply sweep your finger up the display to launch an animated, three-dimensional interface.

INTELLIGENT APPS

It’s a given that today’s phones are intelligent, intuitive. But now they offer a potpourri of clever features that you didn’t quite expect from them once. For instance, from fitness applications to taking the best photos quite in the league of digi-cams — they’re performers. The W760i from Sony Ericsson, for example, has a GPS-supported fitness application called Tracker that can tell you how fast, how long and how far you ran (or walked).

If you’re mad about shooting pictures there’s plenty for you. There’s Samsung TouchWiz F480 (Rs 20, 990) that features innovative technology like Auto Smile Shot which enables the camera to detect when a person is smiling so it automatically takes a picture at that moment. No need now to say “Hold that smile.”

LG’s Secret meanwhile is equipped not just with an advanced five megapixel camera it also flaunts SmartLight that automatically adjusts the picture’s light settings.

Another Samsung phone, the i780 (Rs 23,250), comes with an optical mouse besides the full QWERTY keyboard and a full touchscreen. The optical mouse feature, says the company, is an industry first. Activate it through the phone’s setting and a cursor appears on the screen which can be moved by moving your finger on the keypad.

Samsung Soul U900 (Rs 20,035) is another bright spark. It comes with features that adapt to the user depending on the application. With Magic Touch by DaCP, navigation indicators on the keypad of the phone change according to the user’s needs, making navigation of the menus simple. The navigation panel’s icons alter according to function. So, when in music mode, music related icons will light up on the navigation indicators and when in camera mode, camera icons will appear.

The LG-KF600 (Rs 13,490) for its part is claimed to be so intuitive that it appears almost to “read your mind”. The phone’s InteractPad is an interactive touch-based virtual navigation intuitive keypad that interacts with the second display. This eliminates the need to know which key does what when using the phone’s three megapixel camera, MP3 player, video recorder and even when making phone calls or sending text messages.