MANILA, Philippines — It's the best time yet for those shopping for their first smartphone, or seeking to upgrade their current handsets.

Choices are aplenty. This goes for the market's high, middle, and low ends. Consumers, whatever their spending allowance for a smartphone is, will never have any reason to complain as far as options are concerned.

In fact, the only issue that smartphone-shopping subscribers are likely to face is the overly generous range of available choices.

Cherry Pickings

Local mobile handset vendor Cherry Mobile recently launched several pocket-friendly smartphones, led by the Magnum 2X, a dual-core Android handset.

Running Android 2.2 Froyo, upgradeable to Gingerbread, the Magnum 2X comes with an Nvidia Tegra 2 dual-core processor, with each core running at 1GHz. A 3.8inch WVGA capacitive screen and a 5-megapixel main camera highlight the features list of the smartphone, which comes with a suggested retail price of Php 15,899.

A long list of budget-friendly Android phones accompanies the Magnum 2X.

Android Rules

This should spur Nokia and Microsoft to hurry up with their Windows Phone venture. Microsoft should encourage, entice, coerce, or do anything to prompt its hardware partners to speed up creating and launching WP smartphones.

Tech market research firm Gartner's latest mobile phone market survey reveals that Google's Android mobile platform accounts for 52.5 percent of the smartphone market in the third quarter of 2011. This means smartphones running on Google's mobile OS have twice the market share they had last year.

Once-dominant Symbian now accounts for a mere 16.9 percent of the market, less than half of its 36.3 share in the previous year.

BlackBerry fell from last year's 15.4 percent to 11 percent; Microsoft held on to a negligible 1.5 percent.

Kinect for the Blind

Man has set foot on the Moon. He has built supercomputers, skyscrapers, faster-than-sound airplanes, and weapons of mass destruction. Yet, despite these technological advances, the human race has so far failed to address the technology needed to help people with visual impairments.

Today, as it has been for far too long, blind people have to use a cane, or a seeing dog, or both, to be able to move about.

Innovations in computer and camera technologies, however, offer some opportunities to create more enabling options. Add in some geeks' innate drive to tinker with off-the-shelf gadgets and technologies, and we might finally be seeing some high-tech aids for people with visual impairments.

Recently, two computer engineering students, seeking to complete some course requirements, decided to hack Microsoft's Kinect motion-based videogame control system and transform it into a "belt-worn camera system" that provides its wearer with real-time feedback about their location and immediate surroundings.

One of the 10 projects chosen for the Zeitgeist Young Minds, a conference organized by Google to highlight college-aged inventors, the Kinecthesia uses the Kinect's ability to translate details about one's immediate surroundings into digital information. It works like a sonar system, in a way.

I wonder, when they were developing the Kinect system, did Microsoft engineers foresee how their technology would have game-changing impact on non-gaming applications?

That's all for the meantime, folks. Join me again next time as we keep on watching IT.