Bad news for users of Motorola Milestone here in Asia-Pacific.

While American owners of the popular Droid – a CDMA version of the GSM Milestone – are already getting Android 2.2 updates, users here will have to wait until early next year to get the OS update that gives them speedier operation and Flash support, among other goodies.

When I opened up the box for the Nokia C6 smartphone sent to Techgoondu for testing last week, I told myself to keep my expectations low – this was, after all, a low-cost phone from the rather beleaguered Finnish phone giant.

But what little doubt I had of Nokia’s recent decline immediately disappeared when I fired up this sadly outdated slide-out number sold exclusively by M1 for S$98 (with a two-year plan).

Singapore’s mapping start-up Gothere.sg launched their new iPhone application about exactly a week ago. I had the pleasure of catching up with Junhan, one of Gothere’s founders, to get both a demo of their app and a status update of what they’ve been doing.

Firstly, below are some YouTube videos that the scrappy Gothere guys have put up on the Interwebs to explain what their app is about:

Basically it’s a front end client app on iPhone that extends their already popular Gothere.sg site. I’m don’t own an iPhone (I have a HTC Desire and am on the Android platform), but in the preview session that Junhan demoed the app to me and a few other work colleagues on the iPhone 4, I found the app to be excellent.

Everything that I liked about Gothere.sg — various driving public transport suggestions + estimated costs (e.g. avoiding ERP gantrys), trip summaries, smart autocompletion of search locations, etc. — had been shrunk down into one portable app. And the best thing is that the price point of S$1.99 for the app is something that is very affordable.

When some Microsoft folks recently asked me how users and techies felt about its upcoming Windows Phone 7 OS, I told them “you’re lucky to still be in the news”.

Until the past few weeks, when favourable first-looks of Microsoft’s totally rebuilt smartphone OS came online, the only OSes that anyone was talking about were Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android.

For an example of how fast a dominant OS can fall in interest level, look at Nokia’s Symbian OS that now powers most of its phones, as it transitions to the more advanced MeeGo. Who thinks anything great of Symbian now?

And compared to Nokia, Microsoft was worse off a few months ago – it only showed glimpses of what Windows Phone 7 was about at February’s Mobile World Congress and nothing more.

So, it was with a bit of surprise when I saw how well Windows Phone 7 was built, during a hands-on preview at the Microsoft offices here in Singapore last week.

Having lost crucial market share to Android and iOS, Microsoft has clearly done the right thing by building its new OS from ground up. Gone are the clunky “halfway house” touch offerings on Windows Mobile 6.5. Absent too is any lag that you get while moving around menus. In fact, pretty animations accompany most actions – without slowing things down.

Often we tech journalists play with high-end mobile phones for developed markets like the US, Japan or Singapore, and sometimes we forget that there are many, many phones designed for emerging markets.

The Boss2000, a dual GSM/EDGE phone by Indonesian mobile phone maker SPC Mobile, is one such phone designed specifically for South East Asian markets. SPC just got into the mobile game recently a few months back, and prior to this was an Indonesian monitor manufacturer that was better known in Indonesia than anywhere else.

Launched last week at Communic Asia 2010, the Boss2000 has a built-in analog TV tuner that allows you to catch any free-to-air TV shows (anything running PAL or NTSC). It has a 0.3 megapixel front-facing camera for self-portraits, and a typical 1.3 megapixel camera on the flip side for other photos.

Every function of this phone is designed with emerging markets in mind, making it a very different animal than the higher-end sleek 3G phones that we usually see.

With folks like Sony Ericsson and Nokia doing their thing outside of CommunicAsia, what new gadgets can you see at this year’s show?

Well, Samsung seems to be the brightest light at the show here. I’m particularly intrigued by the Galaxy Beam, which looks a little like a Galaxy S with a bit more heft in the shape of a small projector. Yes, you heard right, this little guy doubles up as a projector to screen your presentations.

Back to life with the Android Xperia X10 and X10 mini launched early this year, Sony Ericsson has just unveiled the Xperia X8, an “in between” member of the Android Xperia family that it promises to be “affordable”.

The “mid-tier” touch-screen device looks essentially like a smaller X10. It has a 3-inch screen, 3.2-megapixel camera and 3.5mm audio jack – all the basics of a multimedia phone for youngsters.

Out in selected markets in Q3 this year, the X8 comes in five colours, including white and pink

Nokia gave the media a first-hand look at the upcoming Nokia N8 this morning, as it kicked off its usual pre-CommunicAsia show this morning with its Connections event.

After playing with the phone briefly at the media event, I’d say my impression of this nifty little number hasn’t changed from when it was unveiled two months ago.

Without a doubt, the hardware and multimedia are great, but the Symbian OS, even in its latest version, is not as attractive as Android or iPhone OS.

Just three months after launching the Milestone with StarHub, Motorola has released the updated Milestone XT, a souped up, no-keyboard version of its highly-successful Android predecessor.

We got a quick hands-on yesterday and came away mostly happy with the update. The first thing you’d see is the less “corporate” look. Silver-rimmed and without a slide-out keyboard, the XT is aimed at the more “casual” user who doesn’t need to text or e-mail as much.

Trust Adobe to hold a regional briefing on Flash on the day the Apple iPhone 4 was launched. The date, of course, had added significance now that Steve Jobs and co. have decided not to support Flash at all in any of its iPhones or iPads.

Despite that, Adobe predicts that 53 per cent of the more than 300 million smartphones to ship by 2012 will sport its Flash software to show off multimedia websites on the small screen. Currently, only 9 per cent of the less than 50 million smartphones have Flash.

This is a daring prediction, given that only a small number of Android Froyo 2.2 handsets – mainly the Google Nexus One – support Flash on the go. Other Android handsets such as the Motorola Droid/Milestone and HTC Desire are being updated in the coming months.