HP ‘Always Connected’ Concepts

The HP Mobile Innovations Tour is a showcase of concepts around the future of mobile communications. The world’s current mobile environment continues to grow more complex. Today’s notebooks, mobile phones, PDAs and digital cameras all continue to add more features, more options and more wireless technologies.

The industrial design behind these concepts strives for extraordinary simplicity, elegance and ease of use that result in an “insanely simple” customer experience.

RIM Announces New BlackBerry Application Suite for Windows Mobile-based Devices

"Research In Motion (RIM) (Nasdaq: RIMM; TSX: RIM) today announced plans to expand its support for Windows Mobile®-based devices with a new software application suite that will enable devices from third-party manufacturers to benefit from the popular BlackBerry® software applications and services"

The old you can't beat the then join them trick. When will Nokia follow?

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Nokia widgets??

Nokia plans to bring web 2.0 to the mobile sooner than web 2.0 is created. With Nokia press release bellow "Entire Netvibes Ecosystem's 85,000+ Feeds Available on Mobile Phones via WidSets"
Will confuse most end users out there, basicly I run a RSS reader on my phone unlike most people I know I use RSS on my phone. Not only has Nokia tried to push out this new medium to the people arround me, but they are going against the trend with a walled garden approach.
Yes Nokia I applaud you for releasing more software but this is a case of too soon and the wrong way, there will be alot of criticism towards Nokia over this one.

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Intel plans to deliver $500 mobile Internet devices

Working with manufactures Asustek, BenQ, Compal Electronics, High Tech Computer, Quanta
Computer, and Elektrobit to form the Mobile Internet Device Innovation Alliance (MIDIA). They are planning to make a low power device for less than US$500. With WiMax and Adobe's Apollo multimedia platform for offline Internet apps, and will be capable of running either Vista or Linux.

This is the next generation of PC which will replace the phone and PC that we have today.

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Nokia Beta Labs

Nokia has quietly open the doors to its Nokia Beta Labs.

Nokia Beta Labs is a site for early testing of Nokia applications that are not yet in wide distribution.

The current set of applications on Nokia Beta Labs include a few applications previously covered on e-series.org: Mobile Codes, Wellness Diary, Sports Tracker and Widsets.

Head over to the Nokia Beta Labs - try out some application.

American subscribers will prefer WiMAX

The analytical company In-Stat carried out a survey, which revealed that American subscribers prefer WiMAX services to cellular data or Wi-Fi. The survey was conducted with over 1200 respondents earlier this year. The analysts say that WiMAX’s ability to support services with notebook cards and USB-devices will become a reality this year. The combination of mobile and fixed capabilities will help WiMAX providers to differentiate broadband services from what is currently available.

Besides In-Stat reveled the following:

• Over 50% of respondents would change their current broadband provider for one that offers wireless with a home broadband service.
• Respondents' interest in cellular data transfer dropped when they learn the pricing.
• Top attributes used in choosing a wireless broadband provider, when not factoring in price, were availability and reliability.

Top 100 Australian Blogs

What I am not on the list ;)

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BlackBerry Down

The long-term ramifications of the outage could prove troubling for the maker of the popular smartphone..

By midmorning Eastern Time today most BlackBerry users in the Western Hemisphere found that the push e-mail service had recovered from the outage that began last night. The longer-term ramifications of the massive shutdown for the maker of the popular smartphone, however, could be broader and more troubling.

The facility that serves as a hub for RIM's North American traffic, routing messages between the roughly 8 million BlackBerry devices now in use and the various sources of email, from private corporate servers to web-based accounts like Yahoo and AOL.


Yahoo News

Itnews

Free Task Manager and Registry Editor for Windows Mobile 5.0 devices

DotFred, a developer at Buzznet has developed a free all in one task manager, registry editor and network utility for Windows Mobile 5.0 devices.

New tools added:
-Ping utility
-IP config
-Net Stats
-Registry Editor
-cut/copy/paste included
-reg file extension associated
-find returns all occurences
-import reg files
-export to reg files

New features added:
- Terminate process under CPU usage
- Terminate thread under Process/Details
- Allows a service to be started manually (so not started after a soft reset)
- Allows to disable/enable a notification

Qantas in-flight SMS and Email trial

The carrier first flagged plans to conduct the trial in August. Telstra, Panasonic Avionics and AeroMobile will be part of the exercise.

Qantas said passengers wanting to send or receive an SMS will need international roaming activated, and a GSM mobile phone. To send or receive e-mail messages, a GPRS-enabled device would do.

"We have asked our business travellers about the concept, [and] the overwhelming majority felt the service was a good idea, particularly e-mail access. This evaluation is the first step towards building a product which will support our customers' business and communication needs into the future," Lesley Grant, Qantas group general manager (Customer Product and Services), said in a statement

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How to Have a Business Conversation

In the course of climbing the corporate ladder, or of just managing the little corner of the world you occupy, you have to communicate with people. It's not always easy, but you have to do it.

Some of this communication amounts to simple conversation, and it's been dawning on me for a long time now that a great many young people don't know how to have one. In fact, a great many older people don't know how to have a conversation, either.

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Intel to launch Linux-powered mobile

Intel is developing its own take on the mini-tablet, with a new ultra-mobile PC platform to be announced at this week’s Intel Developer Forum in Beijing. The big surprise? It’s based on Linux.

Link to Zdnet

China Mobile Subscribers Surpass Total US Population

China Mobile, the world's largest mobile operator, recently announced that its subscriber base grew to 301 million. The per capita income of the Chinese subscribers is US$1700, no where near the US$44,000 in the United States." Though Chinese subscribers rely on pre-paid phone cards and pay around 80% less than Americans for mobile phone service, their typical investment of $10 per month represents 7% (or more) of their monthly salary. Many Chinese spend a greater percentage of monthly income on pre-paid phone cards than Americans spend on food. This says a lot about the perceived importance of telecommunications in that society.

This is one reason I think that the current ICT market is just a tip of the iceberg as the China market will dictate pricing to the rest of the world in the years to come.

Nokia Announces Open C SDK Plug-In Availability for S60 Devices

Available for download at www.forum.nokia.com/openc , the Open C SDK Plug-In announced today allows deployment of Open C projects on existing S60 3rd Edition devices, millions of which have already been shipped into the global marketplace. By end-2006, Nokia alone had cumulatively shipped nearly 85 million S60 devices and of the 49 different S60 device models currently in the marketplace, 20 are built on the latest S60 3rd Edition platform.

"By making the Open C SDK Plug-In available, Nokia is helping to greatly broaden the potential pool of developers who will be essential in creating compelling applications for the next generation of smartphone devices," said Lee Epting, vice president, Forum Nokia, Nokia's global developer program. "Because Open C libraries are built on open-source projects, developers who need to design and implement large application bases to run on several operating systems, will now find it easier to write portable code for Symbian OS based devices. The increase in developer productivity from Open C will drive exciting new opportunities for S60 application development."

Open C makes it possible for developers to implement business logic and other core components of an application without having to learn Symbian's proprietary C++ variant. In addition, Open C delivers to developers significant portions of three open source projects - OpenSSL, GNOME, and LIBZ - providing the S60 developer community access to middleware functionality that is shared by many important open source projects, including Apache and Firefox.

Palm developing own OS - again

Palm is to build its own handheld operating system, combining a Linux foundation with the regular Palm OS look and feel. Work is clearly progressing: devices equipped with the new OS are due later this year, the company's CEO, Ed Colligan, said this week.

If all this sounds familiar, it's because it's the approach PalmSource, the Palm OS development company later acquired by Japan's Access, adopted earlier this decade. It decided to base future incarnations of the Palm OS - versions 6.0 and onward - on a Linux core surmounted by the famliar Palm user interface.

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Where RSS is going.. Forward

Because of RSS ubiquity it is now a very attractive delivery medium for all kinds of content. However because the basic format is simple and primitive, there is no way to encode semantics without building an extension.

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Samsung UpStage

You see a phone that just says buy me, this is one.
Slim, Dual-Faced Form

The UpStage is the first product that's both a dedicated music player and a dedicated phone. And at only .37" slim, it's bound to pick up a ton of dedicated fans. Music (and Everything Else) Player You can load up the UpStage with music from your PC or downloads from the Sprint Music StoreSM - then listen to it all through the stereo speaker or a stereo Bluetooth headset. Then there's a big, beautiful, 262,000-color display so you can watch music videos or Sprint TVSM. Just hit "play." 1.3 Megapixel Camera The same beautiful display that lets you enjoy music videos can also display your photos. The UpStage has a sweet 1.3 megapixel camera and camcorder so you'll never miss a photo op again. Stereo Bluetooth® Wireless Technology Connecting to Bluetooth-enabled headsets, handsfree car systems and compatible printers sounds good, doesn't it? Well, connecting to your music with a stereo Bluetooth headset sounds even better.

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