Nokia CTO Rick Green About the Future of Symbian, MeeGo and QT

"Nokia Conversations caught up with Nokia's CTO Rick Green at this years Mobile World Congress being held in Barcelona and asked him about the future of Symbian, MeeGo and Qt, as you all know a radical change is coming to Nokia's strategy soon with the announcement of the new partnership with Microsoft, on Friday. A partnership that has been leaving Symbian and MeeGo users and developers alike with mixed feelings as to the future of these two OSs"

Marvell Announces Free Development Platform for Mobile Devices

"At the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, chip manufacturer Marvell has announced the free Kinoma development platform . This will reportedly enable developers to write applications for a range of mobile devices with various different operating systems. The platform will be offered under an open source licence in the future to "encourage broad industry adoption" says Marvell."

CrunchBang Linux Review

"A lot of modern Linux distributions created with desktop users in mind go out of their way to be user friendly. Ubuntu, Mint, openSUSE, Fedora - and many more. It is a sign of how desktop Linux has matured that even non-techy types can get a fully featured and easy-to-use open source operating system up and running in not much time at all. The creators of CrunchBang Linux, however, haven't quite gone in the same direction."

AT&T Chief Wants Cross-Platform Mobile App Sales

"AT&T chief Randall Stephenson in an event at Mobile World Congress on Tuesday called for a system that let users keep app ownership across platforms . He argued it was frustrating that buying an app on one platform didn't give you the rights to the app on another. He saw solutions such as the Wholesale Applications Community (WAC) or HTML5 as being better models, although few phones actually support WAC or use HTML5 in a major way for apps."

IE9/Firefox4/Chrome10 to Be Released Together ?

In the description of this session of SXSW 2011: Voices From The HTML5 Trenches: Browser Wars IV, it says: "Every major browser vendor -- Apple, Opera, IE, Chrome, and Firefox -- will have a significant browser release by SxSW 2011." IE team has confirmed it by an annouchment, now we can wait and see if IE9, Firefox 4, Chrome 10, Opera Mini 6 for Tablets and Safari (???) will be released all together.

Refreshed DisplayPort Interface Coming to Tablets and All-in-Ones by 2012

"Yesterday, Video Electronics Standards Association (VESA), the organization behind several display interfaces, has refreshed the DisplayPort Embedded standard, also known as eDP for short. The updated standard now includes a new Panel Self-Refresh feature that was developed to save system power and further extend battery life in portable PC systems. This was detailed to us during CES when we visited the DisplayPort booth at CES."

GPL-like Licenses Explicitly Banned from WP7 Marketplace

Well, well, well. We all know Apple's App Store policies are incompatible with the GPL, and as such, software using this license can't be distributed in the App Store. So, what about Microsoft's Windows Phone 7 Marketplace? Well, whereas the App Store doesn't specifically mention the GPL (Apple's terms are simply incompatible), Microsoft drops the pretence and simply bans GPL and GPL-esque licenses outright.

Samsung Unveils New Improved Bada 2.0 Smartphone Platform

"Samsung Electronics has announced the bada 2.0 smartphone platform with support for near field communication (NFC), HTML5, the Wholesale Applications Community, multitasking and voice recognition. According to Samsung, bada 2.0 also comes with a new and improved software development kit (SDK) that opens up the platform to more developers working across different PC operating systems."

Google’s Android Roadmap: New Clues Emerge

"Here in the Android-watching world, the air has smelled of uncertainty for quite some time. Ever since Google announced Android Honeycomb, the tablet-optimized edition of its mobile OS, there's been no shortage of questions about the platform's future and the direction in which it's headed Thanks to some revelations made at this week's Mobile World Congress, we're finally getting some firm answers ."

RIP Symbian: In Memoriam of a Mid-End Phone OS

So the writing is on the wall. In a very bold move, Nokia's new CEO, Stephen Elop, has decided to fully ditch Nokia's migration plan for the past few years and have the company embrace his former employer's operating system, Windows Phone 7, instead. This noticeably implied getting rid of two competitors, Symbian and the upcoming MeeGo, which were both put on the road to slow death. This article aims at saying goodbye to an old citizen of the mobile space who's now heading to its grave: Symbian. (Warning: Rant ahead)

The Next Brick to Decorate Your Wall: iOS 3.x Devices

Well, it might be safe to say that Apple's own engineers stopped testing their Apple apps with 3.x iOS devices, and have created bugs that make these apps unusable. This is to be somewhat expected, Apple has a track record of not-so-great backwards compatibility (on the Mac), but what we also expected was to not get these broken updates forced to us. It's one thing to stop updating the firmware of older iOS models, and another thing breaking them.

Google Counters Apple Subscriptions with More Flexible One Pass

"Hot on the heels of Apple's subscription service announcement, Google has lifted the curtain on its own offering that will allow publishers to set a price for recurring content delivered via your Google login. The payment system is called 'One Pass', and it allows publishers to offer not only subscriptions, but also metered access, 'freemium' content, and even individual articles. So far, One Pass seems more flexible than Apple's offering, and the company will likely take a much smaller cut from publishers than Apple will."