Wireless Archive

According to N4BB.com, internal documents from RIM have been leaked, revealing the screen sizes and form factors of two phones planned for commercial release.

Engadget has something that could, if you squint, be regarded as a hands-on of BlackBerry 10. "We finally got a chance to cut through the smoke and mirrors of the company's polished PowerPoint presentations to get some honest-to-goodness, up-close and personal time testing the software." This is all they seem to be confident enough to show. Not a good sign for RIM. Not good at all.

"One of the casualties of Nokia's latest cuts is Meltemi, the company's effort to create a new Linux-based operating system for low-end smartphones. The project was aimed at offering smartphones at prices that neither Android or Windows Phone could easily reach, but also would have required Nokia to try to woo developers for yet another operating system." I've said it before and I'll say it again: it's Elop's job to make Nokia as miserable as possible, so that when Microsoft finally makes its move, it can be seen a saviour rather than a predator. Everything that can be cut has to be cut to dive the price down.

And the burning platform is still, uhm, burning. "Chief Executive Stephen Elop is placing hopes of a turnaround on a new range of smartphones called Lumia, which use largely untried Microsoft software. But Lumia sales have so far been slow, disappointing investors." It's a shame to see a once proud company in such a downward spiral, but alas, it's the way of business. If you get complacent - as Nokia had gotten - you will fail.

Bloomberg: "Microsoft, which has tightly controlled the number of ARM-based devices it is supporting at first to ensure quality, opted not to work with HTC after initial discussions with the company, said two people familiar with the matter. The world's largest software maker decided HTC didn't have the sales volume needed and had less tablet experience than some of the other vendors it could choose to work with for the first round of devices, the people said." HTC was the first company to build a Microsoft-powered smartphone. Now, they're not allowed to build Windows 8 tablets.

If you're a Palm fan, you might want to look away - or not. Chris Ziegler has written a fantastic article on the short rise and eventual demise of webOS, and with it, Palm. I'm generally not a fan of companies, but I have my exceptions - and Palm is one of them. Correction - Palm was one of them.

Struggling RIM will layoff up to 2,000 employees in an attempt to right itself while it pins its hopes on the Blackberry 10. Wireless industry analyst Peter Misek of Jefferies & Company opines: "We maintain that the only path for RIM is to partner with someone, to be acquired, or to turn themselves into a software company, and I think that path with become very clear to the management team by the end of the year."

"Two weeks ago, Steve Wozniak made a public call for Apple to open its platforms for those who wish to tinker, tweak and innovate with their internals. EFF supports Wozniak's position: while Apple's products have many virtues, they are marred by an ugly set of restrictions on what users and programmers can do with them. This is most especially true of iOS, though other Apple products sometimes suffer in the same way. In this article we will delve into the kinds of restrictions that Apple, phone companies, and Microsoft have been imposing on mobile computers; the excuses these companies make when they impose these restrictions; the dangers this is creating for open innovation; why Apple in particular should lead the way in fixing this mess. We also propose a bill of rights that need to be secured for people who are purchasing smartphones and other pocket computers."

"Intel has released the long awaited x86 system image of Ice Cream Sandwich for the Android SDK and emulator. This will allow the Android emulator (long plagued with slow and buggy performance) to run at native speed on computers using the Intel x86 architecture."

Smartphones have become the preferred computer of the masses. Sales surpassed those of personal computers in 2010, having grown over 50% per year for several years. Nearly 500 million smartphones shipped in 2011. This radically shifts the terrain in the consumer operating system competition that was, for years, firmly decided in favor of Windows. This article analyzes the New OS Wars.

So, the new HTC phones are facing delays in the US, and they now ship with a slightly modified US-specific Android build which removes data tapping and sports an altered app associations screen to avoid Apple's patents. This is step one. Step two is companies avoiding the litigious and anti-consumer messes that are the US and German markets altogether. Clearly, IP laws are working to the benefit of the consumer and the market as a whole. Great work guys.

An interesting study has been making the rounds across the web these past 24 hours. The creators of OpenSignalMaps have been logging which new devices download their product, and they've collected data on 681900 devices. The results are... Diverse.

Baidu, the Chinese search engine, will launch its own smartphone operating system next week, according to Reuters. It's an Android fork, but with all the backend services handled by Baidu, obviously. The first leaked shots of a supposed device look remarkably like a Nokia Lumia - but not bad, really.

This is fun. The number one iOS carrier duking it out with the company behind the world's most popular smartphone operating system. Last month, Google's lead for the Android Open Source Project, Jean-Baptiste Queru, more or less blamed carriers (see comments) for Android's upgrade woes. Yesterday, AT&T's CEO Randall Stephenson retaliated, blaming Google for the delays. And yes, Google already responded to that, too.