Wireless Archive

InfoWorld's JR Raphael provides an in-depth comparison of Android productivity suites, including DataViz's Documents to Go, MobiSystems' OfficeSuite Pro, Quickoffice Connect Mobile Suite, ThinkFree Office Mobile, and the Google Docs mobile Web app. Each tool is vetted for word processing, spreadsheet editing, and presentation management. Raphael also examines additional tools for accomplishing other basic office tasks, such as dealing with PDFs and Photoshop files, piecing together the best overall package for your Android smartphone at work.

Two bits of news from Palm: first, the TouchPad will launch in June. Second, webOS for PCs will see its first beta at the end of the year, and will run... Inside a browser. This means we now have an idea of what Palm wants - no dual boot, but something that runs inside Windows. My guess is that webOS applications will eventually just run inside Windows like everything else.

Although the phone market is quite healthy at the moment, some parts of it are less healthy than others. In particular, the situation in the mid-end range isn't particularly stellar. The stagnation and scheduled death of Symbian and Blackberry OS, while their successors seem to mostly target the high-end market, only leaves Samsung's bada as a healthy mid-end phone OS at the moment. In this article series, I'm going to have an in-depth look at this OS, and see how well it performs in practice on some mid-end hardware which it has been designed to power, the Wave 533.

Symbian might have been taking a beating over the past few months, but that doesn't mean the world's most popular smartphone platform (I doubt the installed base hase been overtaken by Android yet, although I might be mistaken) is just going to sit idly by. While Nokia gets its first Windows Phone 7 devices ready, work on Symbian^3 continues, and the Dutch (yeahaw!) product manager for Nokia Benelux has confirmed that a massive overhaul of the platform will be pushed to phones later this year .

HP recently posted new videos of their developer sessions at Mobile World Congress. As it turns out they aren't just interesting for developers - in particular, Part 3 offers a glimpse of the TouchPad UI that's a bit more in-depth than what we've seen so far. For developers, there's also an overview of the development environment(s) (part 4) and an introduction to the new SDK "Enyo" (part 5).

"Despite Nokia's decision to partner up with Microsoft and introduce a new ecosystem to the mobile industry, it was announced by Nokia's CTO Rich Green at last months Mobile World Congress during his keynote speech at the Developer's day workshop, that Nokia will still be launching a new MeeGo device this year. Green went on to give reassurances that Nokia will continue to be committed to the MeeGo, Symbian, Qt and S40 platforms and their future in Nokia's three year ecosystem vision."

"Now that the dust has settled after Stephen Elop's big announcement on the 11th February 2011, many have come to realise that actually Nokia's move towards a a new Ecosystem is not as bad as what they thought. But what does all this mean for the Nokia Developers? When the proposed partnership with Microsoft was announced, many felt betrayed and worried about their future, but after having heard and assisted a number of workshops at the Nokia Developer Day at this years Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, earlier this month, their outlook towards the new ecosystem has taken a 180 degree turn and are now looking at the proposed partnership with a lot more enthusiasm, recognising the potential it will bring them in the coming months."

Rafe Blandford, from All About Symbian/Al About MeeGo, has published what is most likely the most complete and in-depth analysis of the Nokia/Microsoft deal, taking just about everything into account. His conclusion? You may not expect it considering the sites he works for, but he concludes that partnering with Microsoft was the best (i.e., least bad) choice. "So in assessing the relative risks and potential return between the two strategies, my opinion is that by following the 'go it alone strategy' Nokia would see a continued gradual decline in the face of intense competition and a less competitive surrounding ecosystem. By contrast, partnering with Microsoft offers Nokia the opportunity, although not the guarantee, to reverse its recent decline and potentially return to its dominant position in mobile."

"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."

The man, the legend: a main developer of the BeOS. Did the App Server, Interface Kit, Application Kit. These days, Benoit Schillings does something else entirely: he's currently the chief technology officer at Myriad, where he and his team is working on Alien Dalvik. Now that I know he's the one leading this team, I know for sure we've got something special here.

"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."

"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 ."

"There's just one problem, though: the 'nine young investors' don't really exist - according to the last tweet on the @NokiaPlanB Twitter account, it was all a hoax perpetuated by 'one very bored engineer who really likes his iPhone'. Ouch."

"Motorola is apparently sticking to its Android guns for the foreseeable future. Not in its future? Microsoft's Windows Phone 7. Christy Wyatt, corporate vice president of software and services for Motorola, laid it out quite plainly for the press at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona this week. 'I don't envision us using Microsoft,' she said. 'I would never say never but it's not something we're entertaining now. We're the only vendor who is 100% Android.'"