Wireless Archive

PureMobile sent over the Nokia E75, one of Nokia's latest business phones. Let's see how the phone stacks up compared to the rest of Symbian S60 3.x phones we have around.

Finally, the Palm Pre has been announced for European markets. The Pre will arrive via Telefonica to some European countries (O2 in the UK/Ireland/Germany, and Movistar in Spain) before the end of the year. This Pre will obviously be GSM/HSDPA variant of Palm's saviour (at least, it hopes so).

The stream of news around the Palm Pre and its webOS just keeps on flowing. Since Palm's survival more or less depends on the success of the Pre and any possible future webOS phones, it's very interesting to know just how well the Pre is selling. According to an analyst, Palm has already sold 370000 Pre phones in May and June; he also stated that the company will ship 1 million phones to Sprint in the first quarter of production. Not bad. We've also got news on the GSM version of the Pre.

Apple, LG, Motorola, NEC, Nokia, Qualcomm, Research in Motion, Samsung, Sony Ericsson, and Texas Instruments have agreed to standardise their smartphone chargers in Europe using micro-USB. "The European Commission announced today that 10 mobile phone producers, which represent some 90 percent of the mobile phone market in the European Union, have signed a voluntary agreement to use standardized chargers for mobile phones using a micro-USB connector. The agreement addresses the EC's concern that mobile phone chargers create needless electronic waste." A single charger for everything! It almost brings tears to my eyes. Honestly. Even Apple. There it is. The tear.

Back when we were still using the old PalmOS, Palm licensed its operating to other manufacturers, such as Sony with its Clie devices. As it turns out, the company might also license its new webOS to other device makers. They haven't yet made any decision about it, but Palm CFO Douglas Jeffries said that for Palm, "it's not a religious issue". What do y'all think? Good idea? Bad idea? In related news, here's a Sprint ad for the Pre.

A native application development kit has been released for Android developers, offering a way to create certain kinds of high-performing applications for handsets running the Google platform. Android applications run through the Dalvik virtual machine, which emulates a Java virtual machine. On Thursday, the Android Native Development Kit (NDK) was released, allowing coders to create parts of their Android 1.5 applications outside Dalvik, using native-code languages such as C and C++.

We've been talking an awful lot about the Palm Pre and iPhone lately, but what about Android? Sure, we've mentioned Android a number of times when it comes to netbooks, but what about phones, you know, what Android is designed for? Well, today, HTC annoucned its 3rd Android phone, the HTC Hero. This is the first to include a custom UI, as well as Flash 10 right out of the box.

To add to the amounting set of expected Android phones in coming time, Garmin has announced that they will stop making devices with their own operating system and instead switch to solely Android- and Windows Mobile-powered phones. They expect to release their first Android device by the end of 2009.

The Palm pre has been out and about for a while now, so stories and items about what it can do are popping up all over the place. One thing is becoming quite clear already: the Pre and its WebOS are quite hacker-friendly, and hackers have already found all sorts of ways to extend the device's functionality.

InfoWorld's Bill Snyder questions whether AT&T's jockeying on tethering and MMS may signal iPhone pricing surcharges to come. After all, as Apple's exclusive U.S. partner, Ma Bell should have plenty of insight into upcoming iPhone features and revenue opportunities. Yet AT&T was very conspicuous in its absence from the list of providers who will support tethering and MMS at Tuesday's launch of the new iPhone at WWDC, and by Wednesday, it was backpedaling furiously, saying it will offer both services -- later in the year. Certainly, the exclusive arrangement between the companies is proving to be an ugly roadblock to Apple's iPhone vision. But Snyder thinks it may go deeper than that: "My best guess is that we'll see horrendous pricing surcharges for tethering and MMS, on top of the already expensive data and voice charges iPhone users pay. I don't think AT&T execs wanted to stand up at WWDC and announce that."

Late last night, The Windows Mobile team made the Windows Mobile 6.5 Developer Tool Kit available, which is not a standalone Software Development Kit, but an add-on component for the Windows Mobile 6 SDK. The Toolkit includes emulator images, new touch and gesture APIs, and code samples for developing software for Windows Mobile 6.5.

The Palm Pre will hit the stores on Saturday, June 6, and it has a very important task to fulfil. Contrary to what the sensationlist media want you to believe, that task is not to dethrone the iPhone, but to save a flailing company. Palm requires for its very survival that the Pre and its brand-new operating system webOS is a success. CNet has taken the Palm Pre through its paces, and despite some flaws, they were quite pleased, especially on the software front. Update: Another review, from Engadget: "To put it simply, the Pre is a great phone, and we don't feel any hesitation saying that."

Looking at the amount of ex-Apple people working at Palm, this shouldn't be a surprise: the Palm Pre works with iTunes on the Mac (not Windows), out-of-the-box. You can plug it, and the iTunes Store will treat as any iPod or iPhone. It obviously can't handle iPhone applications, and songs encumbered with Apple's DRM won't work either, but for the rest you're on your merry way. Apple didn't want to comment on this little tidbit.

Here at OSNews we believe that in many ways the future of computing is mobile. It's also a pretty exciting field, since it's been so dynamic over the past ten years, with platforms rising and falling, and no one vendor ever rising to dominate. But this "wild west" market can be a real source of anxiety for mobile-oriented software developers, who have to gamble on which platform to support, or go to the extra effort of placing multiple bets. Maybe it's not a huge problem for hobbyists or developers of simplistic apps, but as the devices get more powerful, it's enabling the development of more powerful apps. If only these developers could develop a sophisticated mobile app that could be deployed on all the major mobile platforms. Now they can. There's an open mobile framework called Rhodes that allows developers to write an app that will deploy on iPhone, BlackBerry, Windows Mobile, Symbian and Android.