Wireless Archive

InfoWorld's Galen Gruman chucked his laptop in favor of an iPhone to see how far the iPhone could take him as his sole work device for a month. The experiment, which mirrors a similar stint spent working solely on a BlackBerry Bold for a month, shows both the promise and limitations of pocket-based business computing.

It appears that UMPC-maker OQO is in the process of going under. "Like so many other companies that hadn't quite hit their stride by the time the economic downturn swept in last year, OQO is now apparently beset by financial difficulties that are so severe that it has shut off all support service and closed its phone lines."

Someone at Nokia has leaked information about the plans to ship Maemo phones, eventual interest in replacing S60 with Maemo, etc. The same article links to a screesnhot of the future Qt-based "Harmattan" platform. It has not been confirmed whether the screenshot is real or not.

Android, a complete operating environment based upon the Linux V2.6 kernel, promises to be a market-moving open source platform that will be useful well beyond cell phones. In this article, learn about the Android platform and how it can be used for mobile and nonmobile applications, then build your first Android application. This simple first app you build will get you started quickly, but beleive me, you'll want to do more after that.

With the success of the Kindle I and Kindle II still fresh in its memory, Amazon decided to take its line of e-ink digital ebook readers to the next level with the newly announced Kindle DX. The Kindle DX is basically a supersized Kindle II, but it comes with a number of interesting improvements.

"Alone in a room in his home in Bonn, Germany, Friedhelm Hillebrand sat at his typewriter, tapping out random sentences and questions on a sheet of paper. As he went along, Hillebrand counted the number of letters, numbers, punctuation marks and spaces on the page. Each blurb ran on for a line or two and nearly always clocked in under 160 characters. That became Hillebrand's magic number - and set the standard for one of today's most popular forms of digital communication: text messaging."

The Symbian Foundation is working to ensure that it provides the shortest path for mobile developers not only to develop applications, but to go from application development to making money on the applications they build. To that end, the foundation will launch an "application inventory" where developers will not be charged a fee or percentage to distribute their applications via the foundation's channel.

"In a recent report, AdMob said growth in requests from devices running the Android and iPhone operating systems continued to outpace other platforms in March, despite the relatively limited number of devices in the market. The HTC Dream (Google G1) generated 72 million requests, giving it a 2 percent share of the overall U.S. market in March."

"Some chaps at Symbian with way too much time on their hands have compiled the current version of the OS onto an Intel Atom processor - proving that you don't have to follow the ARM road to Symbian nirvana. The chaps concerned work for 'S60 in Symbian Customer Operations' and did the port to see if it would work, and if anyone would take an interest. The port is to an Atom reference board from Intel, but demonstrates that Symbian could probably run on a netbook if anyone wanted such a thing."

Many of the major mobile operating systems today are derived from desktop variants, leaving them with excess bagage that only hinders their functioning in a mobile environment. A group of researchers at Stanford University are building a mobile operating system from the ground up, taking various things into account that others do not. The biggest focus of the project is power management, and it's got some pretty interesting ideas in that area.

"OpenMoko, the company behind the open source FreeRunner handset, is giving up on creating a new version in favour of fixing the old one and working on a new secret project. In a presentation at OpenExpo in Bern, the OpenMoko CEO, Sean Moss-Pultz, told delegates that development on the new handset - GTA03 - would be postponed while the FreeRunner is fixed and the company focuses on 'Project B'. Staff levels are to be cut, though it seems some specialists have already left the company."

After a bit of a long pause, Palm has fed the media with some more details on its upcoming lifesaver, the Palm Pre smartphone with its webOS. Even though Palm didn't give a launch date or pricing information, it did show us a number of third party applications. And there was also something for those of you who still swear by PalmOS Garnet: a fully functional PalmOS emulator for the Pre. There's also some news on the Mojo SDK.

Engadget's recent piece, "Mobile OS shootout", provides a relatively thorough comparison of current smartphone platforms and what they have going for them, mostly from a consumer gadget hound's point of view. They provide a bunch of nice comparative tables, among them the table "Third Party Development". From this table we learn that each platform has its own SDK, whereby some of the apps available are considered "native" - a distinction most non-developers won't be able to grok, since it depends on an understanding of runtime environments, etc. It's hard to say exactly who this table is targeting, actually; the developer or the end-user that the rest of the article seems to target. Let's just investigate some of the assumptions it makes.

With the mobile operating system market heating up with the upcoming launch of Palm's webOS and version 3.0 of the iPhone's operating system, it pays to take a good look at how the various mobile platforms compare to one another. This is exactly what Engadget has done.