Wireless Archive

PureMobile sent us in the Nokia N79 for a quick spin. This is one of the latest Symbian phones out there, running the latest non-touchscreen version of the S60 operating environment, version 3.2.

"They won't say when it'll arrive and they won't say how much it'll cost, but representatives from Palm and Sprint on Thursday were willing to talk about stuff like service plans for the wildly anticipated (though not anytime soon) Palm Pre. It'll be the Everything plans for would-be Pre users: The available individual service plans, according to company officials will be for 400 minutes, 900 minutes, and the $100 all-you-can-eat Simply Everything option. For families, the options are 1500 minutes, 3000 minutes or (again) Simply Everything for $190."

Following in the footsteps of Apple and Google, Research in Motion is planning to open an online store for its popular Blackberry smartphone. The store, dubbed Blackberry App World, aims to be a "convenient location for BlackBerry owners to download 'games, social networks, personal productivity applications and so much more.'" App World will feature freeware apps along with for-pay apps. The pricing for applications will start at free then jump to $2.99 at the low end and $999.99 on the high end. At the moment Blackberry App World is only open to developers, but there is a sign up page for users who want to be notified of when App World goes live for the public.

The Palm Pre made some serious splashes earlier this year when it was announced at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. It was promised the device would ship in the first half of 2009, and despite rumours the Pre was going to be delayed, Palm has now officially stated (the page break hides the fact that those are two separate links) that the Pre is still on track for H1 of 2009. The marketing machine is also ramping up.

Under pressure from popular phones from Apple and Research In Motion, Microsoft hopes it has put in place changes that will help it meet that mobile competition faster, said CEO Steve Ballmer on Wednesday. "There are opportunities for us to accelerate our execution in this area," he said. "We've done a lot of work to make sure we have a team that will be able to accelerate it." Microsoft, which recently said that a Windows Mobile software update will come later this year, has been criticized for failing to improve its platform to better compete with the iPhone and other new touch screen phones.

This series of articles (3) shows how to build a global positioning system (GPS)-aware application using the Linux-based Nokia N810 Internet Tablet and its built-in GPS receiver. You will find that developing for the Nokia N810 is a real joy. The developer tools and community forums provide a wealth of resources to get the job done, as well as these articles.

Oh, batteries -- technology's weakest link. Back when we mostly needed them to run pocket calculators and wristwatches, things were good. The future was now, and the world was electrical. Now that the world really is electrical, and gadgets the size of those pocket calculators are sporting the computing power of yesterdays Crays, we're in trouble. Please excuse the fanboyism, but I'm a big fan of the iPhone, for all its flaws. With all battery-powered computing devices, you have to make some tradeoffs between processor power and battery life, but I think Apple did a pretty good job. Nevertheless, if you sit down for a protracted web browsing session, the combination of the screen and the radio really drain that battery. After an hour, you're pretty much dead. What to do?

Palm has released the first chapter of a book that details its new webOS. It answers some of the questions people had about developing applications for the new platform. "You can think of webOS applications as native applications, but built from the same standard HTML, CSS and JavaScript that you'd use to develop web applications. Palm has extended the standard web development environment through a JavaScript framework that gives standardized UI widgets, and access to selected device hardware and services. The user experience is optimized for launching and managing multiple applications at once. WebOS is designed around multi-tasking, and makes it utterly simple to run background applications, to switch between applications in a single step, and to easily handle interruptions and events without losing context." Ars has more.

This week at Mobile World Congress Microsoft will release a free technology preview of Microsoft Recite. Microsoft Recite runs on Windows Mobile 6.0 or higher and allows the user to record voice notes and then store, search and retrieve information from them by simply speaking a word that they want to search for.

The Palm Pre caused a bit of a stir when it was first announced, but after that, few details have made their way onto the web about the device that needs to more or less save Palm. At the Thomas Wiesel Technology and Telecom Conference in San Francisco, Palm CEO Ed Colligan gave out some more details on the Pre, while also downplaying the possibility of a legal spat between Apple and Palm.

Microsoft has lately been a bit sluggish with producing its mobile branch of Windows, and it's about time that they make some headway if they hope at all to compete with the market today. Though Microsoft isn't talking, a sneaker over at ZDNet says via her sources that Windows Mobile 6.5 will be shipping September of 2009 and 7.0 in April of 2010 (not to mention to testers in November of '09). Will Windows Mobile be able to keep up with the fast-paced mobile market of today? That, of course, is for the consumers to decide.

Lim Ding Wen, a fourth grader in Singapore, has taken up writing applications for Apple's all-popular iPhone, his latest of which is called "Doodle Kids," aptly named for its doodling or painting capabilities. He began his computer experience at the ripe age of two and has a good twenty programming projects under his belt. He is fluent in six programming languages. His father also writes iPhone apps, and they often compare statistics to see whose is more popular-- as it is, Lim's app has over 4,000 downloads. Do you think perhaps we could be calling him "King Ding" in thirty years when he's taken over the digital world?

"Has the era of the 1GHz smartphone arrived? It has for Toshiba, which has tapped Qualcomm's new Snapdragon silicon. The Toshiba TG01 Windows Mobile phone was unveiled Tuesday, according to reports. Based on Windows Mobile 6.1, it is designed to take on the iPhone 3G. Only 9.9mm thick, it uses a 4.1-inch WVGA 800 x 480 384k pixel resistive touch screen and comes with support for 3G HSPA, Wi-Fi, GPS and assisted-GPS. The TG01 is slated to be available in Europe this summer. The price, at this time, has not been disclosed (Acer and Asus are also expected to bring out Snapdragon-based products)."

"Next Monday, Amazon will likely unveil the next version of its Kindle e-book reader at a press conference in New York. But how did the gadget do last year before it sold out in November? Pretty well! Via a research note, Citi analyst Mark Mahaney now thinks Amazon sold 500,000 Kindles last year, more than his previous estimate of 380,000 (and if Amazon hadn't run out of Kindles in November, it could have potentially sold 750,000, Mahaney estimates). Mahaney now thinks Amazon's all-in Kindle revenue could reach $1.4 billion in 2010, or an impressive 4% of Amazon's revenue that year. This assumes that Amazon will sell 1 million Kindles in 2009 and 3.5 million in 2010; that Kindle owners buy one book per month, etc. It's an admittedly rough estimate, but not necessarily an unbelievable one."