Archive for the ‘Mobile’ Category

Huh? Motorola rumored to be planning movie download service for its mobile devices

by Daniel Langendorf

April 25th, 2008 | Posted in Mobile | CommentsNo Comments

Note to Motorola: Forget about the movies. Concentrate on getting cool new phones on the market. Otherwise, the movies won’t matter.

According to UK magazine New Media Age (via MocoNews and Ars Technica), troubled Motorola is rumored to be planning a movie service for its mobile devices. So far, only Paramount has licensed content to Motorola, but the phone maker is supposedly working out deals with other studios.

There are few details: no name for the service, no pricing, no idea if movies are for rent or purchase or both, if there is any DRM in place (we suspect so), or an official release date. The service may be available by the end of May.

Users will not be able to download movies directly to their phones. They’ll have to download flicks first to their PCs and then sync, or “sideload”, the content to their mobile devices. This doesn’t sound very inventive to us.

In fact, it sounds downright weird, all things considered. Does Motorola really think that offering a movie service that’s a semi-hassle to manage will entice more people to buy their phones? Is this the way Motorola plans to erase that $1.2 billion operating loss last year, or get investors excited when the company splits its mobile division from the rest of the company?

Our advice: Worry about getting cool new phones on the market to compete with Nokia, Apple, Samsung, LG, and the highly-anticipated Google-powered Android phones. Otherwise, Motorola has bigger problems than the latest Hollywood releases.

Analysts: 3G iPhone to be announced June 9. Why should we care?

by Daniel Langendorf

April 24th, 2008 | Posted in Mobile | Comments1 Comment

att 3gIn a completely shocking bit of news, Citi analysts Richard Gardner and Yeechang Lee wrote today that the 3G iPhone will be announced most likely on June 9, the first day of Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference.

Isn’t that pretty much what every analyst and Apple fanboy blogger has been predicting, give or take a week?

And for the record, announced is different than available. Will the 3G iPhone be available for purchase in June?

Should we care?

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The Mobile Industry Wants You! (to tell them what you want in a cell phone)

by Daniel Langendorf

April 23rd, 2008 | Posted in Mobile | CommentsNo Comments

mobile industry wants youSomething is going on here. Why does the mobile industry want us, the consumer, to develop its phones for them?

At the Wireless Innovations 2008 conference today in Redwood City, Calif., panelists predicted “radical changes to what customers expect and demand,” according to a Dow Jones report.

T-Mobile reps said its first Google-powered Android phone, due out in the fourth quarter, will be tailored to the consumer, and at the same time the consumer will tell the carriers what they want their mobile devices to do.

This will lead to an “avalanche” of innovation from consumers, panelists said.

As the Dow Jones report notes, “The time is ripe for innovators and start-ups to deliver what consumers want in new, possibly lucrative ways.”

At least four household-name companies are asking customers and third-party developers for input — Google, Apple, Nokia, and LG — and two of them (Apple and Nokia) are believed to have their acts together in the mobile space.

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Microsoft's "Mesh" wants to be your digital hub

by Steve O'Hear

April 23rd, 2008 | Posted in Mobile, Other | CommentsNo Comments

Microsoft's Yesterday, Microsoft unveiled its much rumored “Mesh” platform, a service designed to be the hub of our digital lifestyles: “Imagine all your devices—PCs, and soon Macs and mobile phones—working together to give you anywhere access to the information you care about”.

Mesh – currently in limited Beta – “synchronizes data across multiple devices (currently just Windows computers, but theoretically it will extend to mobile and other devices in the future) as well as to a web desktop that exists in the cloud”, writes Josh Catone over at our sister blog ReadWriteWeb. The service also has a social aspect too, enabling collaboration and sharing. “It can sync data across devices used by a single user, as well as create shared spaces for multiple users”.

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Apple patent for real-time IM on iPhone hints at what's really to come

by Daniel Langendorf

April 22nd, 2008 | Posted in Mobile | Comments1 Comment

iphone patentFrom Day 1 of the iPhone’s existence, users have clamored for a real-time instant message client like iChat. Instead, they’ve been given a sub-par intermediate solution — SMS through the exclusive iPhone carrier network, AT&T.

When Apple announced its software developers kit (SDK) will be available for third-party application development in June, those who covet an iPhone IM client rejoiced, crossing and recrossing their fingers in hope.

On Tuesday, AppleInsider noted that Apple applied for a patent last August on a universal interface for a real-time chat service on the iPhone. The patent was recently published in March.

The patent details what the IM client would look like and how it would behave on the iPhone. Judging by images that accompany the patent, IM will look like the current SMS program and also be a bit iChat-esque.

When I heard of the patent, I wondered why Apple just didn’t wait for others to develop their own third-party IM clients — AOL for AIM, Google for Gtalk, Yahoo! for Messenger, and others. The answers I came up with were:

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Sony BMG joins Nokia's all-you-can-eat music service

by Steve O'Hear

April 22nd, 2008 | Posted in Audio, Mobile | Comments1 Comment

Two down, two to go

Sony BMG signs on to Nokia's all-you-can-eat music serviceSony BMG today became the second major label to sign up to Nokia’s ‘Comes With Music’ service, whereby customers who buy a supported handset will get a year of unlimited access to “millions of tracks”. When Nokia first unveiled its all-you-can-eat music offering last December, Universal Music was the sole partner, a natural fit considering that the label has been busy touting its own flat-rate plan known as Total Music. However, the two remaining majors, EMI and Times Warner, have yet to commit to Nokia’s scheme.

The way ‘Comes With Music’ will work is as follows: Consumers who buy a supported Nokia device will have a year of access to Universal Music and Sony BMG’s music catalog, whereby they’ll be able to download tracks to both their mobile handset and Windows PC through the Nokia Music Store. After the year is up, they get to keep any downloaded tracks. To continue accessing new music, however, users are given “a number of attractive options” — aside from purchasing a new ‘Comes With Music’ device and starting another 12 month cycle, they can purchase tracks (download to-own) from the Nokia Music Store, or move on to a Nokia “unlimited access” subscription plan a la Rhapsody.

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Google says it has received 1,788 entries for Android challenge; not everybody is happy

by Daniel Langendorf

April 18th, 2008 | Posted in Mobile | Comments1 Comment

android dudeIt’s great that developers for Google’s mobile operating system Android have “risen to the challenge,” as a Google-ite said on the Android Developers Blog late Thursday. Google has received nearly 1,800 submissions from 70 countries for its Android Developer Challenge.

But at least one developer we know has ditched Android for the time being because his investors are demanding results, and so far he cannot deliver an Android solution in tandem with actual working hardware.

Peter Wojtowicz, the mastermind behind the Wi-Fi Army mobile game, announced early this year that his team would be developing the revolutionary game in Android, which generated a lot of interest from gaming, mobile, and Android blogs around the world.

Because Wi-Fi Army is cutting edge, combining a cell phone’s camera with Wi-Fi, bluetooth, location-based service, a back-end server architecture, and a slew of other complexities, investors interested in supporting his team have demanded proof-of-concept results that Wojtowicz cannot deliver with actual working Gphones. Adding to the frustration, Wojtowicz is often delayed when one Android SDK release isn’t compatible with an older one, forcing the team to lose time backtracking.

Time is something Wojtowicz doesn’t have as he — and others — are racing to get their next-generation games to market as quickly as possible. For the time being, Wojtowicz’s team is developing Wi-Fi Army simultaneously in Microsoft’s Windows Mobile and Symbian; he expects to start work on the iPhone when Apple releases the SDK in June.

“It would be a lot easier with the (Google-powered) phone in hand,” Wojtowicz said.

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The mobile web isn't dead. It's just starting.

by Daniel Langendorf

April 14th, 2008 | Posted in Mobile | Comments2 Comments

mowserThe mobile Web is dead! The mobile Web is dead! The mobile Web is dead!

Or says Chicken Little, aka Russell Beattie, the founder of Mowser, a Menlo Park, Calif., startup focused on mobile Web browsing. Beattie delivered the news Monday that Mowser “is at the end of its life in its current form.”

For that, I am truly sorry. Beattie, who has invested everything he has in Mowser for the past year, is a gutsy entrepreneur who knows a little something about mobile. From November 2004 to September 2006, Beattie worked at Yahoo! creating mobile products and content.

Beattie left to launch Mowser, a Web site focused on content adaption for mobile phones. You can read about his experiences on his blog, but what it all comes down to after a year of intense work is that “I don’t actually believe in the ‘Mobile Web’ anymore” and the market “is limited at best, and dying at worst.”

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Video: Sony's Mylo 2 Personal Communicator

by Steve O'Hear

April 9th, 2008 | Posted in Comms, Mobile | CommentsNo Comments

The folks over at Akihabara recently got their hands on Sony’s new Mylo 2 Personal Communicator (see our previous coverage).

The device resembles a small WiFi tablet, not dissimilar to Nokia’s N810, and features a 3.5 inch WVGA display, slide-out QWERTY keyboard, 1.3 megapixel camera, Skype support, and 1GB of on-board storage, as well as a Memory Stick Duo/PRO Duo card slot. Applications include Web browsing, media playback, Instant Messaging and VoIP. Akihabara’s major complaint is poor video playback, which is restricted to 320 x 240, despite the device having a generously sized 800 x 480 screen.

Akihabara’s video demo after the jump…

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Nokia, start your photocopiers (iPhone-envy)

by Steve O'Hear

April 8th, 2008 | Posted in Mobile | CommentsNo Comments

Nokia\'s iPhone responseWhen Apple first unveiled the latest iteration of its Mac OSX operating system, codenamed ‘Leopard’, the marketing slogan read: “Redmond, start your photocopiers“. The suggestion being that Microsoft would, shortly thereafter, attempt to replicate all of Apple’s innovations. In 2008, the same charge might also apply to any number of cellphone makers as they scramble to respond to the iconic iPhone. This week it was Nokia’s turn, reports InfoWorld.

During a presentation at the Evans Data Developer Relations Conference in Redwood City, California, Nokia’s Tom Libretto showed a slide that portrayed a new device similar in looks to Apple’s iPhone, codenamed “Tube”. Featuring a touchscreen and graphic-heavy interface, Libretto said the “Tube” will support Java – a feature lacking on the iPhone – and will also be capable of uploading photos to the Web. Other details such as additional features or a launch date weren’t revealed.

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