The week leading up to Mobile World Congress saw a number of good stories and topics discussed on mobile websites, and as usual the roving Carnival of Mobilists has linked through to a number of them. Hosted this week by Mobile Messaging 2.0, issue #110 previews MWC; asks how open does 'Open' have to be; deploying J2ME apps in America; and a number of others
And here's the mobile advertising announcement, Nokia Media Network, a 'premiere mobile advertising network' (their phrase), was announced at MWC. This appears to be the re-branding of the Enpocket advertising company the Finnish company purchased on October 2007, allowing companies to place advertising on Operator and Mobile Publisher pages.
Seth over at ComputerWorld has been watching the nightly Webkit (the underlying browser that Nokia's S60 3rd Edition Web is based on) builds and has noted some big recent speed improvements. Apple's desktop Safari is an obvious recipient of the new code, and in due course the iPhone. Hopefully S60's Web team can also build in the same code and gain similar (up to three times) speed increases?
What kind of crazy tech industry do we have where companies make work for themselves at the same time as making customers unhappy? And you can bet that the mobile industry is the worst offender of all. Read on for a few experiences, thoughts and links.
Fed up with announcements about "leveraging the Web 2.0 growth cycle to grow market share in the YouTube generation"? Ewan's a little sceptical about some of the press releases that get issued at this time of the industry year, and I don't blame him. What are we looking for from the hardware and software companies and what are we dreading seeing?
You'll remember James Burland from his Nokia Creative blog? He's also the guy behind the Nokia N95 User Group on Flickr and he picks the very best photos to highlight in the blog. Some of January's award winners are absolutely jaw-dropping and a good testament to what the N95's camera can do.
While most people have been getting excited about the pre-announcement of Opera Mobile 9.5, the hugely popular (and free) little sister, Opera Mini 4, has just had a big back-end (i.e. the bit that does the work) upgrade, which (among other changes, listed below) should improve browsing speed by (up to) another 20%.
Ah yes, I always leap upon new official figures from Canalys - kind of like tuning into radio chart shows to find out which song is 'number 1'. 118 million smartphones were sold across the world in 2007, but who were the winners and losers? Read on to find out.
Fring, the free VoIP and chat tool, just added a file transfer function to its portfolio, reports Ricky. So far it's just Fring-to-Fring transfers, plus MSN, but we're sure the full range of Fring IM systems will also be opened up soon to file sending (e.g. Skype, which we often use at AAS to send files across our virtual office!).
Twango the media sharing / community site that Nokia acquired last year has now been Ovi-fied. Its been rebranded as Share on Ovi and has a new look and feel to go with the new name. There are also user experience improvements in navigating, sharing and searching for media on the site and a restructured back end to allow it to scale to millions of users. Read on for more.
So AAS forum member 'kflyer' emailed me a few days ago, "wondering whether viruses can really affect a current smartphone. I've read your view on this question, but AAS itself has adverts for AntiVirus clients!" As it's a long, long time since my last rail against the fraudulent anti-virus industry, I thought it high time for an update. Read on.
A video has appeared on YouTube offering a sneak preview from Motorola in regards to the Mobile World Congress. There are no specific details on devices, but the video does show various people lugging around a TV set and DVD player. Might this suggest another video focused phone from Moto, perhaps with an accomapnying video download or purchase service? Read on for more.
First shots of the proto hardware Google is using for the Android project are available at Gizmodo, and it looks remarkably like a Nokia E61 (or a Blackjack or Blackberry, depending where your loyalties lie). Given this will probably not be the final hardware, a functional design, with qwerty keyboard, was to be expected.
More good news for prospective Vodafone users, as they drop their 3GB/month data plan to £15 (reports SMS Text News). It's a long contract (18 or 24 months) but it does come with a USB 3G modem. No word if this will be available to existing users with data enabled handsets, but it's a sign that data pricing is definitely on its way to becoming a commodity, rather than a luxury, on people's monthly bills.
Always interesting to read good third party face-offs. Here, SMS Text News' Ben has been trialling both DataViz's RoadSync and Nokia's free Mail for Exchange for a staggering nine months. Here's his verdict, although personally the latter's price can't really be beaten(!)
