Category: Mobile

I can’t tell you how much fun I have every time a Symbian Community Newsletter hits my inbox. It’s a great resource and there are always at least one or two juicy morsels that I feel compelled to share. This month my favourites are search.forum.nokia.com and a DVD on programming Symbian, Series 60, and UIQ.

The meta-search covers forum.nokia.com, Series60.com, PreminetSolution.com, softwaremarket.nokia.com, and symbian.com and is powered by google. The DVD looks like it covers a lot of ground and is quite reasonably priced at $24.95.

Thanks again to David Mery for the excellent (as always) newsletter!

The other day I was musing out loud (in #mobitopia) about weather an Orange network in Spain would be called Orange or if it would be called Anaranjado. With the announcement that FT plans to buy Amena, Spain’s third largest mobile carrier, I may just find out. My nickel says that Amena will slowly be transitioned in to Orange branding over the next year or two and that in 2-3 years Orange (or Anaranjado) will be at least the #2 carrier in Spain.

I’ve been rabidly checking Cingular, Amazon, and LetsTalk for pricing and availability on the Nokia 6682 on contract. I believe that I’ve struck paydirt today.

According to this link on Amazon (yeah I tacked my associate ID on there), the 6682 will be available for $25 after rebates and activation. Let me break it down: $174.99 up front with activation – $150 mail in rebate = $24.99. The kicker of course is that (as of 7:30AM EDT) the phone isn’t yet available.

Amazon has been known to be a little trigger happy on new products, but the sheer fact taht it’s listed online today and wasn’t 2 days ago is a very good sign. I’m going to be refreshing this page every 5 minutes or so until the 6682 is available, so please allow me a spot in line, as this is one of those deals that are best mentioned after you’ve picked one up.

I missed the formal announcement, but congrats to Darla Mack on her new job as an associate editor at PhoneMag! I’ve subscribed to their RSS feed and have been quite pleased with the amount of high quality content coming from over there.

Go, Darla, Go!

I haven’t seen a whole lot of details about the Motorla Q aside from this press release, but I’m a bit perplexed. It looks a lot like a flattened Treo running Windows Mobile. I can’t tell from the small pictures I’ve seen, but the screen rez doesn’t look particularly spectactular.

We’ll see, this could be the next Treo runaway hit (in the US anyway, the Treo numbers are crap when you look at worldwide smartphone sales).

I wonder whatever happened to that iTunes phone…

Update:

I guess the thing that bugs me the most is the Windows Mobile Smartphone UI on a screen that’s just way too big for that. I guess that’s the only way to not have to involve a stylus, but it just looks weird. At least it’s got the ‘tooth.

I wouldn’t exactly call this huge news, but it appears that Forum Nokia has discontinued their device loaner program (at least in the US). I’m not sure if the program has migrated over to Forum Nokia PRO or if it’s been dropped completely. Either way, I’m not too suprised, as I’ve submitted a couple of requests for loaners over the past year or so and haven’t heard back. They’re probably swamped with more requests than they can handle. Yeah, it’s sad to see a resource like this dissapear (I’m pretty sure it was still around amonth or so ago), but at the same time I was never able to take advantage of it. I wouldn’t be suprised if they just didn’t see any commercial value in my request, but I’d rather think that my request just got lost in a gigantic stack of requests and they never got around to looking at it…

It’s a little past Q2, but that’s okay, because according to Russ, the 6682 is available directly from Nokia USA. It definitely has the early adopter tax applied to it, weighing in at about 600 bucks.

I’m hoping that Cingular (or more likely) Let’s Talk or another reseller has it in stock so I can pick one up on contract (and hopefully at least take a couple hundred bucks off the list price). I really wish that I was in the position to drop $600 on this phone that I’ve been waiting for since it was announced, but that’s just not in the cards. Too much talk and not enough action on my part I guess. I am hoping to pick it up as soon as I can on contract, so I should be somewhere behind the affluent early adopters but before the masses.

Thanks for getting this one out the door Nokia, I look forward to snagging one.

Update:

I just re-read this post and I realized that it comes across a bit cranky. Sorry about that, yesterday was a long day.

According to the specs and what I’ve heard the 6682 is an awesome little phone. When I snagged my 3650 (again, after Russ but before most of the American blogosphere picked up on how much it rocked) list price was probaly close to if not at $600. Lucky for me it had been out just long enough to be free after rebates through Amazon.

Oh, 6682, you will be mine soon enough…

While walking around the electronics section at Target last weekend, I began to wonder if XM Radio had reached the tipping point, and I”m beginning to think that the answer is “yes.”

XM claims to have over 4 million subcribers, vs. Sirius‘ 1.4 million. It remains the horse to beat, something that I’ve felt since the two satellite radio services launched.

Why do I think that XM is reaching the tipping point? Many reasons actually, but I think it all hit me in the electronics aisle of Target. First off, they’ve been playing a heck of a lot of Live 8 content on some of their channels, which is cool.

The second part hit me when I actually used an XM device for a bit a few weeks ago. It’s actually my parents equipment in my old bedroom at their place. Yep, my parents have XM, not me. XM has an amazing range of content. There’s stuff that my dad loves, and stuff that I really like too. Two of my favorite channels so far are XM Cafe and The Loft. In addition to a station playing Live 8 stuff I found myself flipping between these two channels because they offered that sort of eclectic mix that I can never seem to get enough of.

Everything came together when I saw the XM receiver kit that my mom had bought my father on the shelf at Target for $50. Holy crap, that’s cheap. XM is also sneaking its way in to car CD players, new cars, boomboxes, and home stereo systems. It’s really starting to pop up everywhere. I also love the idea of the XM2Go portable receiver which is bigger than an iPod but smaller than a CD player, goes with you everywhere, and lets you record up to 5 hours of content.

Call me slow, but I think XM is at its tipping point (if it’s not well past it and I just didn’t get the memo) and it’s smooth sailing from here. Heck, for the monthly subscription fee you can also listen to some of their channels online.

I saw this fly by on textually the other day but didn’t get a chance to really look at it until yesterday, and I’m kinda hooked. What am I talking about? Wapipedia, of course

Wapipedia allows you to search the content of Wikipedia and view it on a modern phone. It will probably choke older WAP 1.0 based phones, but anything that can handle WAP 2.0/XHTML-MP should be quite happy.

The design does a good job of working quite well on both a mobile device and a browser. It’s a bit minimalistic in a browser, but you know what, it’s usable in both. I really like sites like that. Russ has done a few and I’ve stared (but not finished) a few projects that pull of the same thing.

I think we’ll see more sites like this in the future, unless it’s just me that gets warm fuzzies when using sites like this.

I was poking around the FCC website again this morning and ran across this motorola linux-based smartphone which was approved recently. The beginning of the manual seems to indicate that this particular model does not have Bluetooth, but I’m guessing that there’s another model out there that does, or BT is a feature that had to be cut from this model for whatever reason. This looks a lot like one of the Linux phones announced a year or so ago, though I’m not “with it” enough to remember exactly which one.

They do have a copy of the GPL (see Appendix 32) in the manual, make use of Gnomovision, and have a bit of a bizzarre “offer to customers:”

Until September 30, 2006 you may request from Motorola the source code for any
Portions of this product which are licensed under the GNU General Public license by
writing to the following address:
Beijing Design Center, PCS
Motorola (China) Electronics Ltd.
No. 2 Dong San Huan Nan. Lu
Chao Yang District
Beijing, P.R. China
100022
Tel. 010-65642288
Fax: 010-65642299

I wonder if they would actually pony up the GPL’d code if you asked. What’s up with that date though? Is that admission of mobile phone shelf life? They do seem to be trying to do things right though. Anyway, just because this is approved doesn’t mean you should expect it on the shelves tomorrow. After looking closer at the external photos it looks like this is indeed one of the models that piqued my interest when it was announced.

Yesterday Jim broke the news that Sendo was in administration (from what I gather, it’s sort of like Chapter 11 in the US):

The affairs, business and assets of Sendo International Ltd, Sendo Holdings Plc, Sendo Telecommunications Limited and Sendo Limited are being managed by the Joint Administrators Simon Appell and Alastair Beveridge. The Joint Administrators act as agents of the companies without personal liability.

I can only guess that the Sendo X’s delays and lackluster sales have something to do with it. It’s really a shame too, because the Sendo X was an awesome little phone.

Today news comes that Motorola will be buying up large chunks of Sendo: R&D, intellectual property (read: patents), and some other stuff. Reuters UK, El Reg, The Inq, and so on.

Motorola hopes that the move will help them push more units in the UK, but that’s going to require more than shiny but vacuous flip-phones.

There are some 19 stories on Google News about Quake being released for “a new generation of 3D-enabled mobile handsets,” all of which seem to be a regurgitation of a press release.

Hey, guys, is it too much to ask for a little real content? Some actual information? Like, what are these snazzy new “3D-enabled mobile handsets” that I keep hearing about? I know that there are a lot of “3D-enabled mobile handsets” just hitting or about to hit the market, but which platform is this going to target?

The closest thing to an answer seems to be at the bottom of the press release:

The first 3D-enabled mobile phones will hit the market this summer (Northern hemisphere), with Quake Mobile available as an embedded game on the first of these handsets to be released by a Korean manufacturer in July.

Hmm, okay, so does that mean Quake is going to end up on a bunch of crappy flippy phones that I can safely ignore? I dunno.

The most information can probably be gleaned by following the litle blurbs at the bottom of the press release. The game is published by Pulse Interactive, who offer more information on their E3 Best In Show page. The game was developed (ported?) by Bear Naked Productions. Quake is released under the GPL and has been ported to many different platforms, some of them mobile, but I haven’t seen a port of Quake to commodity phone hardware.

I think something like Commander Keen would be more fun on a standard old mobile phone than something like Quake. The thought of playing Quake on a mobile reminds me of how bad I am playing Doom on Nintendo 64. I tend to suck at first person shooters on game consoles after years and years of keyboard+mouse play.

This whole Quake-in-your-pocket thing may be worth paying attention to. Or not.

I’ve been keeping a keen eye on the FCC website recently looking for approval of the Nokia 6682 (time is running out) as well as the Nokia 770. A few days ago I saw a version of Charlie from Nokia Japan be approved (interesting but not noteworthy since it was the 900/1800/1900 and I don’t see t-mobile picking it up…) Today I stumbled upon an interesting new bluetooth headset that looks almost like an iPod shuffle with stereo headphones.

I haven’t been quite as rabid about product announcements lately, so I might have missed this one fly by. It looks kinda neat, though how excited I would be about it might depend on its price point.

Last week I played with a PalmOne LifeDrive at CompUSA and I’ve gotta say that it’s a nice little device. The screen resolution is definitely a little nicer than budget devices, but at 320×480 isn’t exactly bleeding edge. The design is quite pleasing too; it almost has the feel of a G5 desktop. I also like the ability of switching between portrait and desktop mode quickly. I can do that on my Dell Axim X30 but it’s definitely not as quick as on the LifeDrive. Landscape mode is also perfect for the included Blazer browser, which when coupled with bluetooth or Wi-Fi makes for a good pocket-sized browser. Combine all that with a 4 gig microdrive and you’ve got a pretty nice little platform.

It’s a pretty nice little platform, but is it worth $500? I don’t think so. If you’re really worried about hauling around a bunch of data in your pocket, $500 can get you a 60 gig iPod photo and $50 to spare or a 20 gig Archos AV420. Granted neither of those offer PIM functions, but I’m not sure how compelling PIM + 4 gigs to spare is. I was also a little bummed at how pokey the responsiveness on the LifeDrive was. Click something, wait just a little bit, and there it is. I know that the OS doesn’t run from the MicroDrive but accessing photos and stuff requires a bit of drive spinning. It’s not that the LifeDrive felt slow when accessing photos or media, it felt a bit slow in general, even when doing something that didn’t involve the MicroDrive at all.

Another thing that got me is that it looks like the battery is internal and not user replacable. Having been screwed by a CompUSA warranty and the flaky battery on the Tungsten E, I don’t think I would ever consider buying a Palm device without a user replacable battery.

I could be wrong, Palm could have a big hit on their hands with the LifeDrive, but my guess is that they’ll have to drop the price point a hundred bucks or so before they really start moving units.