Author Archive: Vince Chan

INQ announce a duo of Facebook phones

Our fellow Londoners at INQ have announced two new socially orientated phones, the Cloud Touch and Cloud Q. Both feature deep enough Facebook integration (using Facebook’s Social Graph API) to earn the title of ‘Facebook phone’ and rightly so – access to your Facebook Wall, Messages, Friends, Chat and Notifications are all available straight from the homescreens. Both phones also feature TouchType’s Fluency Prediction Engine which guesses the words you’re about to type based on your previous tendencies and some black magic. They’ll also feature Spotify integration for the musical duties.

As for the phone’s themselves, the Cloud Touch is a full-touch Android 2.2 based affair with a 3.5 inch HVGA touchscreen and 5MP camera. The Cloud Q has exactly the same specs but trades the large screen for a qwerty keyboard. The Cloud Touch is expected to be available in April and the Cloud Q sometime in Q3.

For full specs and information, see the press release after the break.

Sony Reader app barred from App Store, Kindle lives on

Despite Amazon’s Kindle app being available on the App Store for quite some time, you’d think that Sony’s Reader app would also be given the green light. But you’d be wrong. Clearly, Sony didn’t read the Apple bible to app heaven closely enough as their app has been rejected on the terms that it features in-app purchases of books without passing through Apple’s own API for in-app purchases (which would crucially bypass Apple’s 30% cut in sales).

The condition that purchases must go through Apple has in fact been in the guidelines all along, but the Kindle app was allowed through -  it directs you to a mobile site in Safari instead. However, Apple also highlighted another term in the guidelines; you can’t sell goods and services outside of your app. Surely that means Amazon is infringing too, but no word from either Apple nor Amazon has been said about what to do about it.

Sony have already stated they promise to pursue “other avenues to bring the Reader experience to Apple mobile devices.” This will probably mean they’ll end up (reluctantly) giving Apple their 30% share of sales. But what will it mean for Amazon? Their app sells books outside of the Kindle application which technically is an infringement of the guidelines that should result in the boot from the App Store. Considering the size of Amazon and the number of iOS devices out there, that 30% is a big deal. Eventually, they’ll have to update their app to either cut Apple in or disable in-app purchasing altogether (though what will become of their “Buy Once, Read Anywhere” slogan?). Either way Apple wins – they either get their fair share or people will have to turn to their home-grown iBook store, but what would happen to your vast Kindle library that you used to read on your iDevice? Maybe paper books weren’t such a bad idea after all.

Posted by: Vince

The HP Veer

The Veer is probably best described as a replacement for the Pixi, slotting below the Pre3 in specs and in size. In fact, it’s about the same size as your standard credit card making it a very cute little phone. With a planned availability this spring, I reckon this will be a pretty big hit with the kids and women looking for a phone to slip into their jeans pocket or handbag. My only concern is the keyboard considering how tiny this phone is, but like almost every phone, I still want one. I won’t ramble on about the specification, and just let the pictures do the rest of the talking.

Find more information after the break.

Internet addresses could run out within weeks

The last of the 4 billion possible IPv4 internet addresses could be allocated within weeks according to the Internet Address and Naming Agency. The Asia-Pacific region got another two blocks while the rest of the world shared out the rest – the speed at which ISP’s request new addresses means that we could be completely out from a few weeks to a couple of months. Fear not though Tracy and Matt addicts, this is no Millennium Bug – the ‘fix’ has actually been around for a while – IPv6 which has the capacity for each human being to have trillions of addresses.

The issue here is that there isn’t wide-spread adoption of IPv6 quite yet. Windows Vista, 7 and the newer OS X and Linux operating systems all support IPv6 out of the box (though you’ll need an IPv6 compatible router). It’s now up to internet stakeholders to see IPv6 as a requirement rather than an option if the internet is to continue growing at its current phenomenal pace.

Posted by: Vince

RIM opens BlackBerry Radio app beta

BlackBerry Radio is a radio discovery app that allows users to listen to their favourite radio services such as Pandora, Corus, and Slacker radio. New music and radio channels are easily discovered with the BlackBerry Radio app through a powerful genre-based search and integration with BlackBerry radio partners and Amazon MP3.

The beta is currently open to select BlackBerry Beta Zone members (running BlackBerry 6) in the United States, with us Britain’s hopefully getting access to it in the future. Click here for more information.

Posted by: Vince

Grant for scientists to develop faster broadband in the UK

The University of Southampton’s ‘Photonics HyperHighway’ project, in partnership with Essex and BBC R&D, has been awarded £7.2 million to create new fibre optic technologies that could make connection speeds 100 times faster than your standard fibre optics. The money, along with £10 million from the EU will be spent trying to develop new materials and devices to increase bandwidth for an ever hungry online population.

Apparently, current fibre optic limitations aren’t clear at the moment, though it seems that they’re not as limitless and future-proof as they once were thought to be. Research will begin at the Southampton Nanofabrication Centre, and although microfabrication and high-spec nanofabrication mean precisely nothing to me, I’m all for it if it means faster speeds – I crawl along at 1.2Mbps.

Posted by: Vince