Author Archive: Gareth

Twenty-four telecom operators unite to form Wholesale Applications Community

Big goings on over at Mobile World Congress today. Twenty-four telecom operators, with the support of the GSMA and three major hardware manufacturers, have formally announced they will come together to form the Wholesale Applications Community.

Essentially, the goal of the alliance will be to create a viable, cohesive and open industry platform for mobile app developers. Members of the Community will include AT&T, China Mobile, China Unicom, Deutsche Telekom, NTT DoCoMo, Orange, TeliaSonera, Sprint, Verizon Wireless, and Vodafone among others, and they’ll be supported in their endeavors by LG, Samsung and Sony Ericsson. The total customers of the group is about 3 billion, giving WAC some considerable — albeit theoretical for the moment — power. The group plans to work on coming up with a standard for working across platforms over the next twelve months.

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Nokia shows off Symbian^3 UI

For those of you waiting for Nokia to hurry up and make Symbian usable and generally rocking, the road to glory took a step forward recently with this preview of Symbian ^3, whilst not completely rocking the cross platform code that is QT which also powers Maemo 6, it still never the less looks pretty nifty and will be seen on handsets later this year.

If this video is anything to by, its going to please Symbian fans no end. It even has the mythical ‘pinch to zoom’.

The first devices running the new platform are expected to ship as early as Q3 this year. Along with more efficient memory management, allowing more apps to run in parallel, Symbian^3 also includes support for HDMI, so users can plug their device into a TV and watch a 1080p movie. The new graphics architecture will use hardware acceleration to offer users a much improved user interface, with a refresh rate of 60fps as opposed to the current 15fps.

The new homescreen supports multiple pages for widgets, enabling the user to just flick between each one. Across the board we’ll also see a range of network improvements, including the ability to automatically switch from cell network to WLAN automatically, without user interruption. The platform is also ready for 4G networks.

MWC: Motorola Quench joins the Android family at MWC

Motorola has just announced its eighth Android phone at MWC, dubbed the Quench or Cliq XT in the US.

Highlights include a 3.1-inch touchscreen with a 320×480-pixel "pinch and zoom" touch capabilities, 5 megapixel camera (with autofocus and LED flash), a navigation touchpad and a dual-mic noise cancellation system. It’ll ship with Android version 1.5, rather than the Dext’s 2.0 or the Nexus One’s 2.1, but an upgrade’s always a possibility. The rest of the features include Stereo Bluetooth, AGPS, FM radio, Motoblur and Adobe Flash Lite.

Unlike the Cliq there’s no physical keyboard here, but if that’s how you roll then look out for launch and pricing for this phone next month.

MWC: Sony Ericsson unleashes the Vivaz Pro

Sony Ericsson has quickly followed up the recently-announced Vivaz with a QWERTY enabled version: the Sony Ericsson Vivaz Pro running Symbian S60 5th.

The Vivaz Pro, which adds a full QWERTY keyboard to the original Vivaz that was announced last month. The Vivaz Pro offers some impressive specs – 3.2-inch screen, HD video recording, GPS, WiFi, 3.5mm headphone jack -  and the slide-out QWERTY keyboard looks fairly comfortable. Unfortunately, SE took the original’s 8-megapixel camera, and shaved it down to 5.1-megapixels. That shouldn’t make someone want to stray from the S60 device,  the pro version comes with a VGA port, which you will find not on the original, so you can show off your amateur  photography and video on your TV.

Hit up the read link to get the full specs and if it peaks your interest, its due Q2 2010.

Read

MWC: Samsung I8520 rocks Android 2.1, 3.7-inch WVGA Super AMOLED, 8 MP camera, pico projector!

Samsung has quietly announced a new projector phone based on the Android OS at Mobile World Congress.

The i8520 or Samsung Beam is packing some tip-top technology that Samsung is promising to show off at the mobile phone event this week. The Beam has a huge 3.7-inch OLED screen, running Android with a special overlay to make it look like one if its Bada range and a DLP projector!

It’s a rockin’ awesome device with features that impress!

• Quad-band GSM coupled with tri-band HSPA connectivity
• 3.7-inch WVGA Super AMOLED touchscreen
• 8-megapixel camera (720p / 30fps video recording), plus front-facing VGA camera
• Android 2.1 with TouchWIZ running on top of it
• DivX/Xvid-enabled media player
• A-GPS, WiFi (b/g/n), Bluetooth 2.1, DLNA support
• Integrated DLP pico projector!!
• FM Radio with RDS, 3.5mm headset jack, stereo speakers with 3D sound effect
• 2GB (or more) of internal memory + microSD memory card slot
• 1800 mAh battery !
• Size: 123×59.8×14.9 mm

In a nutshell, the I8520 is potentially the best Android smartphone announced to date. Too bad we’ll have to wait for Q3 to see it released in Europe and Asia, and possibly U.S. soon afterwards.

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How to add internet radio stations to the Nokia N900 media player

The N900’s media player application has an internet radio section which contains lots of radio station bookmarks, but no obvious way of adding more. The video below by All About Maemo gives an example of how to add more stations to the list, and how to remove stations too.

The video uses Shoutcast as an example, but there are other sites that will work with this method too. Unfortunately there are many technical and legal reasons why some sites work and others don’t, so perhaps the best thing to do is simply try radio station streaming links to see if they work. Any station which streams successfully can be saved as a bookmark using the method in the video.

Incidentally, if the Shoutcast site asks about player types, choose the option for using your own player.

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How to install MSN, Yahoo Messenger, AIM, ICQ etc on the Nokia N900

The N900 has instant messaging and VOIP totally integrated into the interface, but officially it only supports this integration with Skype, Google Talk, Jabber/Facebook and Ovi. However, by installing a plugin you can actually add integrated support for many more services including MSN / Live, AIM, Yahoo Messenger, ICQ, QQ, Gadu Gadu, GroupWise and Sametime.

This excellent video below by All About Maemo shows the complete installation process for this plugin:

Once you’ve installed a service your service’s contacts may be added your N900’s Contacts application. If there’s duplication, you can merge contacts by selecting them until a “Merge” option appears, then select the contact you want to merge it with. If it talks about naming conflicts during the merging, just enter the name that you want the contact to be known as.

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HTC Photon to be unveiled at MWC?

Dubbed the HTC HD Mini, this Windows Mobile 6.5 device looks to be a replacement for the aging Touch Viva or Touch 3G but obviously pulling in the HD’s high class influence. It packs a 3.2-inch HVGA touch screen display, 5-megapixel autofocus camera, 600MHz Qualcomm processor, WiFi, HSPA connectivity, GPS, 3.5m jack, and runs on Windows Mobile 6.5. There’s really nothing overly exciting or groundbreaking about this particular HTC handset so I guess this means that it won’t come with a ridiculously steep price tag either.

Word is the HTC HD Mini will be released this coming April. This isn’t confirmed though, but hopefully, it will be once it’s officially launched in Spain in the next couple of days.

Source WMPoweruser via PMPtoday

HTC Legend pics emerge

The sequel to the great HTC Hero has been spotted in the wild. The Legend is a notable upgrade to the Hero and looks the part too. My only comment is that if they upgrade the aerial stack then this will be a phone to watch.

See all the pics at Android Community

Competition reminder!

The new podcast is out and we are looking for some folks to win these headsets. Send me a picture of you listening to the podcast. When at Mobile World Congress I shall ask the coolest and most prominent person I can find to choose their favourite two photos (To be honest it will probably be the most attractive booth babe.) The two photos chosen will win! Simples.

You can send your photo to [email protected]. Entries should be in by midnight on 17/02/10. I will be posting all photos received so keep them clean 🙂

Best of luck!