Author Archive: Gareth

Nokia makes walk and drive navigation free on its smartphones

Espoo, Finland – Nokia has today announced plans to release a new version of Ovi Maps for its smartphones that includes high-end walk and drive navigation at no extra cost, available for download at www.nokia.com/maps. This move has the potential to nearly double the size of the current mobile navigation market. The new version of Ovi Maps includes high-end car and pedestrian navigation features, such as turn-by-turn voice guidance for 74 countries, in 46 languages, and traffic information for more than 10 countries, as well as detailed maps for more than 180 countries.

“Why have multiple devices that work that work in only one country or region? Put it all together, make it free, make it global and you almost double the potential size of the mobile navigation market ,” explained Anssi Vanjoki, Executive Vice President, Nokia. “Nokia is the only company with a mobile navigation service for both drivers and pedestrians that works across the world. Unlike the legacy car navigation manufacturers, we don’t make you buy maps for different countries or regions even if you’re only visiting for a few days. We offer both navigation and maps free of charge, with all the high-end functionality and features that people now expect.”

“The large-scale availability of free-of-charge mobile phone navigation offerings using high-quality map data will be a game changer for the navigation industry,” said Thilo Koslowski, Vice President Automotive and Vehicle ICT at Gartner. “Such offerings will accelerate mass market adoption for navigation solutions and shift innovation focus to location-based services that go beyond traditional routing benefits.”

Cry Translator for iPhone released

The Cry Translator is an easy to use iPhone app that quickly identifies the five distinct cries made by infants: hungry, sleepy, annoyed, stressed or bored. These five cries are universal to all babies regardless of culture or language.

The Cry Translator technology has been tested in Spain and North America with impressive results. Based on the degree of accuracy evidenced in the studies, Biloop Technologies developed an iPhone application for consumer use. For more information on the clinical trials, please visit www.biloop.com or read a recent article in Spain’s Paediatric Medical Journal.

Key Benefits

Identifies a cry within ten seconds.

Eases the anxiety associated with calming a crying infant.

Builds confidence in understanding and comforting your infant.

Helps reduce overall infant crying.

Get it here   

Now if only they could develop an app that can understand women they could really be onto a winner 😉

Grand Theft Auto (GTA) for iPhone released

Undoubtedly the biggest release in app store this week is an iPhone version, original porting, of Grand Theft Auto game, the “Chinatown Wars” edition. Why biggest? Well, the console version of this game is huge hit, and also in app store this app has reached, merely in 2 days (!), top sales positions in several countries + Apple is promoting this new release heavily everywhere in iTunes.

Arrival of big game studios to iPhone probably means that soon no longer indy game developers will have any chances to compete…

Dailymotion launches iPhone app

Dailymotion is the only online video upload service that is located in European Union (in France to be precise) so we are happy to report that they have released an iPhone app recently:

Skyfire Launches the 1.5 Version for Symbian

Skyfire Launches the 1.5 Version of its Award-Winning Mobile Browser for Symbian Smartphones: A Sharper, Smarter and Finger-Friendly Way to Enjoy the Best of the Web

Mountain View, CA – January 20, 2009 – Skyfire, makers of Webby award-winning, PC-like web-browser for mobile devices, today launched the next generation of its Skyfire browser, version 1.5, for Symbian S60 3^rd and 5^th edition smartphones. The newest version follows the release of Skyfire 1.5 for Windows Mobile and is now available for download at get.skyfire.com. Enhancements in the new version include full support for high-resolution screens, a fresh user interface (UI) that is more finger friendly, crisper text, smoother zooming, and a full-screen mode that maximizes screen real estate.

What’s new with Skyfire 1.5 for Symbian S60 3 edition?

The White House – official iPhone app released

The quality of videos available for download (not live) in this app is stunning:

… but the most useful part seems to be ability to watch LIVE broadcasts with the president of USA:

CoPilot Live 8 gets an update on Windows Mobile

With several HTC phones bundling CoPilot Live 8 their most recent device it’s pleasing to see that the software has recieved a tidy and meaty update. If you’ve got it, get the update. If you haven’t I recommend you try out the software as it’s one of the finest on the Windows Mobile platform.

These new features include:

· Improved timing of turn instructions. Customers can now choose exactly when they would prefer to receive spoken turn instructions, based on distance or time from the turn.

· Ability to download free safety camera database updates direct to CoPilot Live via mobile web or WiFi

· Ability to switch-off the ‘Welcome to CoPilot Live’ message played at start-up

· Support for Premium Live Services, including Live Traffic, fuel prices and Local Search (Premium Live Services are available for £19.99 for 12 months)

· Support for Text-To-Speech (TTS) voice directions (TTS costs £2.99 for lifetime use)

· Ability to import custom Points of Interest (POI) databases in CSV or OV2 format

· Improved display support for HVGA resolution smartphones

· Additional stability, memory usage and performance improvements

CoPilot has also fixed a connection issue that prevented some Orange and Vodafone customers from accessing CoPilot’s Live Services.

Windows Mobile 7, more details leaked

Mobile Crunch have received some supposedly reliable information on Windows Mobile 7 and if true, we are looking at Microsoft doing a full 360 degree turn on how open Windows Mobile will be.

First, Win Mo 7 is essentially a copy of the Zune HD’s kernel. It comes in one screen size and will work best on OLED devices. Microsoft will give official specs to hardware makers and force them to comply or else refuse them access to the OS. This includes a regimented screen and RAM size as well as a minimum processor speed.

Win Mo 7 has no background processing and will use an Apple-like notification service. There is no system resource access and no threaded processes. In fact, there is no customization at all.

Win Mo 7 will not run 6.x code. End of story. It is based on Silverlight and .Net. Everything save a few basic programs will not work under Win Mo 7. There is no expectation that this will be a “business device” and the focus is currently on games including some XBox Live functionality for gaming and messaging. There will be a Microsoft App store with an easy approval process.

So there you have it, if true Microsoft are making great moves to protect the operating system and shake off the reputation of soft reset hell, poor UI and all round bad experience.

I predicted that future Win Mo apps would only be available from their Marketplace a while ago and even asked them the question on the podcast when we interviewed Loke Uei

I personally think this is no bad thing, a stable Win Mo platform would be a great step forward.

via Mobile Crunch

Skype for iPhone updated

Skype and Google Voice are 2 main enemies of mobile operators aka carriers. We know it because we are going to Mobile World Congress 2010 where many companies are showing “solutions for operators to combat competition from Skype and Google Voice” – as they put it in their pre-announcements.

Skype for iPhone just got upgraded and new features are:

Developers writing for iPhone 4.0

Most are speculating great things for the June announcement however some believe that the 4.0 firmware will be with us sooner than that. Here is further news to fuel the fire for 4.0 arriving on the iPhone sooner rather than later.

iPhone OS 4.0 is imminent. That’s the conclusion I drew from an e-mail I received from a prominent app developer Friday, at least, before hearing from the developer that it was a typo.

The message included the following snippet: "Just wanted to give you a heads up that we’ve submitted an updated app for the new iPhone OS 4.0 software." (The developer later acknowledged that it meant to refer to a 4.0 version of the app itself, not OS 4.0.)