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Author Archive: Gareth
Seasoned tech blogger. Host of the Tech Addicts podcast.
Nokia is betting a wider and more tailored offering of media and software for its phones will prove attractive when its Ovi online store opens in May and goes head-to-head with Apple Inc’s App Store. The Apple store has proved the market for software supermarkets in the mobile world, with more than 500 million applications downloaded in only half a year. Nokia’s market is potentially bigger — it says the Ovi store will reach some 50 million consumers when it opens, while Apple has so far sold less than 20 million iPhones.
Orange and Barclaycard today announced a long term strategic partnership to develop a range of mobile, financial and payment services that will change the way we pay.
Orange and Barclaycard will launch new co-branded products and services to make the buying process more convenient, simpler and faster. With a history of innovation and a combined customer base of more than 28 million, Orange and Barclaycard believe this will be the biggest revolution in payments since plastic cards were introduced over 40 years ago.
Customers will be able to use their mobiles to pay for goods and services at retailers using contactless technology; by simply waving their handset against a reader. Both companies will be looking to expand the partnership to include other contactless services within ticketing, transport and rewards. MasterCard will provide the payment capabilities for the transactions.
Pocketnow have spotted a coming soon page from Microsoft that appears at first glance could be the new Windows Mobile Marketplace which was mentioned in passing at Mobile World Congress last month. The URL reveals a mobile formatted website which implies that the Marketplace may just be a website of applications and not a fully featured app store application. We really hope that this is not the case as a proper application store should be able to offer much more than a web page with at least intelligent app updates and much more really. It is early days and for now lets give Microsoft the benefit of the doubt. Take a look for yourself at this link. http://client.marketplace.windowsmobile.com/
The latest msmobiles podcast is now available and it is a great listen as we spent over an hour talking with Eric Lin from HTC. We talked about a lot of topics including the 3.5mm headset omissions, universal charging, the Touch Diamond range, the new Diamond2 and Touch Pro2 and his views on Windows Mobile 6.5 and lots more. You can download the episode directly here, subscribe in iTunes or through the RSS feed.
Msmobiles spent the day yesterday taking a look around the CeBIT exhibition in Germany and have shared a video look around the HTC booth. Some observations, various models of HTC phones were presented, including HTC Touch Diamond, Touch Diamond2, HTC Touch HD, HTC Touch Pro, S740 as well as accessories for them and two phones powered by Google Android. Take a look at the video after the break and visit msmobiles for more information and pictures from the booth.
So the news in the iPhone world this week has been dominated with the Cydia installer, you know the installer that you get when you Jailbreak your iPhone, they will be offering an alternative to paid applications in the App Store. So what does this all mean for iPhone users and to Apple.
Well personally speaking the App Store offers a fantastic service and developers get a fair share of the sale of an application and it all works well with the exception of a few things mainly the restrictions and rejection procedures of Apple.
For example, we are still waiting for decent turn by turn GPS software, office suite and hell even a video camera and MMS integration. If Apple released their grip and started allowing us to use our super powerful smartphones to do the things we want to do this wouldn’t even be news worthy.
According to the Kinoma blog, there can be big differences in quality and speed between one storage card and another. For quality, all you can really do is buy a brand you trust. But for speed, the good news is that there’s now a standard way of classifying the throughput of SD and SDHC cards — the Speed Class.
It’s really easy to understand, too. Class 2 cards guarantee a minimum transfer speed of 2 MB/second, Class 4 cards a minimum speed of 4 MB/second, etc. A card’s Speed Class should be clearly marked as a number in a round “C”, as shown above.
Kinoma recommend that you always buy storage cards that are Class 4 or higher, and normally buy Class 6 cards wherever possible. With a faster card your phone spends less time on data transfers, which translates to more efficient media playback. As an added bonus, copying media between the card and a PC will be faster as well.
via Kinoma Blog
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SplashData have launched version 2.0 of File Magic for iPhone. File Magic is a file transfer utility that enables you to drag and drop any type of file on your desktop to your iPhone or iPod touch so you can take them with you – like a briefcase. It comes with free desktop companion software that makes it very easy to sync documents, videos, music or pictures from your Windows or Mac desktop to your iPhone or iPod touch.
With the new version, you can now "beam" files wirelessly between iPhone devices. You can also email files as attachments from File Magic on the device, and the company has tightened up security with a password option to protect File Magic access.
Hot on the heals of Vodafone UK’s HTC Magic announcement comes confirmation that Orange France will launch the HTC Dream on March 15th. The Android device – which is better known as the T-Mobile G1 – will be the first to use the platform in the country, prior to the HTC Magic’s launch on SFR later in the year.
Here is a story that caught my attention over at Android Community. This cute looking device is hopefully going to hit soon as one of the ghostly Android phones rumoured to be released this year. Click on for the full story and a little video too.
Nokia is betting a wider and more tailored offering of media and software for its phones will prove attractive when its Ovi online store opens in May and goes head-to-head with Apple Inc’s App Store. The Apple store has proved the market for software supermarkets in the mobile world, with more than 500 million applications downloaded in only half a year. Nokia’s market is potentially bigger — it says the Ovi store will reach some 50 million consumers when it opens, while Apple has so far sold less than 20 million iPhones.
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