If the thought of turning your G1 90 degrees to the left and THEN sliding the screen up to reveal the keyboard has you chomping at the bit for an alternative input method, you’ll soon be able to use your sweaty, greasy finger to write out simple words – just like a real business man from the 1990s except you’ll be using your finger, not a stylus.
The Samsung SWD-M100 Mondi is the first Wimax device in the U.S. and hopes to pick up where Nokia’s Wimax tablet, now discontinued in the U.S., left off.
Katamari Damacy creator Keita Takahashi’s weirdo follow-up game has made, well, not exactly waves in the game community, but perhaps expanding circles of confusion. Guiding your stretchable “boy” around a bizarre world, the goal is to become as long as possible in order to help your girlfriend (who is much bigger) grow out to the outer planets. Sound weird enough? Well, now you can get your Noby Noby dose on the go, because they’re bringing it to the iPhone.
The pricing and date aren’t set, but after he showed it to the audience at GDC, Takahashi said he’d like to release it for free. We’ll see about that — but I think a buck or two is probably a fair price for the amount of nonsense fun this game will provide on subway and plane rides.
Imagine this is an analog to the BLAPP Store. Each jacket is an app.
Mike Lazaridis, co-CEO of RIM, will be announcing the BLAPP World at CTIA this year, adding one more app store to an already healthy app-store market. BusinessWeek calls the BLAPP store “much anticipated” and explains that it will be “chock-full of software programs.” Yes, that’s right: they described BLAPP world they way you’d describe rocky road ice cream and its attendant peanuts and marshmallows.
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Everybody panic! IDG is reporting that MS might charge users who send 5 or more mobile apps to the Microsoft Mobile App Bazaar in one year or update their apps too often. Why? Maybe the depression?
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Om Malik (he puts the Om in GigaOM) is reporting that “a very reliable” tipster told him “that Skype is almost ready to launch [an] iPhone version, perhaps as soon as next week.” Next week being the CTIA Wireless show in Las Vegas, where the big wireless companies get together to pat themselves on the back for stuff like fixing mobile broadband pricing at $60 per month for 5GB of data.
It’s been almost a year since we first got our hands on Samsung’s updated (u740) Alias, and whadoyaknow, Samsung is getting ready to launch the Alias2 on the Verizon Wireless network any time now. Funny how that tends to work. Just as you get comfortable with yesteryear’s technology…BAM, the next generation hits the scene.
You can get a free Sidekick 2008 from LetsTalk.com when you sign up for a new two-year contract with T-Mobile. Or, if you need to extend your contract you can get one for $49. T-Mobile is selling the device directly for $99, so you can save a little moolah with this deal.
T-Mobile Sidekick 2008 [LetsTalk.com via dealnews]
Here’s a spicy rumor for you all to enjoy. Apparently RIM is planning some sort of BlackBerry TV store/service/thing, and may launch it as early as CTIA next week. (CTIA is like CES, but just for cellphone stuff; actually, a more accurate comparison would have been with Barcelona’s Mobile World Congress; thank you.) It’d be a subscription service, and the TV shows download over a Wi-Fi connection; it won’t use your data (3G if you’re lucky) connection at all
Not that you particularly care, but WMPowerUser is reporting that Zune functionality is coming to Windows Mobile 7 and will allow operators to charge phone users for music purchased in the Zune store, thereby opening the Zune experience up to a millions upon millions of unwitting customers.
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There’s a reason you can’t really see the phone in this picture.
Let’s start with a little gem from the press release for this new S-E phone, shall we?
Maria knows that all eyes will be on her this season and thanks to her new T707; she can rest assured that whatever she does, she will look stylish, glamorous and be in control of her life with just the wave of a hand.
Now, to extrapolate, what we are seeing here is the suggestion that Maria Sharapova, besides having a mean arm, knows enough about cellphones to tell if she – or, in actuality, her travel coordinator and assistant – needs a gesture-based cellphone. Wait, what’s that you say? You think S-E paid her to say all those nice things about this otherwise dud of a flip phone? Why you might be right. And there we find the flaw in S-E’s plan for world domination.
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Guess what G1 users? T-Mobile has released its first Android app – My Account – to the Android Market. Now you have the ability to check pertinent account information right from the ‘droid in your hand.
According to Android and Me, T-Mo’s free My Account app provides “current activity, bill summary, plan information, online payment, help guides, forums, battery info, storage info, and more.”
While there’s nothing terribly groundbreaking here, it is nice to see a mobile carrier develop a native application for its own (current) flagship device instead of leaving it up to third party developers.
Sure, all the info included in My Account is readily available on the Net, in store, or over the phone, but why not take advantage of Android while also making customers a drop happier in the process? Nice work, guys.
Research in Motion has released an update for its BlackBerry Media Sync app this afternoon. The new version adds Windows Media Player support (PC only) to accompany its existing iTunes syncing tool.
If you’ve already got Media Sync installed on your BlackBerry, you should have received a notification that an upgrade is available. Otherwise, you can grab Media Sync for free over at blackberry.com/mediasync.
Let’s be honest. When companies talk about providing “complete” Internet access on their mobile devices, they are really only speaking a half-truth. That is, at least until Adobe Flash comes to mobile browsers.
Love it or hate it, Flash has become an integral website component, be it for video playback, games, or interactive animations. Its absence is very noticeable while surfing the Net on iPhones, WinMo / Symbian handsets, and Android-powered devices alike.
While Adobe continues to work on an official mobile Flash version (except for the iPhone), that hasn’t stopped other third parties from jumping the gun.
And so it goes. Last.fm, which just went to a pay-to-play model, is shutting down mobile streaming due to “licensing agreements.” This means unofficial Last.fm scrobbling and streaming apps will now be verboten – although for how long and to what degree are not clear.
The service will now cost 3 euros per month to users outside of the UK, US, and Germany and current subscribers will receive a 30-track trial.
Interestingly, the mobile changes actually address some non-public API calls that allowed software makers to stream Last.fm content relatively unpreturbed. The company said in a blog posting that these APIs will be closed.
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Are iPhone app developers getting paid on time from Apple? Not all of them. On this iPhone developer forum, there are numerous threads from developers who are complaining about delays in payments for January and not being paid the amount of money the developers are in fact due from sales. And we’ve received one complaint directly from an iPhone app developer that Apple is late on its payments for January. Apple’s contract, which is embedded below, says that payment will be made to developers within 45 days of the end of the month. That would have been a week ago.
Developers are expressing a number of gripes with Apple that extend beyond just being paid on time. We also hear (and read) that reaching Apple by phone is a complete nightmare. Emails to Apple go unanswered and customer service reps put developers on hold for 30 minutes to an hour and sometimes hang up on callers after they’ve waited to speak to an agent. Email seems to work best.
T-Mobile’s long awaited USB dongle is available starting today and we’ve had the pleasure of tinkering with the webConnect USB laptop stick for the day. T-Mobile hooked up with Huawei for their first foray into the mobile arena with a slim and stylish device. Considering how young and fertile T-Mobile’s 3G network, I was surprised by the speeds this little dongle could muster up. I’m currently in Redwood City, CA, and my parent’s house is a bit of a dead zone, but I managed to get 337kbps up and 841kbps down. We’ll see how she does when I get back to NYC where I’m sure the 3G network is a bit more robust. Sadly, it only works with Windows, but T-Mobile promises Mac OS X support this summer.
DSLReports is reporting (HA!) that Sprint’s 4G WiMax service, called Clearwire, to Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas/Fort Worth, Honolulu, Vegas, Philly, Portland and Seattle this year. Then, in 2010, expect Boston, Houston, NY, SF, and DC. Chicago is currently live but you cannot purchase subscriptions in that market.
Uh oh, Meebo – it looks like you might finally have some decent competition in the Android IM client space. Palringo, makers of the iPhone IM client of the same name, has released the first beta of their Android port.
Like the iPhone application, Palringo for Android supports MSN, AIM, ICQ, Yahoo!, Jabber, Gtalk, Gadu-Gadu and Facebook chat. It’ll also allow you to send picture messages to any contact, or share your location – a feature which seems a bit extraneous, considering that countless other services with the same purpose (including one built into the Android platform out of the box) are putting a ton of effort into coaxing people into sharing their location without any significant success.
Palringo for Android lacks one killer feature in its current beta state that made its iPhone counterpart stand out: voice messaging. On the iPhone port, you can record messages and send them to any one on your contact list. If they’re on Palringo, it’s played within the app – if not, it’s sent over as a link. It’s a godsend when your fingers are aching from blasting away on that itty-bitty keyboard all day. Fortunately, this isn’t too big of a deal right now, as the only Android phone on the shelves right now has a nice, finger-friendly physical keyboard. But when the touchscreen-only HTC Magic drops in April, many a fingertip around the world will be cryin’ for voice messaging.
There’s a rather sad story out of Cincinnati where a high school girl hanged herself because a nude photo she sent to her boyfriend via cellphone ended up spreading around the school, if not the town itself. It’s called “sexting,” and it’s apparently a big deal on high school campuses. And because of this legitimate tragedy‐why on Earth would kids tease this girl to the point where she decided to hang herself?—people are no wondering what, if anything, should be done to stop the phenomenon.
