WMExperts have piled up the unholy trinity of super-hyped smartphones for your viewing pleasure. The iPhone doesn’t look quite so sleek with the HTC Touch Diamond riding it like a cheap slag. The Sony Ericsson Xperia has a QWERTY keyboard, so we’ll forgive it its inflated waistline.
The question is, which one would you most like some alone time with?
Apple has been down at the patent office again, patenting up an iPhone storm. This week those crazy cats have conjured up two ways to make your mobiling life easier. The first system tracks how far away you are from a mobile phone mast and then warns you when your call is about to drop. Apple has said that this warning could take many forms e.g. vibratory, audible, visual, or someone grabbing you by the shoulders and shaking you vigorously. The second is, bizarrely, a Bluetooth-based system to track down Bluetooth-enabled lost objects such as a Bluetooth headset. Apple could also release a tiny Bluetooth device, which could be attached to anything that you regularly lose, from a set of keys to your self-respect.
Many Apple patents never see the light of day, so is this illusion or reality? Hopefully we’ll eventually see the two ideas feature in a handset.
Source: Apple Insider
The wait is finally over. The Nokia N96 is set to ship on the 31st of July according to Play.com. The N96 follows on from the highly popular N95 and promises to add some great features like 32GB of memory, 3G HSDPA and 5 MP camera.. The N96 will cost a princely 599.99 for the handset alone with an offer for 10% off a sandisk 8GB.
Source: Boy Genius Report
The HTC Dream was shown off yesterday at the Google Conference. It’s a phone with a touchscreen and large QWERTY keypad. The screen’s 5×3 inches and there’s an accelerometer. The Android Community describes the user interface as being a blend of iPhone and Samsung GUI (graphical user interface) genius, with a touch of Google’s minimalism.
Much of the GUI is interactive –swipes and taps reveal menus and activate shortcuts. There’s also an interactive compass, which you can see in the video below. You can pan around a location-based image, creating an “augmented reality device”. Augmented reality sounds like a pretty sweet deal to me.
Oh yeah, and there’s a port of Pacman.
Check out the Android Community for more videos, pictures and explanations.
Skyfire, a mobile web browser allowing users to experience the web as they would on a PC, has secured $13 million in Series B funding. This latest cash injection takes Skyfire’s funding total up to $17.8m. The money will allow Skyfire to bring their browser to more platforms and improve distribution.
If you don’t know what Skyfire is, here’s a brief overview. Skyfire offers the closest mobile web experience to that of a PC. It supports web technologies that most browsers lack. You’ll be able to view sites on your mobile that you could previously only dream of – YouTube and Last.fm to name two. Zoom features, tabbed browsing and various optimisation techniques make Skyfire the Bugatti of the mobile web browsing world. Video and audio will load without a hitch, search results are improved and warring nations are reconciled over a nice cup of tea and some Hobnobs.
It’s still in private beta, but the waiting list to trial Skyfire is proving to be as successful as the Gmail invite system. There are a lot of mobile geeks wanting to get their hands on this little beauty of a browser.
For more information about Skyfire, check out readwriteweb.
Last week, several Indian news outlets reported that RIM had given the go ahead for the Indian government to monitor the domestic BlackBerry network. Unsurprisingly there was an outcry by consumers and everyone else who isn’t a tinfoil-hat-wearing nutjob. RIM has backtracked and is now saying that it is committed to “serving security-conscious businesses in the Indian market”. This is a far cry from the previous plan, which was to allow Indian security agencies access to the network in exchange for taking the blame for any leak of user data.
The Indian government is not completely happy with this and is demanding that RIM gives it “satisfactory answers” to its security questions. Hopefully the fear of a consumer backlash will prevent RIM from completely selling out its customers. It’s still not clear how secure text messages are in India so, if you can restrain yourself, keep your anti-government sentiments to yourself.
Source: Engadget Mobile
This perverse creation is called Mousephone. Despite looking like the lovechild of a Japanese schoolgirl and a space hopper, it does pack in quite a few features. It’s a tri-band GSM phone with 1.3-inch screen, MP3/MP4 playback, FM radio, stereo Bluetooth and keypad. One ear conceals a 1.3-megapixel camera. It costs around $225, and your dignity.
Source: Gizmodiva
If we don’t mention the iPhone on the Omio Blog at least once a week, something bad will happen. We don’t know what, but it’s like Lost with the numbers, if we don’t produce at least one iPhone post a week, we could disrupt the flow of time and space itself, the Blog might immediately self-combust. It’s just not worth the risk.
So here’s the latest in the long-running debate about what the 3G iPhone may or not have from the Guardian.
I don’t know how they make these predictions maybe they inspect the entrails of a slaughtered bird, maybe they take mescalin and take a visit to the astral plane but now the Guardian has produced 5 unfounded predictions about Job’s latest progeny.
Source: Guardian
There’s a tendency to treat people who’ve failed to fully embrace the cult of phone as mouth-breathing neanderthals. But thanks to ‘The Independent’, you can hear their side of the story. The ranks of mobile-non-believers include:
- Brian Sewell, art-critic and guest hijacker in the last edition of ‘Big Brother’
- Jilly Cooper, noted author of classics like ‘Violets and Vinegar: An Anthology of Women’s Writings and Sayings’
- Marcus Berkmann, quiz aficionado and co-writer of Radio 4’s ‘Lenin Of The Rovers’
There are also quotes from lots of other less famous people should you want to hear their excuses. Get them down to Omio and they might change their minds!
Inspired by the Nokia 5800 Tube, developer Morton Hjerde has built a concept for an intuitive music player dubbed “Flat Music Player”. The concept makes use of album artwork and a touch interface to create an experience that adapts to the user’s needs and eliminates outdated features of other music players, such as Paul McCartney.
Hjerde himself says, “The core idea here is to use the content itself as the interface.” I’ve no idea what that means either, but let’s enjoy the pretty video.
