Category: Mobile

Things that aren’t static

Living With A Nokia N95: A Bug’s Life (3/3)

Richard’s two previous parts on the N95 and N95 GPS haven’t been very encouraging. Today he covers connecting it to a computer, the 5Mpx camera, making phone calls and concludes with what he thinks of it.

Living With A Nokia N95: A Bug’s Life (3/3)Connecting the N95 to your computer
By this time, the N95’s battery is well and truly battered. Just a bar left. Plug it in to the admittedly elegantly well-designed lightweight charger and set about attempting a sync again.

PC Suite installs first time in Vista, and syncs with Outlook successfully and seamlessly. Hurrah – a success.
Continue reading Living With A Nokia N95: A Bug’s Life (3/3)

C-Shock: A Mobile Mummy On Your Phone

C-Shock: A Mobile Mummy On Your PhoneDeveloped by academics at the University of Portsmouth, a new mobile phone game aims to help international students deal with the ‘culture shock’ of arriving in bonkers Blighty and cope with the rigours of university life in Britain.

Dubbed ‘C-Shock,’ the game was developed by the University of Portsmouth’s academic and games technology expert Nipan Maniar, an ex-overseas student who arrived in the UK from India five years ago.

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GPS: Living With A Nokia N95: A Bug’s Life (2/3)

As we saw on Friday, Richard isn’t too happy with his Nokia N95. Today he tackles the GPS function and tomorrow the day after will be connecting his N95 to a computer, the 5Mpx camera and making phone calls.

GPS – Come to my rescue
Obviously, the narrow West End street where I work wouldn’t be a fair test, so I take it over the road to Golden Square in Soho. It’s Friday, it’s hot and sunny, if a little bit hazy, but I’m in a clear open space with no buildings for 50 metres on all sides.

GPS: Living With A Nokia N95: A Bug’s Life (2/3)Okay, time to try out the device’s killer app – GPS and Nokia Maps. Having previously owned a Garmin Trek and an ill-fated Ipaq 6915, I’m familiar with the sluggishness of finding an initial navigating signal, so I’m giving the Nokia plenty of leeway to be a bit slow at first.
Continue reading GPS: Living With A Nokia N95: A Bug’s Life (2/3)

Living With A Nokia N95: A Bug’s Life (1/3)

Living with A Nokia N95: A Bug’s LifeThe Nokia N95 promises so much. It’s got every gizmo and gadget you can imagine on it, but Richard Davis hasn’t found the dream to match the reality. After you read this, you’ll appreciate that he’s not a happy chappie.

Let me set the scene as to how I came about my Nokia N95. I fell out of love with Nokia after a rather clunky experience with the N73 a while back, followed by various other niggles which led me away.
Continue reading Living With A Nokia N95: A Bug’s Life (1/3)

Nokia 6120 Phone Packs HSDPA

With more and more mobile punters accessing the web to download music, watch video, browse the web or grab emails, Nokia are hoping to persuade some wallets to creak open for their new 6120 classic phone offering the faster HSDPA (High Speed Downlink Packet Access) connectivity.

Nokia 6120 Phone Packs HSDPAClaimed to offer downloads “up to 10 times faster than over usual WCDMA networks,” the Nokia 6120 bigs up its multimedia credentials sporting two cameras. The first is a basic, low res affair slapped on the front for video calls, while the main camera serves up 2-megapixels worth of picture-grabbing, 4-times digital zoom, a built in flash and a panorama mode.

Powered by a Symbian Series 60 OS, the 6120 looks very similar to its slower 3G predecessor, the 6233, with all the gubbins enclosed in Nokia’s familiar candybar form factor and a bright QVGA-quality display with 16-million colours dominating the front.

Nokia 6120 Phone Packs HSDPAThere’s Bluetooth on board for wireless streaming of stereo sounds, a built-in FM radio, support for MP3/AAC/MPEG4 tuneage and a micro SD card slot for slapping in some more memory capacity.

To help fumbling newbies and floundering technophobes, the 6120 comes with bundled How-To Guides and a Set-up Wizard for setting up email, messaging and Internet connection, with Data Transfer apps helping users shuffle all their contacts, calendars, photos, videos and files over from their old Nokia handset.

With the phone purring along on the S60 OS, there’s ample scope for users to download third party apps and customise the phone to their heart’s desire.

Nokia 6120 Phone Packs HSDPAHere’s Peter Ropke, Senior Vice President, Mobile Phones, Nokia to whip us into a frenzy of expectation for the phone, “With the HSDPA technology, S60 operating system and the wide range of features of the Nokia 6120 classic, consumers will be able to make their daily lives more manageable.”

The Nokia 6120 classic (no relation to the 6120 they released in the 1998!) should start shimmying on to shop shelves in the summer for around 260 Euros (around £175) SIM-free.

Nokia

Intel Preps Linux Powered UMPCs

Intel Preps Linux Powered UMPCsIntel is getting ready to release its own version of the mini-tablet, with CNN reporting that it will be announcing a new Linux-based ultra-mobile PC (UMPC) platform at this week’s Intel Developer Forum in Beijing.

Dubbed a ‘Mobile Internet Device’ (MID), the devices will sport 4.5 to 6.0 inch screens offering resolutions up to 800 x 480 and 1024 x 600 pixels, with the target audience described as “consumers and prosumers” and not mobile professionals.

There’s clearly some work to do on the platform name, with the devices currently codenamed ‘McCaslin’ while teams of whiteboard scrawlin’, flipchart flippin’ brainstormin’ types work on a more user friendly name.

Intel Preps Linux Powered UMPCsExpected to be released next year, the UMPCs are tipped to be an extension of the successful Centrino mobile brand, with the CPU components (codenamed Stealey) packing dual-core processors clocked at 600-800MHz.

Although capable of running Windows XP and Vista, Intel is looking to kit the devices out with an embedded Linux OS supplemented by a mix of open-source and proprietary code.

Who’s it for?
Intel Preps Linux Powered UMPCsIntel’s new gizmo is looking to woo punters with a seductive mobile mix of email, web, entertainment, information and location-based services, including the trusty Google Maps application and Web-based “office and enterprise applications.”

Connectivity will come in the shape of Wi-Fi and 3G HSDPA.

Interface
The new MID tablets will offer a simplified “finger-friendly” user interface, tweaked for big fat fingers on diddy screens. Based on the Gnome desktop, the OS will come with a “master user interface” desktop layer developed by Intel.

Developers will be given a peek at the first MID-specific OS next week (an updated version of China’s RedFlag Linux known as RedFlag MIDINUX), and slides of the interface have already made their way on to Engadget

Palm Releases Backup Program For Treo Users

Palm has unveiled a new beta app for Palm Treo users letting them back up their data over the air to Palm’s secure servers, without the need to connect to a desktop computer.

Palm Releases Backup Program For Treo UsersThe Palm Backup Beta service can be downloaded from here and lets users back up data from the core handset applications; Contacts, Calendar, Memos, Tasks, Blazer (web browser) bookmarks, quick dials and the call log.

Once the app is downloaded on to the Treo (a 300k .prc file), users are prompted to open a new account with Palm, and select their resident country (only the US and Canada were listed as being currently available, so – sssscch! – we lied and still managed to set up an account with no problem).

Palm Releases Backup Program For Treo UsersAn activation letter is sent to your email account, but you can start the back up on your Treo straight away (but you must activate your Palm account within 7 days otherwise your account will be closed).

The first screen asks you how often you want to schedule your Treo back ups (daily/weekly/monthly or manual) and at what time of the day or night.

Palm Releases Backup Program For Treo UsersA back up of your data will then be saved to Palm’s secure server as scheduled – so long as there is wireless data coverage available (if it fails to find a connection, it will try again at the next scheduled time).

Palm warns that if your Treo is stuffed full of data, the initial back up might take quite a while – something we discovered with the process taking something like 20 minutes over GPRS – but then we have over nine years worth of contacts, calendar and memo data filling up our much-used Treo 650. Subsequent backs up should be quicker.

Palm Releases Backup Program For Treo Users
Note that with all that data flying about, you’ll need a generous data allowance with your mobile service provider otherwise you might face hefty bandwidth bills.

With its obvious benefit to business users, this new backup service reflects Palm’s determination to start clawing back sales from high flying competitors like Blackberry and Windows Mobile.

Palm Releases Backup Program For Treo UsersPalm Backup Beta service currently supports Palm Treo 700p, Treo 680 and Treo 650 and there’s no news yet about release date or pricing.

Palm Backup Beta service

Mobile Linux Use Set To Soar

Mobile Linux Use Set To SoarLinux may be associated with sunlight-avoiding, beardy computer ‘enthusiasts’ pottering in sheds, but the popularity of its mobile phone version is predicted to soar.

Although Linux take-up has traditionally trailed miles behind Symbian – currently the head honchos of mobile OS platforms hogging around 60 per cent of the market share – research firm ABI thinks things are about to change.

They reckon that the number of mobile phones purring along on Linux is about to skyrocket from the current tally of 8.1 million phones to more than 200 million by 2012.

Mobile Linux Use Set To SoarABI also predicts that handsets incorporating the open source Linux as a real-time operating system (RTOS) replacement will also grow massively, leaping up from a base of just about zero today to 76 million units in 2012.

Stuart Carlaw, research director at ABI reckoned that Linux’s growth will be down to a number of factors; the breaking down of barriers for adoption, more industry bodies working to promote the OS (including Motorola, NEC, Panasonic and Samsung) and the ease in which phone makers and mobile operators can customise their handsets.

The new report by ABI Research, “Mobile Linux: Bringing License-Free Operating Systems to Smartphones and Mid-Tier Devices”, concludes that “Linux in the cellular phone is not a question of ‘if’, but ‘when’.”

ABI research

Elsewhere, The Linux Foundation has announced an update of the Linux Standard Base (LSB) and the release of a new testing toolkit, which can be found here: www.linux-foundation.org/en/LSB

BBC TV & Radio Trial On UK 3G

The BBC are going to start of a trial to syndicate a range of its television channels and radio networks via 3G to mobile phones within the month.

BBC TV & Radio Trial On UK 3GThree UK operators will be taking part, Orange, Vodafone and 3 giving subscribers to the trial the ability to watch BBC One, BBC News 24 and BBC Three streamed on their mobiles. Beyond some sports programmes and programmes where they don’t have the necessary rights.

As well as the TV channels, eight radio stations will also be included – Radio 1, 1Xtra, Radio 2, Radio 3, Radio 4, 6 Music, BBC 7 and Asian Network.

Appropriately enough the announcement by Richard Halton, BBC Controller of Business Strategy, was made at the Broadcast Mobile TV Congress.

The BBC haven’t done a great deal of content on mobiles, not that they’re not keen on it, as you’ll be able to tell from the comments of Richard Halton, “The BBC believes that mobile content is an important part of the broadcasting landscape and is looking at ways in which mobile devices will shape services of the future for licence fee payers.”

They hope to learn lots from this trial, as Ashley Highfield, Director of Future Media and Technology at the BBC said, “The findings, combined with quantitative and qualitative consumer research, will inform the BBC’s future mobile strategy.”

We’ll keep our eyes on this.