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HTC To Build Windows-Based Palm Treo 670/700?
HTC are rumoured to have won the contract to manufacture the much-hyped Windows Mobile-based version of Palm’s Treo smart phone.
The combination of Windows OS and the Treo’s fabulous form factor could prove a real market winner, although the device’s release is believed to some way off.
An article in the DigiTimes Website reported that the Treo/HTC hybrid was announced in the Chinese-language newspaper the Commercial Times.
The Taiwan-based High Tech Computer (HTC) firm already manufactures its own popular suite of Windows Mobile-based smart phones and PDA-style communicators, which go under a mass of different names worldwide, depending on the mobile networks operators and handset vendors.
Their big-selling models include the XDA Mini (MDA Compact/ HTC Magician/ i-mate JAM/Qtek s100), XDASII (Qtek 2020/i-mate/Orange SPV M1000/Movistar tsm 500) and XDAIIs (MdaIII/iMate PDA2k/Qtek 9090/HTC Blue Angel/Audiovox 6600/Siemens SX66/Orange SPV M2000).
HTC also undertakes contract manufacturing on behalf of a number of partners, and was said to be producing the Palm OS-based Treo 650 back in September 2004.
Rumours quickly spread that HTC would be creating a Windows Mobile-based Treo called the Treo 670, with a host of fuzzy images purporting to be the new device appearing on the Web.
Both Palm and HTC have staunchly refused to confirm their collaboration.
There’s no denying that HTC would be a logical choice to create a Windows Mobile-based Treo, with some pundits suggesting that the company may have lent some Windows Mobile development expertise to Palm’s design team.
The Commercial Times article suggests that HTC may well have designed the 670 itself, working to the parameters of the standard Treo feature-set and case design.
Just as we went to press, another rumour flashed across the Web, with Cool Tech Times showing a fairly convincing photograph of what it reckons is the new Treo 700.
Naturally, large opencast excavations of salt are needed when it comes to these things, but for the record the site claims that the Treo will feature a 1.3 megapixel camera with 8x digital zoom and EVDO capability (EVDO stands for Evolution Data Only, and is the wireless broadband protocol of choice for CDMA networks).
Although the design could have come straight off the screen of some time-rich spoddy Photoshop kid (and we definitely have some doubts about its authenticity), it’s still a pretty looking affair, reflecting the strong points of the Treo’s long standing design ethos.
Whatever the final Treo looks like, it’s only Palm’s hopeless feet-dragging over implementing consumer-demanded features like proper Wi-Fi support that reluctantly sent us to the Windows dark side a few months ago, so whenever the next Treo 670/700/whatever-you-want-to call-it ever surfaces, we’ll take a boxful please!
DigiTimes.com
12 August, 2005
Yahoo Unveils Audio Search Facility
Yahoo is testing a new Audio search facility to let users find audio files on the Web.
The free service, available online at Yahoo Search, claims to have indexed more than 50 million audio files including music downloads, albums, spoken word newscasts, speeches, interviews and, notably, podcasts.
Additionally, the search engine has indexed other audio related information including music videos, album reviews, artist images and artists’ Websites.
Although other internet search engines have the capability to find audio files, Yahoo claims that theirs is the dog’s bollo’s because the company has received permission to index downloadable songs offered by almost all of the biggest mainstream and independent providers.
These include iTunes, Napster, eMusic, GarageBand.com, Napster and RealNetworks’ Rhapsody, letting users click to buy once they’ve found the tunes they’re looking for.
Although the service is still in beta we were impressed with its speedy and simple interface: typing in the name of one of my (sadly) obscure old punk songs immediately brought up the album details, a list of download locations and links to reviews and other released albums.
For many of the songs, you can preview tunes before buying, with a ‘Preferred Audio Service’ option letting users select their, err, preferred music service from a comprehensive list.
Impressive!
This latest offering from Yahoo reflects the growing trend by search engine companies to expand their services into multimedia as well as text-based searching.
With all of the major players already offering some kind of video search facility, the race is on to provide a true, one-stop search engine capable of indexing everything on the Web.
Yahoo Audio Search
5 August, 2005
Technorati Mobile Launches
Technorati has launched Technorati Mobile, a stripped-down version of the popular blog search facility designed to be viewed on mobile phones and handheld computers/smartphones.
In case you’re not familiar with the site, Technorati is a real-time search engine that keeps track of what is going on in what they describe as “the blogosphere”.
Sadly, that’s not some cool, far-distant planet where everyone wears hover-boots, but simply their word for online blogs.
Technorati works by tracking zillions of blogs and building a constantly updated database of blog entries, creating what they like to describe as a “live view of the global conversation of the Web.”
Making it easier for mobile users to access this service seems a smart enough idea, so Technorati Mobile serves up similar options to the main Technorati site, but in a frill-free interface.
The text-only home page offers a search box, a list of the top ten search terms from the past hour and a short listing of Web links under the title, “What’s happening on the Web right now in News, Books and Movies.
Three stories are displayed from each category, with links underneath leading to pages containing aggregated blog comment on the stories.
There’s also the option to get a further ten stories – with associated blog links – by clicking the ‘more’ link in each category.
Although the Technorati Mobile site is designed for mobile users, we mightily warmed to its simple, no-nonsense interface and found it preferable to their Web version.
So much so, in fact, that it’s now replaced their Web version in our PC desktop bookmarks!
Technorati
1 August, 2005
Motorola Adds Yahoo! Web Services To Mobiles
As part of Motorola’s strategy to tempt home and business with new services, the company has announced that it will add Yahoo! Web services to their Linux-based mobile devices.
The company intends to integrate Yahoo Internet services – such as e-mail, search, instant messaging and news – into its handheld and desktop devices throughout the major markets, starting in 2006.
As well as phones, the deal will also see Yahoo’s services pre-installed into home broadband-enabled products and its soon-come digital radio and MP3 device, iRadio.
Motorola plans to make these services available to operators worldwide with the aim of increasing consumer adoption of mobile data services.
Ron Garriques, president of Motorola’s mobile device business, said: “By optimising these products for our leading Linux and Java software platform, we’re making it just that much easier for operators to maximize revenue while delivering the most innovative consumer experiences.”
This announcement follows Motorola’s launch of their new daft Bluetooth sunglasses.
Elsewhere, the company have also announced that Vonage will offer the new Motorola VT2442 voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) gateway to its Internet telephony customers.
It hasn’t exactly got the sexiest of names, but Motorola VT2442 is touted as greatly simplifying the process of adding broadband telephone service into a home network.
The technology also serves up a fully-featured home network router, offering four Ethernet ports for connecting computers or gaming consoles, and an advanced firewall for Internet security.
Yahoo
Motorola
Motorola, Vonage Team
27 July, 2005
White PSP: Microsoft Patent Emoticons: Google Rule – News Catch-Up
Microsoft Wants To Own Emoticons
Microsoft has filed an application with the US Patent & Trademark Office to safeguard its rights on “methods and devices for creating and transferring custom emoticons.”
In case you’ve been living under a rock, emoticons are representations of faces made up by keyboard characters and originally all looked like this :) and :-/.
Nowadays, many mobile phones and computers automatically replace the text characters with an appropriate custom image when it spots emoticons in text messages and emails.
It’s far from clear what makes Microsoft think they should own Emoticons – there again, it’s never held them back before.
Microsoft’s patent application
Microsoft emoticons
Sony Whips Out A White PSP
Sony has confirmed that it will be launching a groovy white version of its PSP, but – surprise, surprise – only in Japan.
Sony has a long history of serving up different coloured units in different territories, with the PS2 being released in Aqua, White, Yellow and Silver in the past.
The company has also announced a firmware update (in Japan, natch) so that users can surf the Internet directly from the console.
Some techie users have already been enjoying Web access on their PSPs after a hack was discovered that took advantage of a hole in the operating system used by certain games.
There’s no date set for a US and European patch, although Japanese firmware updates traditionally precede roll-outs in other markets. Sony White PSP
Google Grabs 47% Of All Searches Online
Nielsen//NetRatings “MegaView Search” report has ranked Google as the Big Cheese of search engines, registering 47% of all searches conducted online.
Lagging some way behind was Yahoo! at 22%, with MSN limping into third place at 12% and AOL Search only managing a comparatively feeble 5% of all searches.
Image searching grew hugely in popularity across all the search engines, with MSN seeing the largest increase in its image searches with a massive 90% surge. AOL’s image search zipped up 74%, Yahoo!’s soared 55%, and Google’s jumped by a rather modest 12%. Nielsen//NetRatings
25 July, 2005
VoIP Market To Hit $4 Billion By 2010: Report
The North American voice over IP (VoIP) market is about to go completely bananas, with phenomenal growth predicted for the next six years, according to a report by Frost & Sulllivan.
The analyst’s newly-released North American Residential VoIP Markets report says that the pervasiveness of broadband Internet access and the availability of low-cost VoIP services will spur huge growth, with consumer VoIP market revenues reaching $4.07 billion (~£2.33bn, ~€3.34bn) in 2010 – up more than 1300% over $295.1 million (~£169m, ~€242m) last year.
The report anticipates a stampede of non-traditional telecommunications companies – including cable operators, Internet service provider (ISP), and non-telecom companies – charging into the voice market, driving the number of North American VoIP lines up to 18 million from 1.5 million in the same period.
The VoIP’s operator’s joy could be the incumbent local exchange carriers (ILECs) misery, as Internet telephony represents a direct threat their market share and revenue.
According to Frost & Sullivan’s report, ILECs are already reeling from losing 15 million access lines to their non-traditional competitors, although a sizeable proportion of these were data lines and second residential lines.
“Residential subscribers are likely to replace second lines with wireless or VoIP; the benefits of VoIP include lower cost, additional features and ease of use,” Frost & Sullivan Senior Analyst Lynda Starr said in a statement. “If an ILEC offers VoIP, it risks cannibalising traditional revenue but also opens up new revenue streams.”
The report concludes that it’s the quality of service and the VoIP feature set that’s attracting punters to the service rather than a desire to get in with the hi-tech crowd.
Frost & Sullivan notes that the mass market will initially be attracted by cost-savings, but the compelling new features on offer will ensure VoIP’s success.
Frost & Sullivan
21 July, 2005
The Cloud And Skype Partner
Skype has teamed up with The Cloud – Europe’s leading Wi-Fi network provider – to offer low cost Wi-Fi access and Internet voice calls at 6,000 of The Cloud’s hotspots in the UK and Sweden.
The partnership forms part of Skype’s world domination plans as the global roll-out of their new ‘Skype Zones’ beta service gathers speed.
This lets Skype users make calls and access program features at cheap rates at thousands of hotspots across the world.
Skype are currently notching up more partners than Casanova after a gallon of oysters, having announced a deal with Ready To Surf network back in March, covering over 350 Internet locations across the UK.
Skype users ambling into a Cloud hotspot will be connected to the service as soon as they flip out their Wi-Fi enabled device.
Once connected, they will be able to instant message for free over Skype, without needing to log on to Skype Zones.
Unlike the Broadband service, users will have to shell out if they want to get yapping over VoIP, with the Skype Zones service costing for €6.18 (~£4.25, ~$7.40) per month for subscribers or €2.50 (~£1.72, ~$3) for a 2-hour connection.
“We believe that the mobility offered by Skype Zones and has the power to revolutionise modern communications,” purred Niklas Zennström, CEO and founder of Skype.
“Skype is bringing affordable Wi-Fi and voice calls to millions of users, enabling them to talk, IM and surf conveniently and cost-effectively from thousands of great locations. Our users in the UK and Sweden will benefit from The Cloud’s extensive network coverage in places where people really want to use it.”
George Polk, founder and CEO of The Cloud joined in with the backslapping: “Skype is the global leader in easy to use, superior quality Internet telephony, and we are very excited to be part of their ground-breaking Wi-Fi roll-out. Skype has become mission critical for its millions of users, and we are looking forward to seeing this new service drive traffic in our vast range of sites.”
Skype The Cloud
19 July, 2005
FeedStation, FeedDemon Review: RSS Newsreader (Rated 5/5)
Developed by Nick Bradbury, the smart fella responsible for creating the fabulous Homesite (still our fave HTML editor) and the superb Top Style CSS Editor, FeedDemon 1.5 is a powerful RSS aggregation tool.
As we’re sure you know RSS stands for Rich Site Summary or Really Simple Syndication. It’s an XML standard that easily enables the distribution of new article, as summaries or full text – further details are on Wikipedia. The key thing to know is that in this world of fast moving, ever-increasing news, RSS and its readers making it easier to stay on top of it all.
The slick, standalone newsreader is ideal for people dipping their toes into the world of RSS, with FeedDemon’s setup wizard making it easy for folks to find and subscribe to popular RSS feeds by simply choosing from a pre-configured list of popular feeds.
If you can’t find anything of interest, users can boldly seek out new search channels via the Search Channels functions.
This lets users select a feed search engine, enter a keyword, and sit back while FeedDemon subscribes to a dynamic channel containing the search results for that keyword.
An unlimited amount of feeds can be filed into channel groups (like ‘news’, technology’, ‘sports’ etc), with all the RSS feeds being displayed in the left hand panel.
Clicking on a feed brings up a list of headlines in the middle panel, listed by date, and clicking on a headline opens up the entire article within a tabbed browser in the third pane.
We found this approach intuitive and fast, although users with small monitors may have to indulge in an orgy of scrolling to view all the content in its default layout.
The interface is configurable though, so users can make more room by shunting the browser to the bottom of the interface.
The program contains a nifty “Watch Channels” feature which searches for news items containing user-specified keywords and then organises them into a separate group so they’re easier to find.
The “News Bins” function was also a hit with us: this feature lets you archive a story simply by dragging a headline and lobbing it in the storage bin at the bottom of the left-side column.
FeedDemon’s new podcasting tools let news-hungry junkies download audio files and automatically copy them to their iPod (and, notably, other media players) with the bundled FeedStation utility allowing the scheduling of downloads – letting users charge up their iPod with new content while they’re snoozing.
With an enthusiastic developer regularly contributing to the online help forums and a slew of updates and tweaks being made to the program, we can thoroughly recommend FeedDemon for both newbies and RSS old hands.
Star Rating: 5/5
FeedDemon
Price: US$29.95 (~£17 ~€24) Windows only.
15 July, 2005
BT Resort To Soft Porn To Sell BT Communicator?
We had a report from a reader today that he’d been … ehm, carrying out tests on his content filtering service. This entailed going to sites with photos of naked bodies – purely to test that the content filter blocked his access to them you understand. One of first sites he went to was the well known UK tabloid, The Sun.
Clicking through a few pages he was somewhat taken aback to find a scantily clothed woman leaning over a computer, promoting BT Communicator, which is BT’s software-based VoIP (Voice over IP) offering. When it launched, one of our writers, Fraser Lovatt, looked at BT communicator and wondered quite why the product existed at all,
“It certainly won’t make it cheaper as BT will bill you at exactly the same rate they bill for calls from your home phone, despite giving a clear warning on their site that PC calls aren’t as good. So, I have to ask – what’s the point?”
It would appear to us that BT’s confidence in their BT Communicator product seems to have hit an all-time low today with its appearance in The Sun.
The piece in the Gizmo section of the site and paper features BT’s new model to promote BT Communicator, Michelle Marsh.
In her excitement to use the product, Michelle has fortunately remembered to don her headset, but sadly has put on her school shirt (it’s a little tight) and then forgotten to wear a skirt.
This is the wording they used in the article ..
“Marvellous Michelle Marsh has been signed up by BT to front (and let’s face it, she’s got plenty of it) a campaign for its Communicator service.
The luscious lovely is plugging the virtues of BT Communicator with Yahoo! Messenger, technology that allows you to phone, text, email and instant message from your PC.
And the stunner is doing it as only she knows how – dressed up in stockings and suspenders as a saucy secretary.”
Classy isn’t it. Lots of mentions of commercial products in there, not the sort of copy that falls out of the finger tips of a tabloid journalist. Surely BT aren’t using advertorials in The Sun to promote Communicator to the masses?
Looking at Ms Marsh’s previous work, it’s clear that she’s a busy little bunny. Her extensive career features the expected large variety of lads mag, car and bike mag shoots, but also extends to a photo shoot in Blackpool for the Tory party conference. Interestingly earlier this year she did the press launch for Bulldog Broadband – a big competitor to BT.
So is this a desperate ploy to try and promote a product that has no reason to exist? or have we go the wrong end of the stick?
The Sun – BT Communicator
14 July, 2005
Skype Zones Offers Wi-Fi VoIP On The Move
Boingo Wireless and Skype have fluttered eyelids at each other, gone for a quiet snog and, ruddy faced, jointly announced Skype Zones, a partnership that offers global Wi-Fi access to Skype customers at (ahem) “revolutionary” prices.
Skype Zones will let Skype’s 45+ million users access the popular VoIP service via Boingo’s network of 18,000 Wi-Fi hot spots worldwide, using a customised Skype version of the Boingo Software.
Currently, unlimited Wi-Fi access for Skype Internet telephony calls is being charged at $7.95 (~€6.53~£4.50) per month, although terms and availability may change as the service is still in beta.
Customers can access Skype on the move via the Skype Zones software which includes Boingo’s Wi-Fi sniffer, connection management and roaming authentication capabilities.
Once connected, laptop flipping punters will be able to make Skype calls and access features such as presence, global user directory, contact lists and instant messages with the Skype software.
“Partnering with Skype demonstrates the evolution of public-access Wi-Fi to include VoIP and other value added applications by allowing greater connectivity and productivity on the move,” said David Hagan, Boingo president and CEO. “Skype’s convenience and call quality have made it as important to travellers as email, and we expect Skype usage to increase traffic and revenue at our network of hot spots.”
Fluffing up the big pink cushions of corporate love, Niklas Zennstrom, Skype CEO purred passionately about his new partner: “Boingo is a world-class company that offers Skype users unprecedented global communications mobility and accessibility, at an aggressive, market disrupting price.”
“Affordable broadband access is fundamental to open communications, and partnering with Boingo to deliver unlimited Skype access around the world at such a compelling price point will generate new customers for both companies,” he added.
The combined Skype Zones service is available immediately as a beta test, with Skype inviting user feedback to help them fine-tune the service.
The Skype Zones client is available for Windows PCs and can be downloaded from the Skype store or the Boingo Web site. The software includes a directory of Boingo’s 18,000 hotspots.
Monthly access to Skype Zones is $7.95 per month for unlimited Skype access or $2.95 (~€2.42~£1.66) for a 2-hour connection.
UK users may find the pricing offered by Ready To Surf a little more ‘revolutionary’, as it gives free Wi-Fi access to make Skype calls in 350 Internet locations across the UK.
Boingo
Skype
Ready To Surf
12 July, 2005