Announced Monday morning, the Windows Phone 7 Series is a surprisingly fresh take on how a smartphone should look and work. Not only is the Zune software integrated, but third-party apps like Pandora are integrated into the interface. pOriginally posted at a href=”http://news.cnet.com/8301-13526_3-10453398-27.html” class=”origPostedBlog”Digital Noise: Music and Tech/a/p
Not quite sure if you’ve heard, but Microsoft launched a new mobile operating system today. Crazy, right? Unfortunately, it’ll be a few weeks seasons still before you can actually wrap your palms around an actual Windows Phone 7 Series device, but the folks over at MSDN aren’t holding back. They’ve hosted up a 22 minute video walkthrough to explain every nook and crannie of the fresh OS, and if you’re one of those “impatient” types, you owe it to yourself to hit the source link and mash play. Grab a beverage first, though.
[Thanks, Nathan]
Microsoft offers up lengthy Windows Phone 7 Series video walkthrough originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 15 Feb 2010 12:39:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Cellphone carriers worldwide are apparently sick of Apple’s iPhone App Store hogging all the attention and loot in the mobile software market. Two dozen of them are teaming up to open a cross-platform app store.
Carriers on board include Verizon, AT&T, Sprint, China Unicom, China Mobile, Softbank and Vodafone, among several others. The group has also partnered with three manufacturers — Samsung, LG, and Sony Ericsson — to support the initiative.
Announced at Mobile World Congress 2010 in Barcelona, Spain, the alliance’s goal is to create a “Wholesale Applications Community,” offering an open ecosystem that will enable developers to create one app for one store that’s accessible on a broad range of phones. Combined, the carriers serve 3 billion customers to date, which could be the potential audience for the wholesale app store.
The move, then, would free developers and consumers from vertical business models like Apple’s App Store. The App Store is exclusive for iPhone customers. Develop an app for the iPhone OS and it only works on iPhone OS devices (iPhone, iPod Touch and the upcoming iPad). Likewise, if you buy iPhone apps, you lose those apps if you switch to a non-Apple phone.
“The GSMA is fully supportive the Wholesale Applications Community, which will build a new, open ecosystem to spur the creation of applications that can be used regardless of device, operating system or operator,” said Rob Conway, CEO and Member of the GSMA board. “This is tremendously exciting news for our industry and will serve to catalyse the development of a range of innovative cross-device, cross-operator applications.”
As promising and beneficial as a wholesale app store sounds, it would be naive to expect it to arrive anytime soon. Cross-platform mobile operating systems, like Windows Mobile, already suffer from the issue of fragmentation: You can’t develop a single app for every Windows Mobile phone, because they vary in features such as screen size, buttons and more. The Wholesale Applications Community’s goal is to create an app store working on an even broader range of devices, and fragmentation will be an even more severe challenge to overcome.
The Wholesale Application Community also appears to be ignoring the fact that vertical integration was a key strategy that drove the App Store’s success. iPhone developers code apps that work only on iPhone OS devices, and thus they’re able to hone the quality and optimize the performance of their apps. In turn, because developers only have to code one type of app that reaches out to a large audience of iPhone OS users (about 75 million to date), many of them believe they have a better chance to make money this way. Vertical integration appears to be succeeding so far: The App Store has served 3 billion downloads and claimed 99.4 percent of the mobile-software market.
The Wholesale Application Community is aware that it would take a long time to achieve its goal.
“Ultimately, we will collectively work with the [World Wide Web Consortium] for a common standard based on our converged solution to truly ensure developers can create applications that port across mobile device platforms, and in the future between fixed and mobile devices,” the Wholesale Application Community said in a press release.
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This article was written on February 23, 2007 by CyberNet.
If you use WordPress for your blog, you may want to pay attention to DivShare because they’ve just made it easier for you to upload files directly to your DivShare account from the “Write a Post” page. We make good use of DivShare quite often, mirroring download links, and uploading other files that we don’t want to store on our own server. It’s always been a cut and dry, simple process, but now it got that much easier.
On their announcement, they mention that one of their goals is to power social experience, and they’re definitely doing this by adding new features left and right that make using their service worth it. For only being around for a over two months, I couldn’t be more impressed.
All you have to do is download the DivShare Uploader Plugin which will then replace the WordPress upload form which you’ll find on the “Write a Post” page. In it’s place will be a DivShare upload form. You don’t have to worry about HTML, or copying and pasting because your files will be inserted right into your post with one click. By creating a special key from your DivShare Profile page, your files will be linked to your account.
We just tried it out by uploading an image, and it’s great. When uploading an image, you’re given the option to insert a full sized image, a blog sized image (400 pixel), or a thumbnail (130 pixel). After you upload the image that you want on your blog, it’s literally one click and you’ll have your image inserted into your blog. I didn’t see a way to delete a file within WordPress (you can always do from the admin page on DivShare) which might be a nice addition in the future.
Another addition that would be nice is if they gave you the option to replace the WordPress upload form instead of automatically doing it, because some people may still want to host some of their own files and use DivShare for others.
It’s definitely a great feature and one that lends a helping hand to bloggers. Thanks for thinking of us DivShare! You can visit their blog for more details where you’ll also find the download link.
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Faster. Smaller. That explains so much of what happens in the computing world, and especially today’s announcement from Kingston Digital. The memory giant announced the availability of a 16GB microSDHC Class 10 card. If you’re not familiar with the “Class” business, that means it meets Class 10 requirements spelled out in the SD Association Specification 3.00: it has a minimum data transfer rate of 10MB/second.
The card comes with a lifetime warranty and Kingston’s 24/7 tech support. Nice. I wish more tech companies stood behind their products like that. You can buy it alone for $138, with an SD adapter for $139, or with a miniSD and SD adapter for $140. Those numbers are a little high, but you know how memory prices drop quickly. Just check the specs of your product before you buy: this card is compatible with microSDHC, miniSDHD, and SDHC devices, but not with standard microSD-enabled devices or readers.
Continue reading Motorola Quench hands-on with video
Motorola Quench hands-on with video originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 15 Feb 2010 12:10:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Forget everything you know about Windows Mobile. Seriously, throw the whole OS concept in a garbage bin or incinerator or something. Microsoft has done what would have been unthinkable for the company just a few years ago: started from scratch. At least, that’s how things look (and feel) with Windows Phone 7 Series. This really is a completely new OS — and not just Microsoft’s new OS, it’s a new smartphone OS, like webOS new, like iPhone OS new. You haven’t used an interface like this before (well, okay, if you’ve used a Zune HD then you’ve kind of used an interface like this). Still, 7 Series goes wider and deeper than the Zune by a longshot, and it’s got some pretty intense ideas about how you’re supposed to be interacting with a mobile device. We had a chance to go hands-on with the dev phone before today’s announcement, and hear from some of the people behind the devices, and here’s our takeaway. (And don’t worry, we’ve got loads of pictures and video coming, so keep checking this post for the freshest updates).
First the look and feel. The phones are really secondary here, and we want to focus on the interface. The design and layout of 7 Series’ UI (internally called Metro) is really quite original, utilizing what one of the designers (Albert Shum, formerly of Nike) calls an “authentically digital” and “chromeless” experience. What does that mean? Well we can tell you what it doesn’t mean — no shaded icons, no faux 3D or drop shadows, no busy backgrounds (no backgrounds at all), and very little visual flair besides clean typography and transition animations. The whole look is strangely reminiscent of a terminal display (maybe Microsoft is recalling its DOS roots here) — almost Tron-like in its primary color simplicity. To us, it’s rather exciting. This OS looks nothing like anything else on the market, and we think that’s to its advantage. Admittedly, we could stand for a little more information available within single views, and we have yet to see how the phone will handle things like notifications, but the design of the interface is definitely in a class of its own. Here’s a few takeaways on what it’s like to use (and some video)…
Gallery: Windows Phone 7 Series first look
Continue reading Windows Phone 7 Series hands-on and impressions (updated with video)
Windows Phone 7 Series hands-on and impressions (updated with video) originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 15 Feb 2010 11:56:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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If you thought the (admittedly weak) Liquid e was all Acer had in store for Mobile World Congress, you’d be badly mistaken. We’ve got a foursome of other smartphones on tap, so we won’t waste any time breaking ’em down. Up first is the neoTouch P300 and neoTouch P400, each of which ship with Windows Mobile 6.5.3. The P300 gets a luscious 3.2-inch WQVGA touch panel, slide-out QWERTY keyboard (backlit, no less!), WiFi and a March ship date, while the May-bound P400 packs a 3.2-inch HVGA touchscreen, 600MHz Qualcomm 7227 CPU, WiFi and a 3.2 megapixel camera. Moving on, there’s the beTouch E110 (shipping in March in black and dark blue), complete with a 2.8-inch touch panel, Android, 3 megapixel camera, FM tuner and a 1,500mAh battery. Finally, the beTouch E400 touts Android 2.1, the same 600MHz power plant as on the P400, a 3.2-inch HVGA resistive touchscreen, smart LED lighting (acts as a message indicator) and an April ship date. Pricing remains a mystery on the whole lot, but we’re hoping to learn more as we dig our heels in at the show.
Acer launches neoTouch P300 / P400, beTouch E110 / E400 smartphones originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 15 Feb 2010 11:52:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Barcelona — Today I tried out Opera Mini running on the iPhone, and it kicks Safari’s butt. The folks at Opera have a native version of their browser running on the iPhone, and while there are limits due to the way it is built, for sheer speed of browsing, it has Safari beat.
Opera Mini has not yet been submitted to Apple for approval: The demo I saw was of a very mature but unfinished version. But when it does get sent to Apple’s crack team of picky, fickle reviewers, it should, technically at least, pass. The reason that browsers other than those based on Webkit (Safari) aren’t allowed on the iPhone is that Apple bans the running of interpretive code. This means Java, or Flash, or any other runtime is out.
Opera Mini gets around this by doing all the rendering on the server – Opera’s servers actually run web browsers – and sending what are essentially pictures to the phone. These “pictures” look and act like regular web pages, only they are 90% smaller. That’s a big deal if you’re using a phone in a country with expensive bandwidth (Russia is a big market for Opera Mini).
IPhone users will be more interested in the cost reductions for roaming data use, and in speed. We loaded up the NYT front page in both browsers (Opera’s Phillip Grønvold is pretty good at hitting both “go” buttons at once) and we were up and browsing five or six pages deep with Opera before Safari had even finished the front page. Better, Opera is responsive to zooming and scrolling as soon as the text is up on screen. IPhone users know that this isn’t the case for Mobile Safari.
Another speed-up comes from caching. Not caching pages, but keeping the markup file (like we said, they’re not really just pictures) from each page, ready to re-display. This gives instant back-and-forward navigation.
There are some quirks. In order to keep things consistent across platforms (Opera Mini is available for almost any modern phone), some iPhone UI conventions are ignored. Copy and paste gets its own custom widgets, although it still talks to the built-in clipboard. In this way it is a little like, say, Photoshop, which has almost identical versions on Windows and OS X, even if the OS X version annoys many Mac users with its UI.
If Opera makes it through the Apple approval process, I’ll be grabbing it right away. The speed makes it perfect the kind of fast reading you do on a phone. And it has one feature that will surely make Apple warm to it: because it doesn’t support video of any kind, Opera Mini won’t display Flash.
Opera Mini for iPhone sneak peek [Opera]
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Straight out of Denmark comes a trio of additions to the ever-growing Android lineup, the result of “two years of top secret international development work” by Lumigon Corp. The first phones are the T1 and S1, both shipping before July, the latter of the two offering a sliding T9 keypad, both featuring Android 2.1, Freescale processors, 720p output over HDMI, FM tuning and broadcasting, and the handy ability to act as a universal remote. Next will be the E1, coming sometime later and offering a “unique navigation system and shape never experienced in mobile phones.” It’s so mind-blowingly beautiful that the company hasn’t deemed your or our eyes capable of beholding such a wonder, so no pictures have been released just yet. Perhaps if we spend our days in devotional contemplation we’ll be mentally prepared for its eventual release.
Lumigon T1, S1 and E1 Android smartphones offer a lovely blend of uniqueness and Scandinavian style originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 15 Feb 2010 11:29:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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