Skyfire browser for Windows Mobile is game changing, does Flash

The Skyfire browser is set to finally bring PC-like browsing to your Windows Mobile device with crazy speeds and support for all manner of embedded content. Sure, there are ways to get Youtube and other mobile video content through proxy sites that convert on the go or with other 3rd-party applications, but this puppy does it all in one sweet and free package. Facebook and Myspace pages load up in no time, video plays in the browser, and all of this is accomplished with some server side magic on the part of the Skyfire server but is completely transparent to the user. All flavors of Windows Mobile -- 5 and 6 for both touchscreen and not -- are supported with the roadmap hinting at Symbian support in the near future. Sounds too good to be true? It is, and you don't have to just take our word for it, follow the read link to get signed up for the beta, this is something that just cannot be missed.

Update: Check the video of it in action after the break.

Step-by-Step: Jailbreak the iPhone 1.1.3 Firmware

Before you get started, be sure you've got at least 1GB of free space on your computer, 300MB of free RAM, and 300MB of free space on your iPhone.

read more | digg story

Cops Can Search You...and Your Phone's Memory

Here's a frightening but real proposition: if you are caught breaking certain traffic laws, not only do police have the right to search you—they can go through all your electronic data as well—your text messages, call histories, browsing history, downloaded emails and photos. In a recent academic paper, South Texas Assistant Professor Adam Gershowitz explains that because many traffic violations are arrestable offenses, just as a cop could search your pockets for drugs, said cop can also search your pockets for a smartphone and go through all its contents. The same is true for any standard arrest, and given the amount of data in current smartphones, it's a scary proposition (even for law-abiding citizens like us).

We'll give you the CliffsNotes version of Gershowitz's 30-page article in which he outlines the situation.

The Issue:

While society and technology have changed drastically over the last few decades, the search incident to arrest rule has remained static. Thus, if we think of an iPhone as a container ­­like a cigarette package or a closed box, police can open and search the contents inside with no questions asked and no probable cause required, so long as they are doing so pursuant to a valid arrest.

A Recent Precedent:

The Fifth Circuit's recent 2007 in United States v. Finley is representative. Police arrested Finley after a staged drug sale. The police then searched Finley incident to arrest and found a cellphone in his pocket. One of the investigating officers searched through the phone's records and found text messages that appeared to relate to drug trafficking...­­the court explained that "police officers are not constrained to search only for weapons...they may also, without any additional justification, look for evidence of the arrestee's crime on his person in order to preserve it for use at trial.

The Solutions:

Courts and legislatures can attempt to minimize this invasion of privacy by changing the legal rules to require that searches be related to the purpose of the arrest, by limiting searches to applications that are already open, by restricting suspicionless investigation to a small number of discrete steps, or by limiting searches to data already downloaded onto the iPhone, rather than data that is merely accessible through the iPhone's internet connection.

I guess the larger moral of the story is that if you plan on getting arrested, don't have a smartphone in your pocket with all the seedy plans. [article via popgadget]

read more | digg story

iPhone 1.1.3 jailbreak now for Mac, that was quick

It has definitely been an iPhone-friendly day on the interwebs. It was just a few hours ago that the iPhone 1.1.3 jailbreak was released to the public by Nate True (from cre.ations.net). However, this was a Windows-only version of the jailbreak; but Nate was working on a Mac version and has just released it!

You can download the Mac version of the software from the cre.ations.net website. Please note that this jailbreak might be hazardous to your iPhone's health. Before you jailbreak your iPhone, be sure to backup in iTunes -- and as always, hacking your iPhone is completely at your own risk.

read more | digg story

Google Sees Surge in iPhone Traffic

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. — Of all the iPhone’s features, none had reviewers gushing more than its Internet browser. It was the first cellphone browser that promised something resembling the experience of surfing the Internet on a PC. Santa helped deliver on that promise.

On Christmas, traffic to Google from iPhones surged, surpassing incoming traffic from any other type of mobile device, according to internal Google data made available to The New York Times. A few days later, iPhone traffic to Google fell below that of devices powered by the Nokia-backed Symbian operating system but remained higher than traffic from any other type of cellphone.

The data is striking because the iPhone, an Apple product, accounts for just 2 percent of smartphones worldwide, according to IDC, a market research firm. Phones powered by Symbian make up 63 percent of the worldwide smartphone market, while those powered by Microsoft’s Windows Mobile have 11 percent and those running the BlackBerry system have 10 percent.

The iPhone has taken the frustration out of browsing on a mobile phone, said Charles Wolf, an analyst with Needham & Company.

Other companies confirmed the trends, if not the specific data, observed by Google. Yahoo, for instance, said iPhones accounted for a disproportionate amount of its mobile traffic. And AdMob, a firm that shows billions of ads on mobile Web sites every month, said it saw traffic from iPhones surge drastically around Christmas.

“Consumers are going to demand Internet browsers” as good as Apple’s, said Vic Gundotra, a Google vice president who oversees mobile products.

Mr. Gundotra said Web browsers as capable as the iPhone’s could also prove a boon for developers of mobile software, who have long struggled to adapt their programs to different types of phones. As it does on the PC, he said, the browser could provide a more homogeneous “layer” for programmers.

“The reason no one considered this seriously is that the Web layer on mobile devices was terrible,” he said. Google has taken advantage of the capabilities of the iPhone browser to create a product, internally called Grand Prix, that it says provides easy access to many of the company’s services, including search, Gmail, Reader and Picasa.

Google, which developed the first version of Grand Prix in six weeks, is introducing a new version on Monday, just six weeks after the first one. That is a speed of development not previously possible on mobile phones, he said.

John Markoff contributed reporting from San Francisco.

Best Nokia Phone Ever - Nokia 6630

Nokia 6630 review: Time to return to the fold

Ever since I got my Motorola A925 in the Spring, I've secretly been longing to go back to a Nokia. And when the 6630 was announced almost six months ago, I knew that was the phone that would take me back to Finnish mobile engineering. The specification read 3G, 1.3 megapixel camera, 1 hour video records, more RAM, smaller size, and lots of other goodies.

Recently, though, my longing for Nokia had grown into despise of my A925. Russel was spot on with Smart Phones Are One Handed Devices. What I wanted was a smartphone, what I had was not:

If you can't use the phone with one hand, it's not a smart phone. Got it? It's pretty simple. It's a PDA Phone or a Communicator or something. Whatever it is, it's not a smart phone. It's a relic. An elecronic organizer with an antenna. An anachronism. A soon-to-be market failure. Get the idea?

Let's go over this again: If it doesn't have a keypad? It's not a smart phone. If you have to use a pen? It's not a smart phone...

The Motorola A925 is not a smartphone. It's successor, the A1000 that I tested for the Christmas issue of the Danish 3 Magazine is not a smart phone either. I had to learn that fact over a couple of months. When you have to stand still and use two hands to SMS or when you need either really baggy pants or a bag to carry your phone around, something is just not right.

So that's why I'm incredibly pleased to report that I'm back on the smartphone track with the brand-spanking new Nokia 6630. So what's so great about it? From a casual glance, you'd perhaps think it's pretty much the same as the 3650 I got as my first smartphone. You couldn't be more wrong and right at the same time!

Yes, it's still running S60, so the user interface is instantly familiar if you've had any other S60 device (like the 3650/60, 6600, 7610). But underneath the hood so much has changed in exactly the right direction. A short run-down of the hardware improvements:

• Dimensions: 110x60x21mm that's almost HALF the mass of the A925 and considerably smaller than the 3650. It'll fit in regular pants with no need for funny smiles from strangers.


• CPU: 220mhz ARM9 / RAM: 7MB free that's more than twice the speed of the 3650 (107mhz) and almost three times the amount of RAM available (2.7MB)! You feel the speed instantly when working with the camera or even just using the regular functions.


• Camera: 1.23 megapixel (1280x960) with 3.7mm lens and 6x zoom this takes much, much better pictures than both the 3650 and the A925 (on which shots were really questionable) in daylight. Evening shots are still so-so. And there's almost no lag on the shutter. Click and the picture is taken thanks to the faster CPU.


• Stereo audio and decent headphones it's actually possible to enjoy listening to MP3's on the phone now. I can see how the phones a generation or two away could start to chip into Apples iPod business. For now, I'm happy to carry around my iPod mini along with the phone, though.



• 3G! Nokias first 3G phone was an embaressment. What an awesome comeback to put thier top-of-the-line phone on the 3G network. Downloading with 20 kbs/sec is quite an experience on a phone of this power. Especially because you can use Opera with Small-Screen Rendering instead of being forced to use the watered down (read: crappy!) version bundled with the A925/1000.

All that hardware would do you nothing without great software, though. Thankfully, the S60 platform has had plenty of time to breed the best suite in the business. Here's what I got on my phone:

• Opera: With 7MB of free RAM, the days of "out of memory" errors that plagued the 3650 are finally behind us. And finally getting Small-Screen Rendering back is so incredibly cool that browsing the web from your phone is actually a somewhat pleasant experience (3G certainly helps with that). I can't believe that Motorola/3 axed SSR from the A925/1000 version of Opera. And worse, ensured that you couldn't install the full Opera even if you wanted to. Braindead and hugely damaging to an otherwise nice set of PDA-phones.



• Agile Messenger 3: From the "I can't believe it's free!" department comes this superb instant messaging client from Agile Mobile that goes on all the major networks (I use it for AIM and MSN). The latest version is incredibly good looking and capable of running in the background and showing notifications on the top of any other app when new messages arrive.


• ProfiMail: Even though the email client in the 6630 has improved (with intervalled checking of mail, most importantly), this alternative from Lonely Cat is still very nice. If you do a serious amount of emailing from your phone it's definitely recommended. Russell had a nice review of it a while back as well.


• Clicker: I use this Mac remote primarily to control the music broadcasting from my Powerbook in the home office to the stero in the living room over Airport Express. This means that you can hide your computer away for a party, but still have all your digital music at your fingertips. Very sexy. And surprisingly non-geeky too. Mary got it instantly.


• Putty: Controlling your servers over SSH through your phone? Oh, yeah. That is quite sexy. And with the 3G connection there's virtually no lag. Runs very well and allows me to check up on the Basecamp servers away from the computer.



• Goboy: Play all Gameboy and Gameboy Color games on your phone! You can take your J2ME games and shove 'em, I got all the games I would ever care for in the GB/C library including the best version of Tetris ever made. And with the 7MB of RAM available, you can play even 16 MBit games like Mario Golf and Micro Machines v3 (versions 1.3 and forward doesn't currently work, you need the 1.2 version) of course you need the original catridges to rightfully play these games (read: don't email me about pirate games).


• Repligo: Convert PDFs and read them on your phone. I've read all of the Pragmatic Starter Kit books like this along with a bunch of Manning books. Very comfortable.

With all this glamour and gold, there had to be one drawback about the phone and there is! From Nokia 7610 and forward, synchronization is now done through SyncML instead of the old mRouter. iSync doesn't grok SyncML yet and probably won't until Tiger (they hired a guy from Symbian to work on it, so it is getting done). So no address book or iCal synching. Sad but true.

But despite the lack of synching, I'd still like to declare the Nokia 6630 as:

Best. Phone. Ever.

It's that good. No really. It's that good!

First iPhone Trojan Seen in the World

Apple's going to have a field day with this. "See, if you hadn't hacked or jailbroken your iPhone, this wouldn't have happened," and "look what could happen."

This malware, more of a prank than anything else, targets those who have modified their iPhone so they can install 3rd-party utilities. In this case, the trojan masquerades as an update to Erica's Utilities.

The package is called "iPhone firmware 1.1.3 prep" and doesn't do much; it just displays "shoes." However, because of the way it installs, when you try to remove it, it will remove Erica's Utilities and other apps like OpenSSH as well.

So the big hassle is having to re-install them. But it does show what could be done if someone wanted to.

Both Symantec and F-Secure have advisories on the malware. The hosting websites have been taken down, so both feel that the risk is now minimal. Notably, the malware was apparently written by an 11-year-old.

LG's Watch Phone

Well would you look at that. The best gadget we've seen at CES so far: LG's watch phone. Again, no details as these shots were taken on the sly. Regardless, it appears to be a mere prototype at the moment. Hear this, however. It features the slickest three-button, watch-phone interface you've seen this side of Chester Gould. Video on the way. Till then, you'll just have to take refuge in the snaps below.

Update: Video is here.

read more | digg story

Nokia 6288 - Compact & Stylish Mobile Phone

Nokia 6288, a new slider phone with video playback features at QVGA resolution (320x240 pixels). For Europe for now at 325 euros so roughly $412.00 US.

The mobile handset is easy for the user to use in one hand as the casing is 100 x 46 x 21 mm in dimension and weighs 115 grams.



QVGA screen is quite wide and useful when the phone is in the closed or open position & the screen provides a high quality display with a resolution of 320 x 240 pixels.

The 1600 x 1200 pixel camera integrated in this compact phone lets you record high-quality video.

This best-equipped handset from Nokia provides a phonebook with 500x16 fields and can keep a track of the last 20 received, dialled, and missed calls each. The 6288 has an internal memory of 6 MB and also MiniSD memory card of 512 MB.

The fitted battery of this phone is rechargeable and provides upto 280 hrs of standby time & approximately 4.5 hrs of talk-time for GSM & upto 3.5 hrs of talktime for WCDMA. The Nokia 6288 comes with a start up kit which includes a headset, travel charger, user guide, Nokia PC Suite CD-ROM & a battery.

Now you can stay connected to your family, friends, and colleagues by sending SMS, MMS, Instant Messaging, & emails through this contemporary handset from Nokia. If you wish your mobile phone could help you in staying connected to the internet while you are on the move, the 6288 allows you to do that as well! Enjoy browsing through the web, check & send emails whenever you want. This user-friendly & versatile gadget from Nokia has all the features that you might be seeking in your contemporary handset.

Go get it now!