One Russian man builds new cases for mobile phones from apple tree
wood. He fully disassembles the new devices and carve a piece-of-art
wooden cases for them, each small part gets its own wooden case - the
antenna, the sim-card, the battery.
A battery is hidden inside a wooden bar...
A sim-card comes in the smaller bar...
And antenna is also…wooden.
Via fast-world.com.
Google added a new entry into their robots.txt file — one way you can keep tabs on what Google doesn’t want to see. The new entry that forbids crawlers from seeing http://www.google.com/m/lcb made me naturally curious.
The new feature, that from what I can tell is new, lets you browse through categories of businesses without you having to type a word on your mobile device. For the life of me, I can’t figure out what “lcb” means, but everything is broken down into categories — there is even one for “Googleplex”. Strange, and pretty useless if you don’t live in Mountain View California.
The feature works pretty well, but it would be even better if it could somehow figure out your exact location rather than simply the city. This way it could browse real businesses that are close to you rather than everything in the entire city. Maybe if you pass in some weird parameters with latitude and longitude it will do exactly that, but I can’t confirm that at the moment.
Since this feature probably isn’t “finished” yet, I’ll leave most judgment out of this article, but it is promising.
Via zdnet.com>.
Pictures of new Nokia fourth generation mobiles have surfaced from design studio Ideosyncrasy. The theme behind Nokia's prototypes is to have "...a different means of accessing and managing information through different peripherals..." Different is certainly the right term - these concept phones are as far removed from current mobile phones as you can get.
Via mobilementalism.com/.
The people of Fly presented its new model of mobile camera phone under the name of MC100, and say have focused exclusively on those music lovers, as it highlights their duties digital audio as well as games… since it has support for several models for the Nintendo platform.
The phone has a design-in-all pleasant and quite simple.
Here we list the characteristics of the Fly MC100 camera phone:
The location of the launch of Fly MC100 will be in Russia, with a price of 620 us dollars.
Zong, a mobile SMS app framework from Europe's Echovox, has cut deals with eight major US mobile carriers to enable the Zong turnkey applications and API to be used in the US.
Publishers can now use Zong apps to offer their customers polls, quizzes, alerts, RSS feeds and more via SMS shortcodes and responses. The company says its API also allows publishers to leverage web content, serve up and bill customers for a wide variety of applications beyond SMS interactions.
Zong says it will announce deals with AT&T, Sprint, Nextel, T-Mobile, Boost, Cellular1 and Virgin early next month. No Verizon yet, apparently.
Publishers are expected to charge customers for use of the apps and billing functionality is built into Zong. The US carriers will take 40 to 60% of revenue from the apps, Zong will take less than 10% and the publishers can pocket the rest. That sounds like the kind of revenue split that could prove viable in the long run. While a lot of the apps we'll start seeing soon will probably be pretty corny, there will be some good ones too. Good mobile apps that work are something I'm willing to pay to use.
Competitor Golife Mobile just began offering limited Java application access last week. Some comparison to Google's Android Mobile OS can't help but come to mind - but Zong is a far more limited application framework, is explicitly commercial in its relationship to end users - and it's live now. While the Android SDK has been released - the Operating System isn't live on any phones yet.
Via readwriteweb.com
Pownce now has a full featured Mobile site for use with mobile devices. Looks great on the iPhone!
read more | digg story
The next version of Microsoft's mobile OS beyond Windows Mobile 6.1 will be the first to directly tackle advancements brought about by the iPhone, according to statements the company has made at the recent Mobius conference and echoed by Engadget. The unnamed update will effectively port a desktop version of Internet Explorer to the handset environment to render web pages in a largely accurate manner similar to that of Apple's mobile Safari browser. Programs for managing music, photos, and other content will also be made easier to use than current incarnations.
A longer-term update will bring more dramatic changes, Microsoft says. The software developer hopes to make the interface much easier to use with fingers compared to today's OS, which includes numerous small elements that are often difficult to activate without a stylus. It would also include a global search feature similar to those found in Windows Vista or Mac OS X as well as a correlation feature that offers context-sensitive information such as e-mail addresses depending on current actions.
The web browser update may depend heavily on technology pioneered in the company's Deepfish project, which adds a whole-page view of a site and maintains the original layout rather than attempt to fit the contents to the smaller view window common to cellphones.
Microsoft has not issued a schedule for when it expects any of the updates to appear, though the firm is expected to release Windows Mobile 6.1 by early 2008 and typically does not issue frequent updates to the software.
read more | digg story
Mobile Web: So Close Yet So Far, a story in The New York Times gives US mobile web usage a B-minus grade. According to Rethink Research mobile web accounts for “12 percent of average revenue per user in 2007, far below the expected 50 percent” while Yankee Group says “only 13 percent of cellphone users in North America use their phones to surf the Web.” Terrible phones, puny network speeds and WAP browsers - no surprise that in a society where people lug laptops even on vacation, mobile web as outlined by NYT isn’t doing well.
In sharp contrast, mobile data seems to be doing well for the US carriers. Here is what they have raked in from wireless data: $8.6 billion (2005), $15.8 billion (2006) and $17.7 billion for first three quarters of 2007. Assuming that the non-messaging data revenues are in the 50-60% (of the data revenues) range for the US carriers, that is pretty hefty growth.
A large push, one would guess is coming from the growing popularity of 3G cards, especially among the web worker/mobile worker crowd. There is anecdotal evidence things will change quite rapidly when we have mobile handsets with real browsers showing up in the sales isles. One such device is already showing its impact. I caught up with Omar Hamoui, Founder & CEO of AdMob, a mobile advertising start-up last week, and he said that over past 30 days the total share of traffic coming to their network from iPhone doubled from 0.4% to 0.8%. Google Maps usage went up after introduction of iPhone. Next year a whole slew of devices are coming to market situation will most certainly change.
read more | digg story
The Wall Street Journal’s report about Google’s big mobile plans is one that covers all bases, and leaves you where you started from: scratching your head. The Journal says Google may or may not buy a carrier; invest in a carrier; partner with a carrier, and/or may bid for spectrum. Aka, anything is possible. Most of this speculation has been already done the rounds. One new thing WSJ reports that is of interest:
Google, meanwhile, already is running a test version of an advanced wireless network at its Mountain View, Calif., headquarters, gaining operating experience that could come in handy if it wins the spectrum and decides to run a full-scale national mobile carrier, according to people familiar with the matter.
They are using this network, under license from FCC, to test prototype devices that use Android mobile OS. That network is interesting for sure, but to go from a tiny network to owning-and-operating a humongous nationwide consumer-centric wireless network needs a big leap of faith,especially for Google investors. But then last week, A-Fraud returning to Yankee Stadium was as likely as waking up to armageddon.
Other notable facts from the WSJ story:
* Google has invested in femtocell maker Ubiquisys
* Google has discussed possibly investing in Clearwire Corp.
So what do you think: will Google buy a carrier, bid for spectrum or do nothing?
read more | digg story
There are plenty of mobile apps that let you snap a picture and share it with your friends or the world—Zannel, Umundo, Mocospace, Pikki, MobyPicture, Yahoo Go—but one that does an especially good job at just sharing pictures among your friends is Radar. The service is run by Tiny Pictures, a San Francisco startup that has raised $4 million from Mohr Davidow Ventures. Whenever you snap a picture you want to share, you send it via e-mail to your Radar account. It appears immediately, and everyone you’ve invited as a friend can see the pictures and comment on them—either online or on their phones. The best way to use Radar is to download the application to your phone (it just added a custom iPhone app today). Whenever you log in, you see a stream of thumbnails of every picture you and your friends have posted. The commenting interface is pretty slick (you can plug it into AIM for instant notifcations of when a new comment has been posted to one of your pics). It the key to Radar because it turns each picture into a conversation starter.
This only works, of course if you A) have friends on Radar, and B) they post pictures on a regular basis. Radar, which launched more than a year ago in the summer of 2006, has only 600,000 users worldwide. But that number has been doubling every month for the past three months. So we might be at an inflection point here, especially as more capable phones come onto the market that can take advantage of its Web-like features. Radar serves 250,000 pictures and videos a day. Eighty percent of its traffic comes from mobile devices (it also has a regular Website), and 70 percent of its users are outside the U.S.
While most of the conversations and photos on Radar are private, you can choose to make them public. And today the company is also launching a public gallery, where advertisers can try to entice Radar members to subscribe to their photo streams. Right now, there are photo streams for the upcoming movie Hitman, pictures of frivolous but funny merchandise from iWoot, top video picks from Vimeo, and CEO John Poisson’s own Radar stream. There will soon be Radar channels from Hendrick’s Gin, iTunes, and the stealth Web video series Nowhere Men (which will focus on a group people “missing” since 2002 and the audience has to help unravel the mystery). This sort of advertising will only work in so far as people don’t see it as advertising, which is why I like it.
Here is a page from Poisson’s Radar channel. Taking picture of food seems to be popular on the site:
And here is what Radar looks like on a regular Sony Ericson phone:
read more | digg story
The T650i is only 12.5mm thick, and pretty light at 95mm, especially for a phone with a metal casing, but punches above its weight with a 3.2 megapixel camera with autofocus, a front end video call camera, MP3 player, FM radio, 256,000 colour display and it’s 3G as well.
read more | digg story
