We’ve just published our Samsung Wave review and here is a nasty surprise. As user reports have it, the microSD card in the German retail package is obviously infected with a Trojan virus.
When one of your partners announces a device running your latest OS before you have unveiled it, something is obviously going wrong. Still Microsoft acted quick on this one and officially announced their Windows Embedded Compact 7 tablet platform so it might have just been a trivial case of miscommunication.
Demanding less powerful hardware than Windows 7 and thus ensuring better performance on ultra portable computers and handhelds, the just announced Windows Embedded Compact 7 is also nicely touch-optimized supporting multi-touch and various gestures. Read more »
The HTC HD Mini just got what appears to be its first firmware update. Unfortunately, it only brings some minor changes. In fact there is only one improvement – the ringtone sound quality. So if you were unhappy with the way your ringtones sound on the HD Mini, it’s time for update.
It was about time Skype enable their voice calls over 3G in their iPhone app and now the Skype “coverage” on iPhone is extended outside Wi-Fi hotspots.
Today Opera published their monthly State of the Mobile Web report and it turns out that the release of the Opera Mini in the App Store has made a huge impact on its usage. Apple might have come a little late to the party but their users are certainly enjoying the company.
More than 2.6 million people downloaded Opera Mini in April, even though it was only approved in the middle of the month. Read more »
No, Firefox web browser is not likely to appear as a native iPhone application anytime soon. But Mozilla are already working on a native iPhone app that syncs your browsing history, bookmarks, and opened tabs. Meet the Firefox Home for iPhone.
I’ve been using various workarounds to sync my currently opened tabs with my iPhone. I’ve tried saving those pages to ReadItLater. I’ve also tried bookmarking the webpages and later on accessing those through the Xmarks website – the service I use for bookmark syncing. But none of these are as convenient as the upcoming Firefox Home.
There’s a war raging and everybody has to pick sides. Apparently Time Warner and NBC Universal are siding with Adobe on this one. According to The New York Post they and several other major media companies have refused to convert their video libraries to HTML5.
The companies in question have explained that such a move would cost them dear and “is not worth it because Flash dominates the web”. Read more »
Microsoft demonstrated Windows Phone 7 interface and gaming abilities at the reMIX event in France. Their latest mobile OS was up and running on an unidentified Omnia HD-like Samsung headset and performed quite impressively.
SPB Software has just announced the availability of their SPB Mobile Shell 3.5 user interface for Symbian devices. One of the most popular smartphone platforms in the world has so far struggled with providing good user-experience to touch-loving users so it was about time that someone did something about it.
Indeed the SPB Mobile Shell 3.5 will transform your Symbian 5th edition running device beyond recognition and having played with it for a week I can confirm that this is a change for the better. Read more »
If you are looking for a way for making new buddies when you visit South Africa for the World Cup this summer, check out the latest bit of software that exited the Nokia Research Center. It let’s you initiate chats and share content with people in the vicinity. The most innovative thing about it is that you don’t need mobile internet access to connect to some distant chat server. Instead your cellphones connect directly using ad-hoc Wi-Fi mode that’s supported by all phones.
Do you remember David Wang and his work to port the Android OS on iPhone 3G? Well, he’s done all of the heavylifting and the image file and instructions to install Android on your iPhone 3G are now available online.
On 21 January Nokia blessed (almost) all their smartphones with free lifetime voice-guided navigation with version 3.03 of their Ovi Maps application. Now, four months and 10 million downloads later the company has released an updated version of the app improving its speed, accuracy and adding Wi-Fi positioning in the mix.
According to the dev team, the new 3.04 version of Ovi Maps gives more accurate positioning, faster zooming and panning as well as faster tilting. Nokia have worked with local Yellow pages companies like Telegate in Germany and Cityvox in France as well as their partners from Michelin and Lonely Planet to increase the Ovi Maps points interest database size.
And in an attempt to make their devices an even better replacement for standalone SatNav units Nokia started shipping the N97, N97 mini, X6 and 6710 Navigator phones with a car holder and a car charger in box. The Nokia 5800 XpressMusic, 5230, E52 and will too get the car holder treatment but will miss out on the charger thingy.
And best of all, Ovi Maps data now includes additional 2 million kilometres of road: it now covers 77 countries throughout the world. Read more »
The Android v2.2 is still awaiting its official premiere but, reportedly, its successor is already in the works and is expected to become available sometime in the last quarter of the year.
One of the major announcements at the Google I/O developers event is the new open web video format called WebM. Based on the VP8 video codec and Ogg Vorbis audio codec, WebM should be optimized well enough to allow playback even on mobile phones, tablets and netbooks.
WebM is an open-source format that will be licensed for free so it should provide a nice alternative to the H.264. Read more »
While we never experienced this with our review units, there are plenty of Andriod handsets owners who claim that their batteries cannot last even a day on a single charge. One of Google co-founders Larry Page, however, denied that this has anything to do with the OS and claimed that there is something wrong with the third-party software installed on the devices experiencing such problems.
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