Tag: cellphone

Bluetooth 3.0 Set to Launch On April 21

April 10th, 2009 · Michael Struwig · Featured, Industry No comments - Tags: , , , , ,

bluetooth-logo

The Bluetooth Special Interest Group is planning an official launch of the latest Bluetooth (3.0) specification on April 21.

The new Bluetooth 3.0 specification will bring with it dramatically increased transfer speeds by switching over to the 802.11 protocol. This should allow users to send much larger files, quicker. Naturally, backwards compatibility exists, and plays a clever role in reducing battery consumption.

When two bluetooth 3.0 devices communicate with each other they switch to the 3.0 specification when a transfer beings, and once the transfer is completed the modules return to the old (and slower) specification to save on battery, whilst  insuring backwards compatibility with all non-3.0 bluetooth devices.

The announcement hasn’t officially been made yet, but it is expected to be made a few days from now.

Mobile Internet Usage Doubles in 2009

March 16th, 2009 · Michael Struwig · Featured, Internet No comments - Tags: , , ,

Today comCast, a internet market research company, has announced that mobile internet browsing and usage has more than doubled when compared to exactly a year ago (January 2008 vs January 2009). In other words, more people in the US are using their phones for getting news, blogging and interacting with their friends via social networks than ever before.

comCast says this is largely thanks to social networking and blogging trends becoming incredibly popular:

Social networking and blogging have emerged as very popular daily uses of the mobile Web and these activities are growing at a torrid pace

says Mike Donovan (senior vice president of comCast mobile). He also points out that application downloads, like the iPhone’s App Store helped increase mobile internet usage popularity:

“We also note that much of the growth in news and information usage is driven by the increased popularity of downloaded applications, such as those offered for the iPhone”

Another interesting fact that came out of the report is that both men and women aged 18-34 are the most common mobile internet users.

comcast-2009

Click to Enlarge

iPhone App Forces Google to Shutdown SMS Service

March 15th, 2009 · Michael Struwig · Featured, Software No comments - Tags: , , , ,

infinite-sms

If you own an iPhone, you may have heard of Infinite SMS by Inner Fence. It’s a rather clever little application that allows you to send SMS using Google’s SMS gateway, circumventing service providers. In other words, it allows you to send Free SMSs.

Infinite SMS wasn’t a freeware application though (but at $0.99 it’s not exactly expensive either), but nevertheless the promise of free SMSs brought in masses of people using the services. So many people started using the application that Google was forced to shutdown the service to all third-party applications.

Google later explained that the huge spike in traffic caused costs to rise rapidly, far more than Google was willing to pay for what is essentially an experiment. There are no hard feelings though, the SMS experiment just became too expensive to handle:

Infinite SMS is a third party app that has been using Google technology to provide free SMS for users, while we were paying for the cost of the text messages. While Google is supportive of third party apps, we’ve decided we can’t support this particular usage of our system at this time. SMS chat is still just an experiment in the early testing stages in Gmail Labs. We’re blocking all external XMPP clients from sending SMS; we’re not singling out Inner Fence.