Tag: mobile

Bluetooth 3.0 Set to Launch On April 21

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

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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.

Nintendo DSi On Sale in US

April 5th, 2009 · Michael Struwig · Featured, Hardware 3 comments - Tags: , , , ,

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Nintendo starts selling it’s new offering into the portable gaming market today, the Nintendo DSi and successor to the Nintendo DS.

It’s not the first time the DSi has been on sale however – it launched in Japan in Fall. The successor to Nintendo’s insanely-popular DS, which sold over 100 million units, offers a number of improvements over its older brother.  Most importantly however is the fact that over 850 Nintendo DS games will be fully compatible with the DSi.

Other signifigant improvements include the ability to purchase and download games from the DSi store. Two cameras also make an appearance, a 3.0 megapixel camera for the front and a 0.3 megapixel camera facing backwards. The DSi also saw a RAM upgrade to 256mb and now supports a SD slot for AAC music files. Crucially, the DSi doesn’t support MP3 files. The iconic double-screen design of the DS has also seen a size upgrade in the DSi – at the expense of battery life, which is reduced when compared to the older DS.

The new console will cost around $170 and comes in blue and black (no white for US customers). Nintendo also stated that the reason the DSi didn’t debut in the US earlier was thanks to the current Nintendo DS still selling so rapidly that they were afraid of damaging the DS’ sales!

Nintendo are planning to compete directly with the Apple iPod touch, which is busy eating into DS games sales.

Nokia to Cut 1,700 Jobs

March 17th, 2009 · Michael Struwig · Featured, Hardware No comments - Tags: , , , ,

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Today, one of the world’s largest phone makers, Nokia, announced that worldwide, over 1700  jobs will be cut (around 700 of them being in Finland), thanks to demand falling for mobile phones. This is part of a plan announced by Nokia early in January to save over 700 million Euros.

This is no surprise, as experts are predicting the mobile handset market to recess by over 10% this year alone. Nokia further announced that it plans to save money by making cuts in its global support, marketing and corporate function sections.

Mobile News: HTC to Launch 3+ More Google Phones

March 17th, 2009 · Michael Struwig · Featured, Hardware One comment - Tags: , , , ,

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According to HTC CEOs (the company that formed part of Google Android’s OS-running phone, the G1), HTC will release the HTC Magic (or G2) in Europe, via Vodaphone, and then are planning to release two more unannounced phones later in 2009. All the phones will be running Google’s mobile OS – Android.

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.