BBC’s Rory Cellan-Jones blogs about the five big stories form the Mobile Phone Congress in Barcelona.
Looking back on the teeming madness that is the mobile phone industry’s annual shindig, there was no one headline-grabbing story, but plenty of pointers to the road ahead. I’ve picked five things that were big in Barcelona.
Macrumors reports on how the fact that it is so much easier to use the internet on the iPhone that this is encouraging more people to access the internet on their iPhone.
Indeed, it appears that iPhone owners are using the internet many times more than their non-iPhone counterparts. Google revealed that there are 50 times more searches originating from the iPhone than any other mobile handset. The discrepancy was so great that Google initially thought it was a mistake. This finding has also been reported by O2 who found that 60% of U.K. iPhone users are sending or receiving more than 25 MB of data a month.
Read more.
For the MoLeNET Podcasting event I decided it might be useful to have a 2GB Micro SD card for my personal LG Viewty mobile phone.
Now I know I can buy one for about £4 from Amazon
Now I know that there was no way I was going to get one for £4 off the high street retailers, so I was willing to pay up to about £12 for one, thinking I am getting ripped off, but at least I will have the card in time.
Now what I couldn’t believe was how much some high street retailers can get away with charging.
O2 was the “cheapest” place at £19, but generally most of the other mobile phone stores were charging £30 and one store, Zavvi had the nerve to be charging £40!
£40!
How much!
Guess who went without and is now going to go to Amazon.
BBC News is reporting on how Nokia want you to replace your paper maps with a map on yur mobile.
Nokia has launched navigation tools designed to make the paper street map obsolete for pedestrians.
The firm’s next generation of digital maps gives real-time walking directions on the mobile phone screen, just like sat-nav systems which guide drivers.
“Nokia is taking navigation services out of the car so it can always be with you,” said Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo, president and CEO of the firm.
“Struggling with oversized paper maps will become a thing of the past.”
Photo source.
Seems I am not the only one enamoured with Asus’ tiny little linux based UMPC.
The Asus EEE PC perched on my knee combines GNU software with a Linux kernel powered by an Intel Celeron Mobile Processor to produce a very extraordinary little laptop. It weighs less than a kilogram, starts up from cold in about 12 seconds and shuts down in five. It has no internal hard disk and no CD drive. It offers 512MB of RAM, 4GB of storage and a seven-inch display; wireless, dial-out modem and ethernet adaptors are available for networking and internet connections, three USB ports, mini-jack sockets for headphones and microphone, a VGA out, an SD card slot and a built-in webcam. All for about £200 – less than the price of a show, dinner and taxi for two in London’s West End.
So is Stephen Fry.
I have been wondering how good the Asus Eee PC is. The small linux UMPC is certainly creating waves in the tech world as well as the MoLeNET community.
Lilian (one of the MoLeNET mentors) demonstrated one at the MoLeNET Online Conference last Friday and I was quite intrigued.
So you can imagine my surprise when the one I had ordered arrived today.
It was interesting to see how this small UMPC was going to work out.
It booted up fine and after a minimal setup process was ready to work. Already loaded with internet, office, media and other applications it is ready to go.
I tried a few things such as running a PowerPoint presentation and playing a video file.
It handled the few things I tried with ease.
I still need to try the internet applications, so it will be interesting to see how the Eee PC can be used to access our college VLE and other online services.
BBC’s Click has a nice article on the mobile internet.
It is estimated that just one in five people with phones that are able to connect to the net actually do. But the iPhone, however, is having a profound effect on the willingness of its users to go online.
There’s a new browser for mobile devices providing a desktop experience on your windows mobile smartphone or PDA. Symbian and other platform editions are on their way.
The makers claim that it is the first mobile browser fully compatible with technologies such as asynchronous Javascript and XML (AJAX), Java, and embedded Flash.
Currently it’s a free download for US users only. Update now active in the UK too.
More info at:
http://www.skyfire.com/
From Handheld Learning
Want to look weird using your PSP as a phone?
Well now you can with firmware 3.90 which adds Skype functionality to the PSP (2000 series only). You can download Firmware 3.90 via the network update, but you will need to have wireless access to access the internet.
Thanks PSPFanboy.