Let Mobile

The Blackberry Storm was officially announced yesterday in the US by Vodafone and Verizon Wireless which have joined forces for what they believe is going to be an iconic change in the world of smartphones, as well as for Blackberry. Up until recently, Blackberry’s design team has always leaned towards a more conservative and cautious design, but we saw a dramatic change with the recently released Blackberry Bold. The Bold has clearly taken into consideration that smartphones are more than just a business tool and with the growing popularity of the Blackberry, it was about time that they came out of the box.

The Storm has only furthered the more creative approach taken by Blackberry by delving into the currently very competitive touchscreen market in which manufacturers are all vying for the crown of iPhone killer. Looking at the Storm, you can see that Blackberry has really thought long and hard about that fine balance between design and functionality and about how heavy leanings toward either one of these can be the disaster of any handset. And let’s be fair to a company

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Hot on the heels of the excellent Nokia E71 comes a leaked video which shows the next generation of Nokia QWERTY business handsets. Predictably, some spoilsports pulled the video soon after publication, but not until everyone had a good look at these two previously unknown phones. Details are only based on what we saw in picture form, so here they are:

Nokia E72:

* Symbian S60 operating system.
* Full front-mounted QWERTY keyboard, just the the E71.
* Built-in Wi-Fi.
* GPS

Nokia E75:

* Side sliding QWERTY keyboard.
* Candybar design with traditional alphanumeric keypad.
* GPS.
* Symbian OS as with the E72.

Of course, both handsets will be adept at email and messaging, which the video demonstrated along with their Internet prowess. It was also clear the E75 would be available in red, black and brown while the E72 was seen in just red and black. As the video showed two working mobile phones, an official announcement cannot be too far away, especially as the E71 was so well received.

A few still pics have hung around after the videos demise, so that’s all we have until Nokia decide otherwise!

Mobile VoIP has been in development for a short time now but only a small percentage of users are taking advantage of the increasing availability of the service. Mobile VoIP has the potential to decrease both domestic and international calling costs by routing calls through the Internet even when calls take place on the mobile phone. With the economy in a precarious position, people everywhere are looking to take advantage of ways to save money. This, along with a variety of other advances and improvements, has made it so that mobile VoIP is poised on the edge of taking off to become something big.

Economic Changes Driving Growth of Mobile VoIP

People in many parts of the globe right now are concerned about

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US Cellular will be adding a new mid-range device called LG UX585 Rhythm to its portfolio during the month of November. From what we know, the Chocolate-like slider will sport the such specs as the so-last-year 1.3 megapixel camera, music player, very useful FM transmitter (like the Nokia N78), QVGA screen. There’s also a dedicated music control key(s) in form of “Touch Music Hot Key,” which is actually the circular touchscreen located in the middle of the wheel.

In a nutshell, it’s a decent phone for those looking for a simple music phone, but aside from music playback capabilities don’t require much more. Look for it in mid-November when you will be able to grab it for $129.95 after a $50 rebate and with a contract.

Annoyed by ads on your iPhone/iPod Touch? Well I am and I’m guessing many of our readers also hate to browse through advertising to reach the actual content. For desktop computers there are a number of solutions to remove ads — not that we suggest using them, after all we make our living from advertising. However, when you’re on a limited data plan or in the hurry, you don’t want to spend your time reading ads on a mobile device. Rather, you’re searching for information and ads are quite sufficient there. That’s why someone figured out how to remove advertising from displaying in iPhone/iPod Touch’s Safari.

LifeHacker has a step-by-step tutorial on how to do this on your iPhone and iPod Touch. As expected, a jailbroken device is required, but with all those simple jailbreaking tools, that shouldn’t be a problem nowadays.

Anyway, here’s a link to the page on LifeHacker’s website from where you can find out how to make turn ads into a blank spaces and enjoy the pure content.

Shazam, a music recognition and discovery service, just signed up with Vodafone Germany so subscribers can get information on music nearby and even buy the track with just a short sample. Not only will this provide access to some 6 million songs in Shazam’s database, but also extra artist info, music videos, and sharing capabilities through Facebook. It sounds a lot like Sony Ericsson’s trackID program, except for that link to the store. An iPhone app is available if you want to give it a shot, and a month-long free trial is also available for a bunch of Nokia and Sony Ericsson devices.

Wow! There are some seriously good acts coming to The O2, with tickets for sale from TOMORROW (10th October) - check these out:

Depeche Mode: 30 May 09 - Tickets on sale 10 Oct @ 9am

The Killers: 23/24 February 09 - Tickets on sale 10 Oct @ 10am

The Pussycat Dolls: 27 January 09 - Tickets on sale 10 Oct @ 9am

Remember if you are an O2 subscriber, you get lots of advantages when you go there, like priority tickets, and the like. Check out the The O2 site here.

Users of the Sony Ericsson Symbian UIQ3 based smartphones can now grab the full version (as opposed to beta) of Digia’s @Web browser and enjoy web on their handset as they never have before. The WebKit-based browser is complaint with such standard as HTML 4.01, JavaScript 1.5 (AJAX included), HTTP 1.1 with support to secure and non-secure browsing, cookies, embedded audio (wav, mp3 and midi) and more. Features include full finger touch UI, accelerated panning, full screen browsing (auto-hiding address and navigation bar), page rotation for portrait and landscape browsing, four zoom levels, bookmarks support (with folders and favicons), URL auto-complete and more.

Digia @Web costs 8 EUR and it’s a must have for everyone using some of the newer Sony Ericsson smartphones. There’s a free trial version, too…

Echoing what I have been saying recently about DVB-H vs DVB-T “Mobile” TV, Broadband TV News has a piece on exactly that. Essentially, devices that have a DVB-T tuner can take advantage of FTA terrestrial services, breaking any kind of value chain that could have existed if the device’s tuner were DVB-H.

The article does take in a new report from Juniper Research which is talking about the effect of these DVB-T handsets - however, instead of going over that, I’ll break the situation down for y’all very quickly myself….

DVB-H - made for mobile devices, very advanced error protection in broadcast, and clever use of time-slicing of signal that preserves battery life by switchin of receiver for up to 80% of the time. However, massive network rollout costs, and getting installer user base to buy new handsets are huge obstacles to mass adoption.
DVB-T - made of home-based receivers, such as TVs - as a standard, not great when applied to mobile devices as you usually need a large antenna (show me a mobile device that doesn’t have a big antenna….!). Also wears battery down on Mobile devices as receiver has to be on all the time. BUT, mobile devices with a DVB-T tuner can access free-to-air existing services, and no additional network investment needed. Operators make nothing from FTA services, so they are not behind adoption of DVB-T!

So that’s pretty much it - opposite ends of the spectrum, and there are devices in the market for each standard. Interestingly, the Mobile TV chips vendors are variously making I/C chips with all the Mobile TV standards - nothing like hedging your bets!

Xeni Jardin from BoingBoing visited the South Park headquarters and guess what, they [South Park folks] are preparing a dedicated iPhone application. From what we know, users should expect the ability to stream clips, grab wallpapers, read news, and browse the complete episode index. In addition, there will be able an option to choose character likenesses as contact images and assign them to any phonebook entry. We all have one Cartman and one Kyle in the crew, right? Now you will know exactly who’s calling you.