This shows that when the conditions and opportunities are close enough to its competitors; Microsoft’s smartphone OS can grow at a faster pace than the established players. Additionally, this is also a validation of sorts for the partnership that Nokia and Microsoft have established. I am glad that the fruit of such efforts are becoming ovbious over time.

About 60 days ago, Nokia and Microsoft launched the Nokia Lumia 800c launched Windows Phones in one of the worlds largest telecom carriers; while the iPhone still struggles to catch on in the Asian market.

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OtterBox Commuter case for Samsung Galaxy Note

Published via WordPress for Android…

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Let’s expand a bit: Microsoft announced that Windows 8 will run not only on the x86 platform (with processors made by Intel and AMD, but compatible with each other) but it will also run on ARM processors; a line completely incompatible with programs made for the x86 line, but more efficient when it comes to power management and mobile features such as tablets. ARM processors are what Android tablet OEMS are using for their Android tablet lines. This means that Microsoft is releasing 2 versions of the next Windows 8 in one; two sources that look and behave very similar to each other… and this is the key to the question… understanding that they are the same on the outside, but their core is compiled to run in two completely different platforms. The version of Windows 8 to run on ARM is set to have some limitations, and here is where Gizmodo’s authors don’t seem to have a technical grasp of the situation. Microsoft has also announced that Windows will have two modes for running: Metro and Windows Classic. The Metro mode is what everyone has been talking about, with the tiles and touch interface that works great on touch devices and has received so many design awards. The Windows Classic mode will run legacy applications.

While Windows 8 Professional on x86 will run legacy applications in Windows Classic mode AND Metro apps installed from the Windows 8 Marketplace; Windows 8 on ARM will not allow users to install legacy applications as they are not binary-compatible (which is a fancy way of saying they don’t run because they were prepared for another processor line). It also means that Microsoft has the possibility to split the two lines of Windows 8 if needed and continue with one, the other or both in the future. In any case, Microsoft has decided that even though no third party applications will be installed in its Windows Classic mode for Windows 8 on ARM; they will still provide some of their own legacy applications such as some setup apps, Windows Explorer, MS Office (which will come bundled for FREE with Windows 8 on ARM) and MS Internet Explorer 10. In other words, they are only there for users that are already accustomed to the old look and feel and still want to make use of MS Office while not needing an overly powerful PC to do so.

The issue resulting out of this is that some are misinterpreting this as a conspiracy by Microsoft to prevent competing browsers from running on Windows 8, which is not only inaccurate but flat-out ignorant.

Third party application developers can still release as many applications as they want. They can develop their apps to run in Metro mode, which guarantees them that their apps will be able to run in both Windows 8 Professional in Metro mode and Windows 8 on ARM in Metro mode, or they can have two code-bases and develop a Metro mode app that will run on all lines of Windows 8 plus their existing code (that runs on Windows 7) to run in Windows 8 Professional without the need for any changes.

As far as I see it, browser developers can still release browsers as feature rich as they want in all versions of Windows 8, so why would Gizmodo interpret this as some shady scheme against browser developers?

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My review of the Commuter case should hopefully be coming soon once I receive my review unit, so stay tuned.

When it’s being called “smarter than a smartphone” you want the smartest protection you can find for your Galaxy Note. With two layers of semi-rugged protection, the Commuter Series Galaxy Note case was designed to outperform expectations.

Source – www.otterbox.com

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How do you combat this? Never use Data? Wouldn’t that really just negate having a Smartphone in the first place.. in my view it would, so what else could  combat this? You can use a Data Usage monitor application I have used SPB Wireless Monitor on both Windows Mobile and now Android, it’s not cheap about $6.45 AUD, another App that I have recommended in the past is 3G Watch Dog, it has both a free and Pro version, still can be a bit to much for some Newbies. Now awhile back I found an article showing a new app on the market that helps you take control of your Data Usage, it was called – Onavo Lite, since it’s early release it has been updated a number of times and changed it;s name a long the way and Notification icon (Which I really like now) to finally be called Onavo Count. 

I downloaded Onavo and have been using it few over the last few months, my first impressions was WOW! This app looks great just so visually clean and on my HTC Sensation it just pops. It is so easy to use it is one of the first apps I install and the first one I refer to my customers both when I worked and the Service Centre and now in Retail.

Now here’s the screen shots.

I have Onavo on my HTC Sensation, HTC Legend and my Son’s HTC Explorer, and I will be putting it on my Samsung Galaxy Note when I get it.

To find out more visit Google Play Store and search for Onavo or click here

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Here’s some of my earlier work – Review: Dell Axim X51v | Review: Motorola Q9h & iPod Touch Dual Unit.

I use my HTC Sensation for basically everything from my Phone and mobile internet device and as my digital camera/ video, however now as I travel with the family around Perth it has graduated to my GPS unit with Sygic Maps.  I used to use a generic holder on the windscreen and would find the Sensation would heat up during the course of the trip, I hoped that with the Sensation now away from the windscreen and on the dashboard it might run a lot cooler and even work out better and make it easier to use.

Photo source ProClipusa.com

PARCEL ARRIVES

Both the Car mounting and the Device bracket and holder arrived in the distinctive ProClip packaging…

SET UP

Please note photo’s are a bit off as I roped in my 9 year old daughter to take the photo’s…

The Device mounting plate fixes to the Car Mounting plate by four supplied screws…

Next connect the Holder to the Device mounting plate…

Next connect the Holder to the Device mounting plate by screwing the centre screw… Once completed it’s now time to mount it to the car…

INSTALLATION

The unit clips into my Mazda MPV dashboard very easily, you can use the double sided tape supplied to give even more stability…	The top clip fits in under the Cigarette Lighter…	Once it clipped in I found it to be very stable and allowed me to move the Holder into portrait or landscape…
The Supplied Cigarette Lighter Adaptor fits just above the holder and cable also hides behind the unit…	I found the HTC Sensation just glides down the Holder…	The Sensation pushes down onto the Micro USB power connector…
Sensation is now secure…	Different viewing angle…	What it looks like from the Drivers seat…

OUT COME

We have used the new Holder for the past couple of weeks and I must say that the ProClip Charging Holder with Tilt Swivel and Cigarette Lighter Adapter for my HTC Sensation is awesome, keeps the windscreen clear nothing in the way and I have found that my Sensation is not running as hot, still will with 3G and GPS going.

I found the sound and position of the Holster to be perfect angle for me, even if I am the Driver or front passenger I can still turn the Sensation towards me to check details or GPS info.

If you are interested in finding one that is compatible with your car and device visit ProClip here

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Cygnett, premier designer of innovative and stylish digital accessories, today announced its line-up of new, third-generation iPad cases.

With the unveiling of the new iPad 3, companies are starting to roll out their range of cases, Cygnett is one of these leading companies, find below there Press Release announcing some great looking cases.

Source: Cygnett Marketing

Melbourne, Australia – March 7, 2012 – Cygnett unveiled its range of new, third-generation iPad cases today, including brightly-coloured chic canvas case, Alumni, the latest version of the company’s best-selling fashion case, the Glam, super-soft Lavish and Lavish Earth, new Lavish Connect with removable Bluetooth keyboard, as well as Cygnett’s trademark screen protectors OpticClear, available in clear and anti-glare.

“The new, third-generation iPad brings a host of new and fantastic features,” says Sophie Swann, Cygnett’s Marketing Director. “We believe iPad cases should enhance the user’s experience by providing protection that delivers peace of mind. Our new cases have been researched to offer the best possible complementary combination of quality design, fashionable protection and practical functionality.”

Cygnett’s cases for the new, third-generation iPad are complemented by a wide range of iPad accessories that fit all iPad models, including:

• Stands, holders and docking stations: FlexiView adjustable iPad stand, CarGo headrest mount, Platform universal tablet stand and AudioAxis rotating iPad speaker dock
• Keyboards: KeyPad wireless Bluetooth keyboard
• Car chargers: PowerMini II dual-USB car charger fast-charges iPod or iPhone plus iPad at the same time, and doubles your charging capacity for all other USB-charged devices. GroovePower Auto II is a 2A wired car charger with Apple S30 pin connector that fast-charges iPod, iPhone and iPad.
• Wall chargers: GroovePower+ dual-USB wall charger fast-charges iPod or iPhone plus iPad at the same time, and doubles your charging capacity for all other USB-charged devices.

Cygnett’s cases for the new, third-generation iPad include:

Alumni

Canvas case with handy inside pocket

Price: $49.99

With acid brights and bold jewel tones prevalent this season, channel the look by freshening up your iPad with a vibrantly-hued Alumni case. Covered with tactile hard-wearing canvas fabric, the case is designed to bring out the best in your wardrobe. Dress your iPad in energetic colour to match your style. A handy inside pocket is ideal for storing extra notes. Opening or closing the case automatically activates the sleep/wake function. Available in jade green, cobalt blue, hot pink or black.

Lavish Connect

Folio case with Bluetooth keyboard and integrated stand

Price: $149.99

Ideal for easy on-the-go work or entertainment, the protective Lavish Connect features a super-thin magnetically-attached 78-key QWERTY Bluetooth keyboard and integrated stand. Concealed magnets activate the sleep/wake function and keep the case securely closed when your iPad is not in use. Available in black or sandstone.

Lavish and Lavish Earth
Folio case with multi-view stand
Price: $59.99

Style personified, these super-soft leather-style folio cases double as stands. Offering 360-degree protection, sumptuous black Lavish is perfect for busy executives, while the earthy sandstone and purple tones of Lavish Earth are ideal for professionals seeking an elegant, but understated mix of style, protection and practicality on the go. With three viewing positions, the cases are reinforced to afford users comfort and flexibility when viewing movies and images. Concealed magnets activate the sleep/wake function and keep the cases securely closed when your iPad is not in use. Lavish available in black; Lavish Earth available in sandstone or purple.

Glam
Fashionable folio with multi-view stand
Price: $59.99

High-fashion meets hi-tech with Cygnett’s revamped Glam case, a firm favourite that adds a touch of glamour to iPad. The sleek and slim folio-style Glam case oozes style, looking just as much at home on a runway as on a desk. It doubles as a stand, offering three viewing positions for watching movies or flicking through your image collection. Available in glossy red or metallic silver.

Watch this space: Cygnett has more cases for the new, third-generation iPad coming soon. Sign up for the Cygnett newsletter today and be sure you don’t miss anything. http://www.cygnett.com/ipad_2012

About Cygnett:

Cygnett designs, develops and manufactures innovative digital accessories for the world’s most popular gadgets and technology. From cases and accessories for iPod, iPhone, iPad, smartphones and tablets to portable speakers, earphones, power products and laptop bags, Cygnett is celebrated as one of the world’s major digital accessories designers and manufacturers.

With offices on four continents, products in over 40,000 worldwide retail outlets and in more than 36 countries, Cygnett’s success is built largely on its ability to design and deliver quality digital accessories and products that tap into what consumers want – protection, fashion and function.

For more information, visit www.cygnett.com

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Nokia Lumia 710 is available for preorder from WireFly FREE with a new T-Mobile account. The new Nokia Windows Phone smartphone is part of the re-launch of Nokia on the smartphone market in the US.

The new Nokia Lumia line (so far made up of the 710 and the 800 handsets) is part of the flood coming in the next few months of high quality second generation Windows Phones and the result of the partnership that Nokia and Microsoft signed last year.

The Lumia 710 will be available January 11 running Windows Phone 7.5 and will come pre-loaded with software exclusive from Nokia for turn-by-turn-directions called Nokia Drive and other not so exclusive apps such as The Weather Channel, ESPN, Netflix, App Highlights, T-Mobile TV and Slacker Radio.

The Windows Phone 7.5 device supports data connections on the HSPA+ network from T-Mobile’s “4G”.

Nokia is said to launch a campaign for the Nokia Windows Phone line of about 200 million this year for all the devices it will launch on the different carrier networks.

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Well then come write for Gadgetix… I can guarantee you will be able to write about what you are passionate about and potentially keep some of the products we get for review … as for the rest, we can all hope because I am in no position to guarantee. Who knows, maybe the site will do so well…

Drop me a line or two, why you want to do this, provide me with a published or posted sample article (not to be used on this site). You can contact me using our Contact Us page [here].

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Maybe all the suing they’ve been doing has distracted them from doing actual work.

Here’s a screenshot of the news!

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It is said that the best form of flattering is when others copy what you do… this app looks great on Android phones and it is fully functional. The developer of UberMusic v1.0 (Android Market, $3.49) was able to capture the simplicity of the Windows Phone 7 Music app and copy the experience into an Android OS app. Even some of the scrolling and transition animations are the same. Good, clean, efficient application design is bound to be imitated (or bluntly copied) no matter what your mobile OS UI is…

The application is almost an exact replica of the Music app in Windows Phone OS. However, due to the differences on what can be done in one OS and not the other; there are minor (very minor) differences. The first obvious difference is the main accent color in Windows Phone OS can be picked at the Phone Settings level and all apps will use it one way or another, this is not the case with UberMusic. The song list is almost identical, except for the font and button size which in this case it could be just related to the screen size of the Android phone just being larger than the screen of the Windows Phone being used for the demo.

The alpha tool to pick songs by name (for example) is exactly the same, even the transition between selecting a character and the actual list of songs starting with that particular letter is the same and the letter tiles seem to rotate in the same way. Please note that while the behavior is the same, the lists are not exactly the same since the songs on each phone are not the same. Scrolling these lists when there is something already selected in the background is very similar, but not always the same. For example in the next screenshot you will see that in Android; once an album has been selected, a background is displayed on UberMusic. This resembles the way the Marketplace behaves and uses your selection once you picked a particular artist or song and it displays it in the background.

Within each album, the album art is displayed in the same way and the play/pause button is part of an album button overlay. Obviously within the Windows Phone OS, you have access to the music Marketplace, to which you cannot have access from UberMusic. A button could be easily added here to take you to your favorite music purchasing site. Something that could be setup under the app settings, either by providing a URL or a tool selection (think Amazon music, or any other sites)… While this would hand-off to a web application, it would keep with the similarities in functional objects.

Finally, when you tap on the album art, three buttons show up in Windows Phone. One of them is to mark the current song as a favorite. Unfortunately, this feature is not supported yet and missing from UberMusic.

All in all, the developer has done an incredible job duplicating functionality and UI components that don’t even exist in the Android OS. I would keep my eyes on this particular developer, since some considerable time was spent on these UI components and they could obviously be re-used for other apps in the Android OS.

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The Marketplace is divided at the top level into several groups or categories:

• Carrier Apps
• OEM Apps
• Apps
• Games
• Music

Where the Carrier Apps are the apps that your Cellular carrier developed apps are grouped. The OEM apps is where the smartphone manufacturer apps are grouped. Apps is the proper App Marketplace or where all apps are stored (including Carrier and OEM apps if they so choose to). Games acts as a shortcut of sorts into the Games category within Apps. Finally Music, which has all the music you can download if you have a Zune subscription or purchase through your account.

The Apps category was similarly divided into sub-categories that had clear boundaries but some overlaps. Some of the developers I’ve been in touch have expressed their hopes that some of those categories would be regrouped in order to make more sense from a consumer point of view. This seems to be what Microsoft is preparing so that the latest App wave can be grouped into more logical or potentially more flexible groups.

The new App sub-categories are:

• Entertainment
• Music + Video
• Tools + Productivity
• Lifestyle
• Kids + Family
• News + Weather
• Travel + Navigation
• Health + Fitness
• Photo
• Games
• Social
• Sports
• Personal Finance
• Business
• Books + Reference
• Education

These categories clearly offer some space for overlapping and making apps show up.

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Last week we learned from the Web that Microsoft is getting paid by Android smartphone OEMs a licensing fee in order to meet patent and copyright laws. This is no news, out of curiosity I just did the exercise of calculating how much in US Dollars that really was to put this fact into context and see how it affects the dynamic in the mobile marketplace.

Google has stated recently that they are registering about $500,000 Android smartphones a day (yes, five hundred thousand per day, you read right).

It is also known that the OEMs for Android smartphones have to pay a license to Microsoft because Microsoft has patented and/or copyrighted features that were later included into Android customizations. Last week we also learned how Microsoft is making loads money off of all Android devices being sold; specifically Non-Samsung OEMs are paying $5 per unit sold and Samsung is paying $15 in licenses/royalties/usage fees per unit sold to Microsoft. This means that Microsoft is making a killing off of Android; which should pretty much finance Windows Phone for as long as they really want…

500,000 Android units a day
124,000 Samsung Android units a day or $1,860,000 daily
376,000 Other Android units a day (non-Samsung) or $1,880,000 daily

2011 Microsoft annual revenue from Android devices: $1,365,100,000

But this is nothing compared with 2012… since Android is growing at a pace of 4.4% weekly.

The global mobile market is still growing and it does not seem to be slowing down. It is not only converting feature phone users into smartphone users, but it is also gaining new traction and increasingly gaining new users. It is more convenient and inexpensive to be able to browse the web on a smartphone than on a more expensive computer. This is particularly true in developing countries where cellular networks are outpacing wired broadband.

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• Let’s see where to start; Windows Phone Mango was branded as Windows Phone OS 7.5, then Windows Phone OS 7.1… same old, same old… Microsoft being Microsoft and its branding inconsistencies…
• Windows Phone Emulator with Mango… although it is somewhat incomplete and not all features are in the emulator; anyone can download the Windows Phone Mango emulator and see what the new OS will be about. All you need is a PC where to run the emulator.
• Oh, yes, this one is great! The whole Microsoft end-user platform has turned a turn… for the BEST: Windows 8 was previewed at different events, the new UI is consistent with Windows Phone. Simple, beautiful, super-high performing, graphically clean. This is a revolutionary step. Every so many years UIs make a huge leap forward… this is one of them. DOS to Windows 3.0, to Windows 95 and now to Metro UI (Microsoft’s name for the Windows Phone –and now Windows- UI).
• XBOX 360 will get a new UI, guess what? It is also consistent with Windows Phone OS and Windows 8! One UI, consistent, powerful, simple.
• XBOX 360 will most likely be replaced with a XBOX vNext to be announced in the summer of next year. It’s not clear yet when the new XBOX will be released.
• Back to Windows Phone Mango: since the announcement in May when “over 500 enhancements” were announced; there have been more and more demos of the new update and what those new enhancements will be… this is very exciting… the list does not seem to end. 500 or not, there are a whole lot of enhancements from the expected multitasking, navigation, twitter integration, to other seemingly minor but equally powerful for users that have lots of ways to communicate… such as threaded emails, single inbox for all your accounts, etc.
• Development tools for Windows Phone (Mango) released. If you are a WP7 developers when you download the free development tools, you can now start development for the Mango release to come this Fall.

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This year’s TechEd focuses on Cloud Computing, Virtualization (supporting cloud computing), Windows Phone development, and all other Microsoft products. Every product has at least a conference or two. Some side-events are scheduled to happen off-site and off regular conference hours. Such is the case of the “Windows Phone 7 Unleashed Hackathon” held at the Omni Hotel. This is expected to be a hands-on lab where attendees will be able to learn about Windows Phone 7, XNA, Azure interaction with WP7 and how to build, scale and publish their WP7 app or game to the WP7 Marketplace. People who attend this side-event will be eligible for a chance o win a Samsung Focus phone.

Today I attended a very interesting conference on Cloud computing and strategies for deploying solutions to the clouds.

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On a much more positive note, Telefonica will "soon" start scheduling delivery of the March update to the Windows Phone OS.

Of course, if you live on the other side of the Atlantic, you would think "What do I care?", but Telefónica has already setup shop in the US and offers some telecommunications services. Hopefully, services offered are not as bad as they are being offered to their country of origin, Spain.

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The main reason for this fix being required was that some fraudulent digital certificates (what certifies website A is really website A and not some malicious website spoofing the URL). This obviously affects everyone (including Windows Phone OS and all other devices, PCs, Macs, Linux systems, Servers, etc) and the update on the PC side was issued only five days (yes, 5 days) after the announcement. Since then an “SSL Update” has been mentioned.

Some say that because there so many delays, that we should sit back and wait a few months for this seemingly quick fix. In my case, I think that if at&t and the manufacturers want to regain some credibility that was lost during the initial updating process, they better get running now. In any case, it is all dependent on the completion of the initial updates being rolled out. Microsoft may come with an announcement pretty quick relating to this update, considering how quick they were to correct the issue on the PC platform.

Slashgear is calling this a “May Update” following the same process of naming the updates with the month in which they were initially released. They even go as far as announcing that it will be released on May 3, which could be overlapping with the previous updates. We should also mention that based on the established updating rules and agreements with the carriers; if an update to Windows Phone OS is under 20 Megabytes (this update may be particularly small), then it can be delivered over the air (OTA).

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To recap, at&t and the manufacturers had decided to stop the release of the update to this particular model because some changes had been made to the hardware and were not thoroughly tested. This update is the one that completes all pending updates to all Windows Phones out in the US market. Any future phones will be released with these updates already installed and will not require of the February and March updates.

In Europe, Deutsche Telekom and Global and in Australia; Optus who were going through the same steps than at&t, will be also releasing the updates on the same schedule.

While this pretty much closes the update deal in the US, there is still Telstra in Australia who still has not even confirmed any kind of schedule for updating their WP7 phones (shows as still "testing") and Spain’s Telefónica still has no information on their update release which, again still shows them as “testing”.

Let’s hope that the few that are still pending updates get their tests completed as soon as possible

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Just as I reported a few days ago, those who are on at&t’s network and have either the Samsung Focus or the LG Quantum started getting the notification on their phones. The Where’s My Phone? webpage has already been updated to show that the updates are being delivered. The HTC Surround unfortunately is still in “Testing”. No word on when they will start receiving their updates though.

I have not yet received any additional features and apps offered by at&t. I cannot say I am tempted to try the Contacts app, since I don’t think it will add any benefit to my current setup, but I am interested in receiving the WISPr protocol. I am not sure if it will work with an app or transparently on my phone. I looked it up on my Windows Phone’s settings and there was no mention of this new protocol anywhere and I had no new applications installed, nor did I find those apps in the at&t special section of the Marketplace.

Everything is working just fine so far… I will report if anything else comes up.

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Officially, two of the three Windows Phones sold by at&t have changed status from "testing" to "scheduling". This means that in the next 1-10 days the update will begin popping up on users’ phones. The phones that have passed testing are the LG Quantum and the Samsung Focus. The HTC Surround still requires more testing because of a package that is unique to the HTC Surround still needs to be fully tested.

The updates for these phones will include the February Update (a.k.a. Pre-Update) and the March Update (a.k.a. NoDo, Copy & Paste). Additionally, because these phones are provided by at&t, they will include an two extra features.

The first one called "WISPr" which is a protocol that will make your phone switch from 3G to an at&t hotspot WiFi connection whenever within range of one. This is a great idea, but the jury is still out on whether the execution of it is something worth using.

The second one is the ability to sync your contacts from your Windows Phone into your at&t address book. The excuse is that your address book will be able to sync into at&t’s cloud so you never lose that information… oh,wait! Wasn’t that what your Live account does already? And your work account too? Why on earth would you ever want to do that? Well, some have said that if you ever want to change mobile platforms you should have a similar app on your other at&t offerings… but this will not help you if you want to leave at&t. Nice.

We are finally going to get our update… now to Microsoft, the manufacturers and the carriers let’s put this experience in the past and start working on not repeating this disappointment to your customers ever again.

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While NoDo was originally scheduled for December 2010, we reported that due to a few issues with carriers and manufacturers few bumps appeared on the road to updating all WP7 smartphones. Reportedly today, the final tests are helping complete compatibility and usability tests imposed by the carriers. Our estimates are that WP7 phones will all be updated sometime before the end of May.

Joe Belfiore has also indicated that the problem with the updates will be resolved and that future updates will not have to go through these issues as they are mostly typical from a new platform. Needless to say Android had more than a few bumps on the update road at the early stage of their OS. Not something that Belfiore mentioned, but I am highlighting for those of you who don’t remember.

Right after that quick introduction and apology, Belfiore changed gears into Mango. As we all know, the next major update for Windows Phone 7 (Mango) will be out by fall to existing users and new phones. Mango will provide the ability to do better multitasking, including background audio while other services are being used or applications are running, better browsing by updating Internet Explorer to Internet Explorer 9, integration of Twitter accounts in a similar way than Facebook is integrated into WP7 today. Additionally, 16 more languages will be supported in the OS so that more countries can be incorporated into the Marketplace both to submit apps and to purchase them.

Even though he kept the details still vague, one nice announcement Belfiore made today was that developers would have more access to phone controls such as sensors, camera, etc. and that such increased control given to developers along with multitasking features would allow applications like Skype or Spotify to be implemented in this platform. Although he did mention that while Spotify is not available in the US right now, he expects it to be available by the time the update is released to users.

On the entertainment side, he made the announcement that Angry Birds for Windows Phone will become available on May 25.

Developers will be able to experience all these features and more on their emulators as early as next month (May) when the new development tools for Windows Phone become available. One nifty feature he demoed was the expansion of the functionality within the live tiles. Something that is currently unique to Windows Phone 7 that will be enhanced and expanded! He mentioned the (new) ability to link from a live tile into a particular section/feature/function within the application it ties into. The great example he demoed was an Amazon app that would link into a barcode scanner function under certain circumstances and the generic main hub under other scenarios.

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This is something that is still keeping me puzzled, it happened Saturday a few weeks ago and I’ve been mulling it over trying to make some sense out of it. This is the closest to a semi-valid pattern I could come up with, but in my opinion, there are still too many variables open, so don’t make any assumptions.

I almost filled up the 8 Gbytes on my Windows Phone. No big deal, right? I never quite took over all the available storage, I had about 1 Gbyte left when I checked on my phone. Add to that, I was out and about most of that Saturday and using storage intensive apps (maps, facebook, etc). Nothing quite out of the ordinary, not enough to use up the Gbyte I had left on my phone with cached information from web services…

Then all of a sudden, when I am using the maps app, my phone reboots itself. Odd… I think, and wait until my phone restarts and try to get into the maps app again, it all looks normal… but when the maps app starts to show the higher resolution map; while aerial view was on and it was obviously downloading the image, my phone reboots itself again.

Now, I am starting to get frustrated with the phone, so I start thinking "what was the last thing I installed? There must be some kind of conflict"… so I keep trying to get back into the maps app, and now the phone jumps into an endless loop:

Samsung logo… Reboot… Samsung logo… Reboot…

I try removing the battery (which had close to a full charge), try powering up the phone, and I get the reboot loop:

Samsung logo… Reboot… Samsung logo… Reboot…

I try removing the battery and the SIM card. Power up the phone again, no luck:

Samsung logo… Reboot… Samsung logo… Reboot…

Try to cold boot into factory settings, and still no luck:

Samsung logo… Reboot… Samsung logo… Reboot…

I give up… I cannot use the phone now. Got to get to an at&t store before they close… get to one, but they tell me that they cannot do anything… they say that I should go to an at&t authorized service center. It’s on my way home. I rushed in there before closing time. They were really helpful, but they could not do anything for me (or didn’t know how to).

Obviously, it’s been less than a year and the phone is still under warranty, so I would get a replacement for an equivalent phone (they had another Focus), so I get a new one.

When I get home, I get to reinstall most of the applications I had on it, take the opportunity to clean up and not install some apps that I wasn’t using anyway.

I didn’t want to leave it just like that… I needed to get my explanation for this incident. Start researching and one thing lead to the next and I wound up in a website that had lots of users complaining about the exact same reboot loop. Not everyone seemed to have a Samsung Focus, but they all had WP7. Hmmm… I’m on to something.

Now, like most forums on the web, there are all kinds of users posting information… most people asking about their own problem and most everyone posting what worked for them as if it were the solution for everyone’s problems. In any case, there seems to be too many variations of this issue, but the common denominator I could find was that everyone was getting close to capacity on their WP7 and ran into this endless reboot loop. Users who had their phones unlocked for development could get into one of the menus on reboot and reset to factory settings… with some rate of success.

All of a sudden it dawns on me, the previous week, after I copied the last batch of music files into the phone at the end of the day, my phone had (weird enough) rebooted itself about three times… how could I not connect the dots in the afternoon!

Anyway, I really hope Microsoft comes up with a solution in one of their maintenance updates for Windows Phone. In the mean time, I decided not to install a big chunk of my music, and started using a free music streaming service (last.fm [HERE] as an alternative).

Like I said before, I am still happy with my phone, the service is great, the UI is still awesome, but Microsoft needs to start releasing bug fixes for these phones faster.

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My carrier was already at&t, I am so happy with the network coverage that I simply will argue anyone who bought the BS about network bandwidth and connection speeds. I simply don’t buy it. I am accessing at 3G speeds everywhere I go, no dropped calls, no service interruptions of any kind (since I bought the phone in November). To all of those who complain, but have an iPhone, I say: you bought a defective phone, so deal with it. Your phone is negligently designed and it’s been proven more than once that the iPhone has signal strength issues due to a faulty antenna design. Your calls drop on either technology GSM, CDMA… what does that tell you? There a chance that the problem might possibly be the antenna design, the communications chipset, etc.

Anyway, this little Samsung Focus of mine is the little phone that could… but the quality control issues that so affect other platforms are still a burden for Windows Phones. Manufacturers with low quality processes or carriers that disregard the implications of having untested hardware affect all platforms.

The latest and most recent disappointment has been at&t which is supposedly the premier carrier for Windows Phone 7. Being a premier partner means that everything regarding Windows Phone 7 is going to be done absolutely right: no delays and top quality service and devices.

Well, everybody knows that this particular “Premier Partner” is taking too much time to release their updates and there is a reason for that:

It turns out that at&t (with other carriers) and the OEMs played the old “switcheroo” game on the Redmond team. It is not clear to me who (carriers or OEMs) did what, but at some point Samsung, HTC and other OEMs or the carriers released the same phone with slightly different hardware than the one that was initially tested. All this could be considered business as usual had they communicated with Microsoft at all and on time for the update release schedule. Unfortunately, this means that you may have bought a WP7 phone that is not 100% compatible with what’s going to come to us through the WP7 Updates until someone fixes this mess.

You’re obviously not going to be left out hanging, and you will get your updates sooner rather than later. Those updates are obviously going to be delivered to you now after thorough testing and confirmation that you will not brick you phone. Even though this is nothing in the grand scheme of things, it certainly threw a wrench in Microsoft’s wheel. Microsoft has had to come out and burn some PR and good will just to be able to buy some time and correct all the issues that would come out if you had any of the phones with switched components/parts. As far as I know, both the February and the March updates have been corrected and if you are one of those who has a “special” phone you will receive your updated WP7 updates soon… and most likely together in one shot.

Some carriers had diligently worked to release the WP7 update and have met all the requirements to meet the original deadlines. They have been able to release the updates and have had no big issues with them. Others, have struggled with the updates and one of the reasons behind that is this component inconsistencies throughout their products… but this is also odd because Samsung has not had any problems relating their Samsung Omnia 7, which is supposed to be the exact same hardware than the Samsung Focus but more square at the top and bottom borders. HTC on the other hand, has released devices on different carriers with mixed results but the ones that have had some issues are the same carriers that had issues with Samsung devices. This points the finger more towards the carriers and not the OEMs, but that is still not 100% clear.

Now that (all April Fools joking aside) at least three of the top market analysis companies have deemed Microsoft and Windows Phone 7 the platform that will beat Blackberry and iPhone’s platform by 2015, it is becoming more and more critical that both carriers and OEM partners communicate better.

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“Up until the launch of Windows Phone 7 last year, Microsoft has steadily lost market share … By 2015, IDC expects Windows Phone to be number 2 operating system worldwide behind Android” IDC, March 2011

I ended up confirming the quote from IDC to be true, but the real bit of news here is the implication and the desperate move on the part of Verizon. I had to dig deeper.

As it looks like right now, several influential news announced in the last few days became the straw that broke the camel’s back for big red. The most recent, obviously, being that Windows Phone will leapfrog other manufacturers in the coming years and Verizon has not a single Windows Phone. Even more, the CEO has made some harsh comments about the platform. Add to that the fact that at&t and Verizon are neck to neck in the fight for iPhone leadership, and that Verizon is not really “stealing” that many customers from at&t. Reports from Consumer Reports also confirm that just as the iPhone that runs on the at&t network, the iPhone that runs on the Verizon network has the exact same antenna and signal drop issues confirming once and for all the fact that this is just simply negligent design on the part of Cupertino. (Not that I lost any sleep over this, I had already reported that last fact). Throw into the mix, the announcement from at&t that they intend to purchase T-Mobile and this all adds up to the future not looking as good as Verizon would want.

The comments coming from Cupertino are mostly of outrage and confusion from their new channel partner (Verizon). The idea of giving away a new phone can only water down the image of value that Apple has fought to project onto the market. One thing is giving away the iPhone 3gs for $50 like at&t has managed to do, but another completely different is to give away a product that is the most recent in line.

I don’t think this is going to work out for Verizon… if Apple is not in favor of this, they will still have to pay new iPhones at cost and Verizon will lose a lot (somewhere upwards of a gazillion maybe?) when customers pick up their new free iPhone.

In my case, I will refuse to get an iPhone, even if it is free… there’s just no comparing between every smartphone in the market and Windows Phone 7… the UI is just plain superior. Besides, this is just another April fools day joke.

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To get into further detail, the NoDo update with Copy/Paste and performance gains on loading apps is still out there scheduled for March. This one is going to focus on “the way the updating process actually works”. This update will become available to all users (eventually), but only immediate to some users right now. Starting today, some users will get the notification on their phones that they need to sync up their phones with the Zune software via USB cable in order to get the update. Users need to be aware that if they haven’t been keeping updated their Zune software, then they will probably be asked to update it before the actual phone update runs. I personally recommend you to do that today, even if your phone does not prompt you about the WP7 update. That way you are ready to go.

The order in which users will be batched was not mentioned, so you could potentially see your phone’s notification while someone who purchased the very next phone (purchased next, enabled next, registered next, or whose serial number is immediately next)  not pop up for a few days.

The report that indicates this update to be available did not indicate of any changes in the delivery date for NoDo, so you should still expect it to become available in the first half of March. You should most likely receive your NoDo update with the same delay from the final release date than the delay you receive this first notification from today’s announcement. This means that if you receive this first update in 2 days, and NoDo is release March 12, then you should expect your NoDo update to become available to you on March 14.

Many had criticized Microsoft for not releasing enough updates, now it looks like we might get more updates than expected… If you ask me, I can’t wait either way.

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While this is a sneaky but smart approach on the part of AT&T that will most likely work on most unsuspecting customers, the implementation of it left a hole wide open that most AT&T customers may take advantage of right away. Their system is prepared to give you 1000 rollover minutes as long as you send a text message saying “Yes” to 11113020 regardless of you having an iPhone, smartphone or any other cellphone.

I have personally tested this to be working with several non iPhones.

You win some, you lose some… this time AT&T seems to be about to lose some… while keeping some customers that were going to stay with them anyway.

Thanks AT&T!

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Now if they only were able to mix in a Windows PC and a Windows Phone!

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The report goes on to say that the article is called “Troubleshooting problems during software update for Windows Phone 7”, and it simply walks the users through the WP7 update process and helps troubleshoot in case of any potential problems that may happen during the process. The article also indicates how to “undo” the update if users were not to like the update. From the content in the article one can tell that the update will only happen when the phone is connected to the PC and syncing through the Zune software, however it will also require that you have a USB wired connection between the phone and the computer to make sure that the connection will not be interrupted by any external factors. You can currently sync via WiFi if your computer is connected and running to the same network you are connected with WiFi and your phone goes into screensaver mode.

Additionally, you need to make sure that your phone is fully charged before updating to make sure you don’t get interrupted in your software update.

I’m keeping mine fully charged at all times so I can update as soon as it becomes available!

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It turns out there is a "Photo Stream" feature that looks out for pictures uploaded by your contacts into MobileMe much like the What’s New section in the Pictures Hub in Windows Phone 7 goes out and gathers pictures posted by anyone in your contacts. That is not the complete extent of Windows Phone 7, just the social aspect of the hub… it has several more hub pages with the typical sections you would find in a Picture application such as Galleries, Albums (or folders, whichever your user interface), sample pictures, favorites, most recent, etc.

I am not sure what the legal extent of Microsoft patents really are with regards to the "hub plus social" concept , but I wouldn’t be surprised if a round of lawsuits would start out of this event.

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This places Microsoft in a very particular and unique position. It clearly shows they have the right approach at third part application development. Their approach is clearly correct in trying to leverage their existing development community. There are a number of clear opportunities for all developers that jump into this development environment. Additionally a large number of developers that have tried the development tools from Apple, Android and Microsoft all agree that the best and easiest tools are the ones provided by Microsoft, making this an even more attractive scenario for existing developers on MS technologies.

Here is a quick chart showing the numbers for actual counts and average daily count growth. Click on it to see the details.

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This year they are introducing 4 tablets. You can see them in this video [HERE]. They are three Android tablets and one Windows 7. All four of them are in different form factors.

ASUS Eee Pad MeMO

• Android 3.0 (Honeycomb) OS
• 7-inch capacitive touchscreen display
• 1024 x 600-pixel resolution
• Capacitive stylus included
• 1.2GHz dual-core Qualcomm 8260 Snapdragon processor
• 5-megapixel camera with LED flash
• 1.2-megapixel front-facing camera for video chat
• HD video playback
• Starting at $499, available in June

ASUS Eee Pad Transformer

• Android 3.0 (Honeycomb) OS
• 10.1-inch IPS touchscreen display
• 1280 x 800-pixel resolution
• NVIDIA Tegra 2 dual-core processor
• 5-megapixel camera with LED flash
• 1.2-megapixel front-facing camera for video chat
• Unique docking station with integrated keyboard and 16-hour battery
• Priced between $399 and $699, available in April

ASUS Eee Pad Slider

• Android 3.0 (Honeycomb) OS
• 10.1-inch IPS touchscreen display
• 1280 x 800-pixel resolution
• NVIDIA Tegra 2 dual-core processor
• 5-megapixel camera with LED flash
• 1.2-megapixel front-facing camera for video chat
• Sliding full QWERTY keyboard
• miniHDMI, miniUSB ports
• microSDHC support
• Priced between $499 and $799, available in May

ASUS Eee Slate EP121

• Windows 7 OS
• 12.1-inch IPS touchscreen display
• 1280 x 800-resolution
• Wacom digitizer pen
• Core i5-470M processor
• Up to 4GB of RAM
• 32GB-64GB SSD
• 1.2-megapixel front-facing camera for video chat
• Included Bluetooth keyboard
• HDMI port
• Starts at $999 (32GB) $1099 (64GB), available later in January, at least in Amazon.com [HERE] and [HERE] and at the Microsoft store [HERE].

The Slate is being advertised as “the most powerful tablet”, which is correct with its Intel i5 processor it is the fastest performing tablet so far. It certainly has laptop-level performance and was demoed displaying HD-1080 video while opening office documents. Its battery is supposed to last at least 3.5 hours (not so great for a tablet, but good for a laptop replacement).

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The article goes on to talk about the "Update". Please note that the target URL for the post shows "january-update.aspx" which could be an indicator of the original title for the article or an indicator of the fact that it is planned for January like most are estimating by now. The article goes on to indicating that it is a "peek at some of what’s ahead" in the upcoming Windows Phone 7 Update.

A few features are listed:

• Copy and Paste: describes the basics of copy-pasting. It also describes how it will work. Simply select a word by tapping on it, drag the finger to extend or reduce the selection and simply tap on the “copy button” that will appear next to the selection. At this point the information is copied and in memory, now you just need to go to the place where you want to paste. Tap on the exact spot you want the text pasted and then on top of the keyboard (where you normally see the word suggestions while you are typing) you’ll see again the copy-paste button. Tap on that button again and the text will be pasted on the spot you selected. It also mentions that anywhere where there’s text (such as a webpage, text field, etc) can be your source of your copied text.
• Performance: Just as it was announced yesterday at CES, this article mentioned that some form of performance enhancement has been applied to “the time it takes for apps and games to start up”.
• Better Marketplace Search: This one is based on some pain expressed by most people that have been searching for apps in the Marketplace. You would not notice this if you normally would use the hub, go to the right category, select “top”, “new”, etc and then scroll down, but if you press the search button on your phone while in the marketplace the search applies to the marketplace. Mind you, the whole marketplace… not just the category where you are. You would receive a mix of matching apps, games, songs, artists etc… all from the marketplace all right, but not too smart. Minor fix, but with real benefits when you are searching for something specific.
• Getting Phone Updates: This is the one that is really important for you to receive the update as soon as it becomes available. Go to your phone’s app list and tap on Settings. Tap on Phone Update and make sure your phone get notified when the Update becomes available for you.

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Some numbers mentioned were really impressive, Kinect sold 8 million units since launch date a mere 2 months ago. No specific numbers were given for Windows Phone 7 devices but it was already reported that they were over 1.5 million in the first 6 weeks. Some devices were showcased even with examples of where Microsoft is working with partners to reduce power consumption and enhance the user experience. One example was particularly interesting: the one used by the recently announced ASUS eee Slate where the collaboration between hardware manufacturers and software showed promise.  By fusing the different substrates in the screen LCD, digitizer, pen sensors, etc the screen was consuming 20% less power to produce the same brightness than other screen that were not fused together, all this on top of using Gorilla Glass. Gorilla Glass is a proprietary type of screen that is much more resistant to scratches than policarbonate and does not shatter like glass. Earlier, ASUS had announced this tablet as “the most powerful tablet” and indeed, with an Intel i5 core processor, this is in fact the highest performing tablet that can potentially work as a replacement to any decent performing laptop. It is reported to have a 3.5 hour battery.

Windows Phone 7 was showcased with the much anticipated first update. It was demoed with copy-paste, and it was reported to have much better performance on third party applications along with other minor fixes and enhancements. Other sites have reported that this update is ready but is currently awaiting carrier tests and approval. It is was reported that we should expect this update to be rolled out to consumers late January/early February. A very effective approach was taken to this demo, basically showing off how easy it would be to complete 7 particular tasks on a Windows Phone 7. This is exactly what was reported earlier in the conference to be what is gaining Windows Phone 7 more customers. How easy it is to use as opposed to the other OSs.

Windows 8′s guts were shown running on several different devices. In fact the big announcement in this line is that Windows is going to start supporting the new generations of SOC computers (SoC means System on Chip), particularly the ones that follow the ARM specification, in this group were mentioned nVidia’s Tegra line, Texas Instruments OMAP, Qualcomm while still supporting the x86 architecture that Intel and AMD produce. This new line of SoC technologies are the ones that will have extremely low power requirements along with the reduced size. What this means for the consumer is that tablets, netbooks and other devices will not be limited to use the x86 line which, in contrast, seems so power-hungry.

Surface 2.0 was another interesting demo during this keynote. Now, on version 2, the surface computer is no longer a huge block to be used as a coffee table or block in the center of a room. Even though it can still be used this way, it can now be used hanging on a wall due to the fact that it is now a mere 4 inches thick. The surface of the device (manufactured by Samsung) is covered in Gorilla Glass and the pixels themselves now capture IR/UV light reflected from the items placed on the surface. This is much more effective than a camera placed behind, a resistive touchscreen or a capacitive touchscreen. As it was demoed, a piece of paper was placed on top of the surface and the text on the paper was immediately detected on the device. Amazing.

Out of the rumored devices to be announced in this keynote, the big one missing was Microsoft TV, Microsoft’s response to Apple TV and Google TV.

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Impressive numbers, but this is not the only announcement. Avatar Kinect to be delivered as an included service with an Xbox Live Gold subscription.

Avatar Kinect is a service that will allow users connect with their own avatar to different environments and talk avatar-to-avatar and other services. Avatar Kinect will include not only the usual Kinect body movement recognition but face, mouth and eyebrow movement to reproduce face expressions more accurately.

Additionally, some Xbox applications such as Netflix, Hulu, Zune even a partnership with ESPN to include controlling with Kinect.
Article posted with BloghuB for Windows Phone 7

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I have a spare ThinkOutside Bluetooth keyboard (the intellectual property moved from company to company, it used to be called Targus ThinkOutside, ThinkOutside, iGo ThinkOutside and now Thanko), other friends and acquaintances that also have their WP7 phones have different kinds of Bluetooth keyboards as well… all those keyboards are different sizes but are all intended to be used along with a mobile devices.

Now, WP7 phones come in different sizes and with and/or without physical keyboards, but none of course with a comfortable enough keyboard to be used for extended periods of time. Phones are obviously not intended for this much use at once, but every now and then I am away from my laptop and want to type a few ideas into OneNote or a blog article draft, etc… What WP7 phones do not have (yet) is a Bluetooth profile for keyboards. This profile would enable virtually any Bluetooth keyboard to be used with the phone to type!

Your Windows Phone 7 supports several different profiles, all useful, but ultimately not enough for making everyone happy. Here is a list of what is currently supported:

• Hands Free Profile for hands free operation of your phone. Specifically to place calls and make calls.
• Headset Profile for place and making calls and listening to audio. This profile is supported by phones and other devices such as computers, PDAs, etc.
• Advanced Audio Distribution Profile (A2DP) for streaming audio from a music player to headphones or speakers. This is an audio streaming only profile.
• Audio/Video Remote Control Profile (AVRCP) for remote controlling a device such as music player, computer using multimedia software DVR, video tuner, amplifier, etc or for being remote controlled by the connecting device.
• Phone Book Access Profile (PBAP) for allowing other devices access the phone book to use the information to be displayed on an external screen. For example when your car’s stereo shows a call from John Doe, it is actually accessing your phone book to get the name matching the phone number for the incoming call.

Unfortunately, there are no profiles implemented for Keyboards (which BTW are some of the most basic Bluetooth profiles). It is called HID profile (for Human Interface Device) and it is normally used for keyboard, mouse, numeric keypad, etc.

If you attempt to connect your WP7 phone with your keyboard, you will see that the phone can detect the keyboard, it may even know what device model it is but don’t get your hopes up… because this is just the plug and play features in Bluetooth doing their work. When you try to pair them you will even be requested to enter a pairing number on your keyboard, but you will then see either an error message or nothing at all followed by a timeout message. This just means that even though you would have been able to pair the devices together, WP7 does not know how to handle a keyboard.

So there you have it… this is why your phone is not able to connect to your Bluetooth keyboard. Just continue tapping on your screen. I was told that one of the updates scheduled for 2011 (there are at least 3 of them scheduled for this year alone) will add support for the HID profile.

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In this article I will go over the setup we did on our mobile users and their smartphones. The setup was mostly painless, like I reported earlier, except for some unique issues related specifically to the fact that we were moving from a working platform to another (as opposed to starting a new platform from scratch).

First a side note: Google Apps allows the users to connect to their services for email, contacts and calendar through many different tools and methods. They use their own web client, client/connectors for MS Outlook, and along with other platforms they provide the Google Apps client for several mobile devices. What is most interesting is that they also communicate to the clients via the EAS protocol (EAS protocol stands for Exchange Active Sync protocol). This means that you could potentially connect into it with any client that supports connections into MS Exchange and sync to your Google Apps serviced account without the client even noticing. Having this in mind, we set out to connect several different mobile platforms.

Our company does not mandate users to connect with a particular platform, so our mobile base is a huge mish-mash of platforms, versions, UIs and technologies. The idea is that the users will use whatever platform they feel most comfortable with and we provide them the service they need to get them connected.

First attempt to setup a mobile client we did with a Samsung Focus (Windows Phone 7), then we moved to iPhones/iPads, BlackBerry devices and Android.

Windows Phone 7

Setup took literally 2 minutes. Out of all the setups we did, this was the quickest.  You essentially needed to provide the email address, the password, the server name and then decide whether we wanted to have push email or not. We even thought we had done something wrong and set it up twice: once as a Google email synching email, calendar and contacts and the final one as a MS Exchange connection synching the same 3 sets. Both without any issues at all. Either way we set it up, it was the same result: all appointments, contacts and emails came in pretty quick with no issues at all. MS Office comes bundled with Windows Phone 7, so any Google Docs exported to office format can still be opened on the device without the need to install any document viewer.

iOS: iPhone/iPad

iOS setup to connect into Google Apps was somewhat slower than with Windows Phone 7. There were quite a few more fields to enter/select, but it was pretty straightforward. It seems that iOS is not as smart as Windows Phone is, after all Windows Phone is a complete departure from the norm… still iOS devices connect seamlessly to both MS Exchange and email hosted with Google Apps plus the added bonus of having the Google Apps app for iOS that allows users to do whatever they would do on a desktop while using all the features of Google Apps.

BlackBerry

BlackBerry devices have always been difficult to deal with when you tried to do something RIM didn’t want you to do. These devices play nice as long as you connect with one of their services BES or BIS (BIS being free for setups of up to 50 users). Don’t get me wrong, BlackBerries work fine, but once you set them up one way (like we had them with BES); if you try to change what they are doing and go for something completely different, they will not cooperate. We had one BlackBerry Storm II that even after a cold-boot, back to factory settings would not allow us to connect into Google Apps; and this was with Tech support from RIM, Verizon tech support and our Google vendor technical support that was helping us execute this migration!

Android

You would think that an OS built partially by Google and the open source community would make the best use of the features provided with Google Apps, right? Well… not always the case! It turns out that Android does not treat all Google accounts the same way. The very first one you register in your device gets special treatment and is the one in which most services are connected with. So far so good, but the issue was that these smartphones were connected to Gmail accounts as the primary account and then would use a "corporate" account into the MS Exchange we already had… when time to change to Google Apps came, we removed the MS Exchange account and tried to add the new Google account (all without touching the users’ Gmail account) it was impossible. Forums on the web recommended to delete this, delete that, restart, even do a full reset back to factory settings. We were not willing to do that, especially because there were just as equal amount of reports that this reset to factory defaults would not work but also because this would have users go back to a blank slate and waste their time setting up everything else they had on their phones. Trying to setup that second Google account we would get an error message along the lines of "connection to the server cannot be established because it is not reliable" (not in those exact words, but close enough)… so we thought that it was an issue with not having enough signal. Searching the user forums and websites we found a website created by some guy in Africa who finally discovered a workaround to be able to register a second account and get all contacts and calendar synched. He recommended that users attempt to open up YouTube with the account that could not be registered. Then close YouTube and try to create the account as new Google email account. It seemed ridiculous, but simple and innocuous enough to try… (Hey, our other option was to go back factory settings!). It looks like  creating the credentials for YouTube on the device creates the entry in the settings so that Mail will be setup as a secondary and allow it to be treated as primary thus letting the users do what they wanted in the first place, that is to read their emails, calendar and contacts from work…

Unfortunately, the saddest thing is not that the OS has some flaws; all OSes have flaws. The real issue here is that because there is no clear responsible party for this particular piece of functionality, no one has fixed it so far. This issue has been reported as such by users for over a year already.

Mind you users who did not have a Gmail account would have absolutely no problems, so user beware: if you have an Android Phone, just avoid using your Gmail account at all costs or work at a place that has no interest for using Google Apps!

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Over the last quarter, I’ve been researching what to do about our old Exchange server. I decided to take a look at all our available solutions, regardless of my personal biases. When we first started the process we had several different options available to us:

• Upgrade MS Exchange, which required purchasing new hardware.
• Moving to a hosted MS Exchange solution. Eliminating the cost of hardware, but with the same risks if it ever went down due to hardware failure.
• Moving to some sort of “cloud services” solution. We narrowed it down to Microsoft’s Office 365 and Google Apps.
• Downsizing to a “hosted email” type  of solution. Also narrowed down to a single vendor with whom I have done business in the past and with my personal websites and email accounts. Lowest cost solution, but would require us to keep user-level backups of emails… a true operations nightmare.

Right after we had reached a conclusion on what to move into… our MS Exchange server died with 3 drives in the RAID array non-responsive, what made it unable to hot swap and rebuild. Three more drives died upon replacement, and the inability to restore from the available tape because it was corrupted. Finally we came back temporarily from a different tape set. Like I mentioned, we had already decided  to move into a “cloud services” type of solution, where we would not be held hostages by the hardware nor would we be dependent on software requirements of ever-expanding bloatware with features we were never going to use.

In any case, even though I do consider myself a true Microsoftie, I had to give into the idea of using Google Apps. This solution was not even more cost effective (Google Apps is $25 to $75 annual per user cheaper than MS Office 365) but it simplifies administration and setup. At the same time, we get a foot into the possibility of using other applications (word processing, spreadsheet, etc) from Google (included in the $45 – $50 annual per user fee). Finally we are using an email and application system that already is SAS-70 Type II audited for compliance (which MS Office 365 is not).

I know that Microsoft is not there yet with Office 365, and in a few years if they happen to be better than Google Apps, I will have no trouble moving back into that solution provided they are the most convenient and cost effective solution for the company. In the mean time, I have to admit that Google Apps is a great working environment.

So, how did we do with our migration?

It turned out to be much simpler than expected, and yes, we did great! We ended up migrating all our data into Google Apps Premium along with the Postini service (now called Google Message Discovery) for some of our key users. GMD is a service that gives you data retention of up to 10 years with no storage space allocation limits.

Server data gets moved by running an application on the server and user information that happens to be needed and is not on the server (some of our users had huge archives in PSTs) get moved into Google Apps with a client application.  Overall the process varies depending on how much uploading bandwidth the company has but it has been pretty simple and seamless for the users. Now as for the users, we are allowing them to continue to use MS Outlook so that the transition is not painful for them. If they want, they can move on and start using the Google Apps interface which is the same as Gmail in principle, but it happens to give you access to all of its 25 Gigabytes, along with Google Talk, Google Video, Google Docs, Google Calendar, Google Tasks, Google Contacts, Google sites (an application similar in principle to MS SharePoint in its early stages) and other tools like Spam and malware filtering, Archiving (GMD). Users who want to use MS Outlook can still make use of all the connected apps where Outlook acts as a client for them or they can use the corresponding website for each of them.

I will describe what happened with each of the mobile platforms in an article in the near future, but suffice it to say that it was mostly painless… except some BlackBerry devices that were refusing to disconnect from the BES firewall and the surprising fact that Android was one OS that was tough to connect to Google Apps.

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There are several different developer devices. One of them being the Samsung Taylor, this is the one that was reported to receive the update. The reported updated version on these devices is now 7.0.7338.0, it was not reported what the previous version was but it was prior to the release version running on retail devices which is 7.0.7004.0. Updates for devices had been announced to be executed through the Zune software, so start syncing your phones everyday now… who knows when you’ll be getting your update!

Copy-Paste is reportedly working in the following way:

Words are highlighted/selected by tapping on them. It’s been reported that arrows will show now on both sides of the selected word. The selection can then be expanded by dragging left or right. This makes for the selection of multiple words or paragraphs. An icon will appear near the highlighted text in a similar (and consistent by the way) with the PC’s Office suite. Then a paste icon will appear right after focus is set to an editor and after the soft keyboard is enabled (essentially when the text editing object is enabled for editing text).

It is not confirmed for all UI elements, but at the very least for Messaging, you can tap and hold until the context menu will show up and it will include the options for copy and paste. If this last bit is true, this alone will enable a consistent way for copy paste features across the board.

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We’ll let’s see what you are allowed to do in Windows Phone 7’s Metro UI:

• Go to Messaging
• Select a prior conversation or select someone’s name or even type someone’s mobile phone number.
• Start typing their contact information, type “Hey Joe, here is the contact information for Mike:”
• Then you copy-paste Mike’s contact information…but… wait, wait, there’s no copy-paste here. (We knew that, it’s coming in January!), but even if copy-paste were available, would you copy-paste all contact information one by one? copy mobile number, paste mobile number, copy email, paste email… that’s too cumbersome.
• Luckily there are both free and paid apps for that and their names are:

• textContact Light (free)
• textContact Pro ($0.99)

These nifty little apps are for sending your contacts to someone else over text message. They are very simple and straightforward. You create the message by typing whatever text you want; then choose to add a phone or an emai which takes you to the contact selector. You pick which one and your are done and can send the text message.

The paid version has more fancy features where you can save the most frequent messages in a “favorites” sort of list. You can also keep the most recent text messages.

The free version is add-supported. This version in particular is highly ranked (45 in the world and 40 in the US under the Free Tools category).

When you start using the application, you go straight to the test editor, where you enter the main text that will be sent in the text message. As you can see, the menu allows you to clear, save, add email, add phone, access history, saved sms or the about page. The clear menu option empties the current text entered. The save option will let you store the content, add email lets you choose a contact’s email to insert into the text message. The add phone will let you choose a contact’s phone to be inserted into the text message. History and saved sms will let you access the history page and the saved sms page that will be described in a few paragraphs.

Once you decided what type of contact information to insert, you choose the particular contact you want to select the email or phone number from. Selecting them is easy and has the same features you find in the common Metro UI for selecting contacts. Just swipe up or down to get to your contact or touch the letter they are archived under and you will be able to jump into that particular letter. Selecting a particular contact should not take you more than a touch, a scroll and touching the actual name. You can combine as many sets of contacts as you want. If the message is too long it still gets cut off in blocks of 160 characters long allowed by text messages.

Under history, it will show you the last 10 messages. This gives you a quick view at what you sent out last. It comes very handy. The saved sms page lets you save the most used messages/contacts so you can save and use them as many times as you want.

If you have textContact Pro, then you get a few more tools, that will help you get there a bit faster. Overall both of them are very helpful and do the intended job efficiently and without any unnecessary features. I recommend both these apps if you normally send out contacts from your cell. Even if you don’t usually send them, it makes sense that you would have an app like this one ready to be used, in such cases I would recommend that you go for the free app and live with the ads that pay the developer for their efforts in releasing both versions.

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When you open this app the first time it prompts you for the blog’s connection address and other parameters as they appear in the Settings page, I’ll get to them in a few paragraphs.

The after setting up your first blog, you can start using it immediately (or you can setup several more blogs). The app has a main hub divided into Blogs and Local Drafts. Blogs contains all the blogs you setup so you can select where to post. Local drafts allows you to create an article/post off line and then publish/post it to the blog. The main hub also has a settings button that has several types of settings.

The pages under settings are Services (blogs) where you add new blogs where you will be posting, Media in case you upload your images to an image service such as Picasa, but this is mostly redundant when you have a WordPress blog since you can embed the article images into the blog post. For blog types supported other than WordPress (Drupal, Blogger, dasBlog and TypePad through the following protocols: Blogger v1, Blogger v2 and Metaweblog) you may need to use an external media store such as Picasa in order to post images. General for defining your general blog post preferences like sync the last few (configurable number) of posts, signature, publish on upload, image default upload size, etc.From here there is a nice credits and help pages that come handy if you want a quick hand on how to do some of the tasks.

Back into the main hub and in the blogs or the drafts pages you have a list of blog articles. It contains the title, a quick 1 line worth of text from the article, and a list of categories and tags that fit in the next line. Right next to these 3 lines of text you can see the date in which it was posted. Selecting any of the articles in the list enters edit mode. In the menu there are several items to be selected, add, comments and a selector to delete them. Add will take you to the editor, comments takes you to a page where you can approve, disapprove and sync comments to that particular article, finally the selector allows you to remove an article from the blog.

The editor page looks very similar to the page where you compose an email with a few minor differences. On the top you have the blog name and type of blog service used. The following line shows your article’s title with an icon at the end that allows you to select categories and tags (more on this in a few lines). The main editing area allows you to enter the main content of your article. The menu for this particular page is great and simple. You have the option here to post/publish, add a picture, add a link to a URL or format. Expanding your menu will show additional items for source view (edit HTML source), undo and redo your last changes.

The only thing in my opinion that sticks out as a design issue is the button for accessing the categories and tags (that little blue circle with an “i” in it). It almost looks like an afterthought and not really included in the overall design of the app. For this to be 100% Metro UI, I would personally enter it as a menu item in the menu in the editor (either an icon/button or a menu option after expanding the menu). Additionally, the tags page does not download a list of tags from your blog, so you are starting from scratch even though your blog may already have hundreds if not thousands of tags already entered. The author reported to me that he will take my suggestions into account and will incorporate the appropriate fixes when the time comes… he was very responsive when I posted a few suggestions on his website. This is very encouraging.

Add picture shows the picture chooser that also has the option to take a picture on the spot with your Windows Phone’s camera.The picture chooser has the usual sort options to facilitate picking the right image. Here you get all, by date and favorites. The add link button in the menu takes you to the link option page where you enter the text, URL and whether you want the target of the link (such as _blank, _parent, etc). Selecting a block of text and then the formatting menu option takes you to the text format page where the basic formatting options are displayed. These are basic formatting only, don’t expect to have the equivalent of Word here; remember that this is a blog article editor and your article is still going to be formatted with your blog’s website theme so that all your articles look consistent with each other. In any case this is plenty flexible for the task at hand. Finally source view shows the same editor screen but shows all the HTML tags that will be sent along with the blog for formatting.

Overall this app is great and extremely useful. People that don’t blog for a living and just do it for fun or passion for a particular subject (almost all of us). will see the utility in this app because it will allow them to write their articles under any circumstance anywhere they are. Now if only Microsoft would update their bluetooth stack to include bluetooth keyboards!

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Chris Walsh, MobilityDigest.com and CNet.com all claim to have inside knowledge of the update to come in January. This is a compilation of their information. In their articles related to WP7′s first update, they indicate that the WP7 update will have at the very least the following items:

• Bing turn-by-turn directions and other improvements. This is being beta tested right now.
• Custom ringtone support: An app that will allow users to edit, customize, search and store ringtones.
• Copy/Paste
• Multi-tasking (at least some form of multi-tasking, the details are not clear). The latest (unclear) information we have about this one is that it will be supported through some form of multi-tasking via the hubs. This means that the hubs in applications will have some form of multitasking capabilities when used properly. This feature will reportedly be implemented only in the short term. Does this mean that we are only talking about app-switching instead of multi-tasking for now? If so, it still would be much better than none at all!
• SkyDrive integration. Doing this would probably make sense since we are now linking MS Office 2010 and OneNote 2010 via SkyDrive to the devices, but the way to add new documents is a bit cumbersome.
• Flash/Silverlight plug-in

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I will post a review of the app as soon as I finish setting it up and playing with it a bit.

This little app is just an example of the great tools that developers are putting together for Windows Phone. Good quality apps are a key for Microsoft’s success with this platform and for this, Microsoft has gathered an impressive amount of developers… all eager to post theirgreat ideas. It’s been reported that there are more than 15,000 developers. So far, since the Marketplace opened up a little over 3 weeks, there have been more than 3500 apps released. And unlike the iTunes store, only a handful of those apps are fart apps.

Back to BloghuB, I believe that this app will let me post quick articles more often as I won’t need to write them from my PC.
Posted with BloghuB for Windows Phone 7

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The body of this phone is made of aluminum, laser sculpted-mono-block with polymer inserts. This device has a decent screen size while being small and pocketable enough.

The screen of this device is definitely not the largest, it’s compact size contributes to the overall small and light feel.

Out of all the devices with Windows Phone 7, this is a pretty good option for audio enthusiasts: dolby SRS virtual surround will certainly do the trick.

Technical Specs

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The Venue Pro is a well-crafted device, it shows no sign of Dell being out of the mobile market for any amount of time. The quality and close attention to detail shows in this device where even the front of the device (which could have been made of clear polycarbonate like any other phone) is made of Gorilla Glass which is a tough anti-scratch-and-shatter-resistant material.

The Dell Venue Pro will be released for the GSM market in the T-Mobile network. Unfortunately, it will be locked up for the T-Mobile  network, but the hardware right out of the box is supposed to support the GSM and UMTS bands used in the US by both T-Mobile and AT&T. I wouldn’t count out the possibility of buying an unlocked Venue from Dell itself or a third party and using it in either network. Please have in mind that there are no unlocked prices or even availability information out there right now.

Another highlight of this phone is the screen. This is going to be a 4.1” AMOLED display that will be as bright as they come. The slide-out keyboard is portrait-oriented. This means that when you are typing on the keyboard you get the same feel that you would get with a blackberry-style keyboard. The keys feel a bit larger than with other keyboards that have the same portrait orientation (Palm Pre, Blackberry, BlackJack II, etc). The Venue is rumored to come either with 8Gb or 16Gb of memory, although only the 8Gb has been officially announced.

Hardware-wise it feels a very classy design which complements the OS so well.

No big thrills were added to this device when it comes to software, although we are still waiting to see if T-Mobile adds a Marketplace section of their own (like AT&T is doing). Dell has also announced a series of applications that will be bundled along with the Venue Pro, no confirmation on which ones they are yet.

Technical Specs

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• Windows Phone 7 will be available October 21 in some European markets and November 8 in the US, everyone else will follow.
• There will be 9 devices at launch. More will follow soon, more were announced than the initial 9 to be launched. We have reviews for all 9 of them and they will be posted later today:

• Dell Venue Pro (T-Mobile)
• HTC HD7 (T-Mobile, O2)
• HTC HTC 7 Mozart (Orange)
• HTC Surround (AT&T)
• HTC 7 Trophy (Vodafone)
• LG Optimus 7 (Vodafone)
• LG Quantum/Optimus 7Q (AT&T)
• Samsung Focus (AT&T)
• Samsung Omnia 7 (Orange)

• HTC 7 Pro (Sprint)

Other devices have not been announced, but there have been rumors of them and a few videos of people showing them off… we are not sure when or where they will be released.

• Asus had a device shown off at some point. Videos have surfaced where the demo goes through an AT&T marketplace, hence the assumption that they might be released on the AT&T network but AT&T has not filed any documents about them. We are not sure if these are going to be offered eventually or if they were part of a a test batch that never passed AT&T’s approval.

Windows Phone 7 has been confirmed and reconfirmed to support expandable microDS storage. On this one in particular we are actually see some very conflicting information. All storage memory on WP7 devices is technically microSD (installed on board or installed internally). Technically microSD is supported, the question we need to ask is whether EXTERNAL microSD is going to be supported. If it turns out it is supported by the OS, then the only explanation we could find for all 9 devices not using removable microSD cards, would be that manufacturers are applying planned obsolescence into these devices therefore making the consumer upgrade their phone whenever they run out of space. If the OS does not support external microSD, that is still logical, because that would be inline with Microsoft being consistent in their push for cloud services and removing local storage for a more distributed (i.e. cloud-based) solution. This push will potentially raise your bandwidth usage which will (technically) lower bandwidth prices or make huge loads of money for the carriers.

So there you have it… Microsoft’s announcement in a nutshell.

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Today at the long rumored, recently confirmed and much anticipated event; Microsoft and partners announced all the phones that will be available. The announcement itself was no big news, it pretty much confirmed what we all knew at this point… Windows Phone 7 devices will be available on October 21 in some European markets and November 8 this year in the US. Both GSM carriers (AT&T and T-Mobile) made their share of announcements as well. CDMA carriers will have their devices available on the first half of 2011, but they were not present at the event. We got this information from the device manufacturers. Previously posted news on this site about Motorola seems to have been a plant from either Best Buy Mobile, Motorola itself or Verizon. The bit of news still remains unconfirmed and it could still be true, especially considering that their Droid plans were kept in secret so well for so long before their initial launch. I am hopeful this is true and come early 2011, there might be a nice device from Motorola for VZ.

Back to the event itself: the amount of information is pretty amazing… come to think about it; it’s a bit overwhelming. I will try to do my best organizing the pieces. The two main speakers at the event were Steve Ballmer himself (CEO, MS) and Joe Belfiore (Corporate VP of Windows Phone, MS). Some minor differences were noted between the phones announced and the rumored phones… for example, it seems as if most rumored phones would have 256Mb RAM and it turns out they now seem to have 512Mb at the very least. It may not be such a big difference, but considering that we will eventually get multitasking, if these phones are upgraded; the hardware should be able to handle it. Speaking of UPGRADES, all Windows Phone 7 phones will support the announced upgrade coming early 2011 with copy-cut-paste features. This comes straight from Steve Ballmer who announced the upgrade while at the same time indicating that Microsoft is obviously listening to what the market is requesting.

I will post soon (sometime between today and tomorrow) a list of all CONFIRMED devices and their spec sheet. Expect a one-device-per-page with full specs for each of them.

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It’s not a one-click jailbreak like blackra1n was, but it still get’s it done (more or less).  It is slightly buggy, but I managed to get it to work.

Unfortunately, this jailbreak did not come without it’s drama.  Hit the jump for the full story.

I’m sure at this point we all know about SHAtter: the famed low level bootrom exploit found in the latest iDevices that can allegedly jailbreak the device for good.  In other words, this cannot be patched with a software upgrade from Apple.  They would have to ship a new crop of devices to fix this. 

The Chronic Dev Team has been working this exploit into a their greenpois0n jailbreak for quite a while now, and they recently announced their release date: 10-10-10 at 10:10:10 AM.  However, on the night before said date, the infamous George Holtz (aka Geohot) came out of nowhere and put out his beta (read: buggy) jailbreak limera1n, which is based on a different bootrom exploit, but is still one that cannot be patched via software update.

Geohot, who claimed to be leaving the jailbreak scene altogether back in July, has surprised everyone with this, but especially the iPhone and Chronic Dev Teams.  While the exploit has been confirmed as legitimate (and in some cases better), it has completely thrown off plans for greenpois0n. As a result, the SHAtter exploit has been delayed.  From the iPhone Dev Team’s blog:

Releasing SHAtter now would be a complete waste of a perfectly good bootrom hole in light of limera1n, and so it can be held until Apple closes limera1n’s hole.  While there’s no guarantee that Apple won’t also close SHAtter by then, it provides a ray of hope for devices after Apple’s bootrom respin.  Meanwhile, look for an alternate implementation of the limera1n exploit in greenpois0n (and possibly other tools), where it should undergo more testing too.

In addition, the Chronic Dev Team had this to say:

Thanks to the irresponsible antics of geohot, we will have to delay the release of greenpois0n (new ETA = as soon as possible), so that we have time to clean up his little mess and integrate the exploit he uses in limera1n into greenpois0n. This way, we can save SHAtter for future devices that may still be vulnerable to it.

We know that this is not what some people want to hear, but due to geohot needing to feed his ego (as usual) and revealing his limera1n exploit, we do not have any other responsible options.

Geohot, in his defense, claimed that he released limera1n prior to greenpois0n because he knew that SHAtter would be useful for future devices and that the Dev Teams wouldn’t risk putting 2 exploits out for Apple to fix at once. If Apple patches Geohot’s hole, which supports older devices in addition to the latest, the SHAtter hole might still be open for newly manufactured devices with new bootroms. 

Although Geohot’s methodology wasn’t the best, it may show a benefit in the long run.

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The sample unit we have here will be ready in a while… not really for announcement day or even for launch day. We’ll see.

As if tomorrow’s announcement were not enough, today we have confirmation that a new star was born… everyone please meet the new star. This is Mark our new staffer… he will start writing for us in about 15… or 16… years… Isn’t he cute?

He’s only 36 hours old but he is just like daddy, all about gadgets…

Hope you don’t mind the announcement and I apologize for being offline for a while, but this one I couldn’t miss attending to. Otherwise I wouldn’t be alive today!

This coming days will also be grueling, between Windows Phone 7’s announcement tomorrow, a toddler at home and the first few days with a newborn we’ll have our hands full.

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The part I liked most of all was the Power On button.

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This is one of my favorite iPhone apps.  Lose It! is a diet app for those of us looking to cut off some of our bellies and show that nice bod that has been hiding underneath.

The concept of the app is quite simple: track what you eat.  When you first launch the app, you will be asked a few questions about your body, such as your weight, height, age, and gender.  Once you answer these questions, the app will set up a daily calorie limit for you based on that information.  From there, you simply record the food you eat and the app will add up the calories you’ve had so far and tell you how much is left.  You can also track your exercise as well.

The app also features a weight tracker which graphs your progress as you move closer to, or farther away from, your goal weight.

Other features of the app include online backup to LoseIt.com, the ability to track nutrients in addition to calories, and integration with Facebook and Twitter.

And let me say this app works nicely.  It helps me watch my food intake, and I’ve managed to lose 3lbs with it in the 2 weeks I’ve been using it.

Best of all, Lose It! is absolutely FREE in the app store.  So if you need to drop a few (or few hundred) pounds, get Lose It! today and start Losing It!

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ARTRAGE STUDIO AND ARTRAGE STUDIO PRO
RELEASED BY AMBIENT DESIGN
New Digital Painting Products Provide Comprehensive Tools for the Skilled Hobbyist and Professional Artist

Auckland, New Zealand – Ambient Design has released ArtRage Studio and ArtRage Studio Pro. These new products in the ArtRage family contain all the tools found in the entry level ArtRage product plus dozens of added innovations for advanced users. ArtRage Studio Pro was created for artists who require a professional toolset while ArtRage Studio was designed for artists who don’t need the high-end features. Both products include an intuitive, scalable and customizable interface, a “Canvas Puck”, which allows for easy navigation on the canvas, customizable keyboard shortcuts, an auto-smoothing inking pen, watercolors, flood fill, selections, a text tool that for live text editing on layers and the bitmap “Sticker Spray” brush. Hobbyist and professional artists, animators, illustrators, scrapbookers and manga and comic creators will appreciate the software’s power and its ability to allow for seamless, artistic expression.

Customers can choose the software that best fits their needs. ArtRage Studio Pro’s more advanced features include: Real color blending, sophisticated color adjustment options, PhotoShop® filter support, a customizable Sticker Spray brush and an inking pen with opacity, blending and anti-alias control. 3D programs can also make use of ArtRage Studio Pro’s exported channel maps to recreate the color, volume, gloss and reflectivity of paintings in their native renderers. ArtRage Studio and ArtRage Studio Pro support Windows® 7 touch screen capabilities. Watch a video of the Sticker Spray in action here: Sticker Spray Video.

Matt Fox-Wilson, Ambient Design’s creative director said, “As we were adding features, we realized that one product with a large set of features wouldn’t suit many of our users so we decided instead to create a second product aimed more at the mid-level artist. ArtRage Studio is perfect for that group of users. It’s not a “lite” version, but a version tailored specifically to their needs.”

Both products include the intuitive, realistic behavior of the ArtRage toolset, such as sophisticated brushes, numerous stencils, blending of artistic media on the canvas, and easy-to-use, customizable color pallets. Users have many choices of paper varieties and paper grains and paint and drawing mediums such as oils, pencils, crayons, airbrush, chalk and markers. ArtRage provides Photoshop compatible transparent layers that can be used for advanced compositions and allows photos and images to be easily recreated as paintings.

ArtRage Studio Pro beta tester, Hans Deconinck said, “Everyone will love this software. Watercolor painters, oil and acrylic painters and the comic book and manga artists too.”

Pricing and Availability:
ArtRage Studio can be purchased for $40.00 (USD) and ArtRage Studio Pro for $80.00 from the ArtRage web site: www.ArtRage.com. ArtRage 2.5 Full Edition is available for $20.00 and will be upgraded in the future. Some users of ArtRage 2.x are eligible for “Switch To Studio” discounts when purchasing one of the new products.

ArtRage supports popular pen tablets from companies such as Wacom® and Adesso® that allow the artist to draw and paint with a pressure sensitive stylus. New camera based touch screens like the HP TouchSmart allow the user to finger paint or use traditional paintbrushes for a unique digital painting simulation experience. Watch a Touch Screen demo video here: Touch Screen/ArtRage Demo.

For a complete list of new features of ArtRage Studio and Studio Pro, please see: New Features.

A PDF comparison chart for all three ArtRage product offerings can be found here: Comparison Chart.

A trial version of ArtRage Studio Pro can be download here: Artrage Studio Pro Demo.

For more information, or to purchase or to view the galleries, forums and tutorials, please visit the ArtRage home page: www.ArtRage.com

System Requirements:
Windows XP, Vista, or Windows 7
Mac OSX 10.4 or later with 1GHz processor (Intel/AMD or PPC G4/G5)
1024 x 768 screen size, 512MB Memory, 100MB disk free.
Languages: English, French, German, Dutch interface. English manual.

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A recent benchmark by web developer Chris Black shows that quite the opposite might be true. Mr. Black benchmarked the iPhone 4 running iOS 4.1 and Google’s defunct Nexus One running Android 2.2 “Froyo”.

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Even though you may enjoy a good game or two with your Facebook friends, you probably will not be calling most of them any time soon, so what would be the point of actually having them integrated into your contacts. Supporters for one would say that this is a simple question with a simple answer: consistency! It would be inconsistent to have multiple lists of contacts, and even though it would be a much larger list, it would probably be no different than people with lots of phone numbers accumulated over the years. Some people in your list would probably not get called at all.

Having said this, Windows Phone 7 RTM (the actual version that was sent to manufacturing a few weeks back) was confirmed to have under its setup a feature to allow including Facebook friends under Contacts or to keep them separate. It would have been great to just stop there, but Microsoft has raised the bar once again with this OS and their attention to detail. The option to keep Facebook contacts out of your WP7 contacts will still sync contact information for those contacts that you already have on Facebook. Just think about having your friend’s phone numbers updated automatically whenever they change their numbers while still keeping out all the people you normally just play with on Facebook.

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Internet Explorer 9 offers substantial improvements the current version including: a streamlined interface, full hardware-accelerated HTML5, modern SVG and native JavaScript integration, support for the Web Open Font Format as well as faster overall performance. The new Internet Explorer 9 Beta provides a more secure, stable and fast browsing experience.

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- Netflix, does not allow me to rate movies.
- Live (Microsoft), I can’t log out from an account to log back to another account.
- National Geographic, they have a section called the Picture of the Day. It does not work because the photo browser is made in flash.

So today I give my browsing experience in the iPad -3. Yeah that’s a negative 3.

As you can see, Steve Jobs, there was not any Porno site and only one problem is flash relative. Of course, knowing you the answer is going to be a question: Did you contact these sites asking them to create iPad friendly versions? My answer is NO. I feel that is easy to change the ONE browser with problems than all sites that do not work in Safari but they do work well in all other browsers

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The specification in this machine does not show anything out of the ordinary. The battery life is showing from 4 to 5 hours a little more than the average in other devices. Of course, if I’m calling it TabletPC is because it uses Windows 7.

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A black rectangle and an ironic NOW PLAYING under that useless black box. Was not you selling me that picture of me laying in my couch browsing the web?

THE WEB! Because I did not hear you saying a FILTERED version of the web free of Flash. Why I have to jailbreak my iPad to get what I have in my Nexus ONE? Please old man, open your mind or just retire. You are holding back Apple. HTML5 is the answer but still far from being implemented everywhere and that process will take at least 2 years. I don’t want to wait two years to navigate the web from my couch without any restriction on what I want to watch. I already invested in one of your iPad. I want to enjoy it. That’s all I want. And you, STEVE JOBS, you are holding me to enjoy my investment though I’m about to start thinking that I just leased your company an iPad. I do not have any control on it. You have all the control. What I can play and what I can’t. What I can watch in there and what I can’t. What I can install and what I can’t.

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The Viliv N5 is virtually a Pocket Pc… Hum… Let me clarify… A PC that fits in un pockets. Small yes, but powerful enough to run Windows 7.

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My preferred is the Toshiba Folio 100. What’s yours? Leave us a comment with your answer.

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He officially announced, also that “Windows Phone 7 is the most thoroughly tested mobile platform that Microsoft has ever released.” he indicated that Microsoft had about 10,000 (yes ten thousand) devices running automated tests on a daily basis. He also said that over a half million hours of active self-hosting use, plus more than three and a half million hours of stress test passes. To top things off; eight and a half million hours of fully automated test passes over those devices. That is not counting the thousands of independent software vendors and developers testing the OS and providing feedback for it.

Finally, he said “We are ready.”

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Or lack thereof.

That’s right ladies and gentlemen, the new BlackBerry clamshell device now has a name of its own: the BlackBerry Style.

Not much more to say, but, seriously, am I the only one that finds the name…oxymoronic?

via CrackBerry.com

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Galaxy Tab from Samsung

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I was at the mall this afternoon and went into a BestBuy mobile (of all places) where I started a conversation with the source for this article. He claimed that Motorola reps had been there yesterday delivering the marketing materials for the launch of a new Motorola device. I though that it would just be another successful Moto-Droid when my contact said it would be for the Verizon network. Boy, was I surprised to learn that it would be a Windows Phone 7! Motorola has been out of the Windows Mobile circuit for quite a while. In fact, their last successful smartphones using a Windows Mobile OS were the Motorola Q series. I was very skeptic about this bit of news and challenged my source with a few technical questions: was he serious? could this be Motorola’s return? what would it look like?

I was convinced that he had some factual information but when my questioning pushed too hard, he backtracked and started saying that he couldn’t say more… this also gave me an idea that we might be dealing with serious news. I decided to come home and write this article… couldn’t resist the urge.

In his own words, this is going to be similar to an HTC-HD2 (those were the exact words he used); meaning touchscreen, large WVGA screen, no slide-out keyboard, 1Ghz+ (please note the plus, he said more than 1Ghz but he did specify by how much, I am guessing 1.5Ghz). Just to try to force more information or see if he was lying, I questioned why not just say that it would be like the Droid series and he was very specific in saying two things: no keyboard and Windows Phone 7.

I know this is too little details for such news, but this is what I have so far.

In any case, there are some clear contradictions here with what I confirmed before on prior articles:

• The launch date does not match the schedule announced for  October-Europe and November-US
• Verizon Launch on September: AT&T was announced as a premier partner which would point to some kind of scheduling preference. Instead, Verizon seems to be the one about to release first. Verizon was never mentioned as a premier Microsoft partner for Windows Phone 7, just as a partner.

These two items could be justified if only the announcement is made in September with the actual release later on; but the information I was provided pointed to an actual launch.

Additionally, Motorola was never mentioned as a Microsoft partner for manufacturing devices using Windows Phone 7. Now, these announcements were made a few months ago, so this could still point to Motorola deciding to move fast after seeing that all the major manufacturers are jumping into the water with Windows Phone 7 while continuing operations with Android.

Motorola is known to make quality smartphones… their recent Droid line shows that without a doubt. Let’s wait a few more weeks to confirm whether this is true or not, in the mean time I will post any specs and pictures if I come across the marketing materials (if I can get a hold of them) and the actual device (even if I only get the plastic unit for display only). I will try to snap a quick picture of it.

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It leads one to wonder of other carriers will follow and hold back updates.  After all, it was just 2 days ago that BlackBerry 5 was released for the Bold 9000 when leaks had been going around for more than a year.

We can only wait and see.  Until then, let’s pray for OS 6 leaks.  After all, leaks are already coming out for devices that aren’t even out yet.

via MobileSyrup

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“First off, buying a shanzhai tablet can be tricky business. You’re essentially taking a leap of faith in buying something, typically over the internet, from an unknown company or brand that is in a far off country, that it would be difficult for you to contact or get a hold of should something go wrong with your purchase.

That being said… a big part of the reason we as “Westerners” started this website in the first place, after living in Asia for the last 13 plus years (yeah some of our team has been here even longer!) is because we were able to notice how improved and good some of the shanzhai products were becoming and are. “

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The actual availability date for the devices is still only confirmed as October for Europe and November for the US.

What is incredible is that so far there has been over 300,000 downloads of the Windows Phone Developer Tools. This is only for the Beta versions available so far; the actual number of downloads to watch out for is the tools after they become available on 9/16. The development tools are free and only require you to register as a developer if you are going to publish and sell (or give away) your applications on the Marketplace. They should give us an idea of how many companies will publish their applications on the platform. Even if one third of them were to publish an application, then the Windows Phone Marketplace would start with somewhere north of 100,000 applications submitted for Microsoft’s approval. We’ll have to see how Microsoft can handle such load and how many actually end up being available when devices hit the shelves.

The development tools are based on Silverlight and XNA technologies which leverage existing developer knowledge and development efforts. Almost all community games developed for the Xbox LIVE service can be released on the Windows Phone platform with no changes at all or (if needed) very minor changes. These games were already released also on the Windows platform, so now; developers can realistically develop once and release on three different platforms altogether. All of this just by choosing to use the Microsoft provided free tools that are based on Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 and Expression Blend.

Additionally, there are several tutorials and training available for free. The long-time Windows Mobile MVPs Andy Wigley and Rob Miles have released over 12 hours of classroom training and supporting exercises called Windows Phone 7 Jump Start; click [here]. Microsoft has also updated the Windows Phone 7 Developer Training Kit which includes training materials and code snippets, available [here].

If you are a developer, you can also jump into the development frenzy, all you need is to have is a great idea. The rest is just using the same development tools you’ve always used. If you are interested, please follow these easy steps:

• Register at the Windows Phone Marketplace, [here]
• Code and complete your application or game using the available Beta tools, download them [here]
• On September 16, download the final Windows Phone Developer Tools
• Recompile your application or game using the final developer tools
• Prepare your XAP (your package after code compile) to be submitted into the Windows Phone Marketplace when it opens in early October. They are currently taking applications for use in previous versions and not for Windows Phone 7 yet.

What is very interesting about this last bullet is the meaning behind it. I believe that it means there is no way that Windows Phones will be released any time before that early October timeframe. Additionally, it suggests that (IMHO) Microsoft will probably be releasing devices late October in Europe and immediately after that, in early November in the US. My reasoning being that they would allow no less than 3 weeks to approve and have available a decent amount of applications and games in the Windows Phone Marketplace.

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via Boy Genius Report

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Take a look at some of them:

1. 3D Brick Breaker Revolution (Digital Chocolate)
2. Age of Zombies (Halfbrick)
3. Armor Valley (Protégé Games)
4. Asphalt 5 (Gameloft)
5. Assassins Creed (Gameloft)
6. Bejeweled™ LIVE (PopCap)
7. Bloons TD (Digital Goldfish)
8. Brain Challenge (Gameloft)
9. Bubble Town 2 (i-Play)
10. Butterfly (Press Start Studio)
11. CarneyVale Showtime (MGS)
12. Crackdown 2: Project Sunburst (MGS)
13. De Blob Revolution (THQ)
14. Deal or No Deal 2010 (i-Play)
15. Earthworm Jim (Gameloft)
16. Fast & Furious 7 (i-Play)
17. Fight Game Rivals (Khaeon)
18. Finger Physics (Mobliss Inc.)
19. Flight Control (Namco Bandai)
20. Flowerz (Carbonated Games)
21. Frogger (Konami Digital Entertainment)
22. Fruit Ninja (Halfbrick)
23. Game Chest-Board (MGS)
24. Game Chest-Card (MGS)
25. Game Chest-Logic (MGS)
26. Game Chest-Solitaire (MGS)
27. GeoDefense (Critical Thought)
28. Ghostscape (Psionic)
29. Glow Artisan (Powerhead Games)
30. Glyder 2 (Glu Mobile)
31. Guitar Hero 5 (Glu Mobile)
32. Halo Waypoint (MGS)
33. Hexic Rush (Carbonated Games)
34. I Dig It (InMotion)
35. iBlast Moki (Godzilab)
36. ilomilo (MGS)
37. Implode XL (IUGO)
38. Iquarium (Infinite Dreams)
39. Jet Car Stunts (True Axis)
40. Let’s Golf 2 (Gameloft)
41. Little Wheel (One click dog)
42. Loondon (Flip N Tale)
43. Max and the Magic Marker (PressPlay)
44. Mini Squadron (Supermono Limited)
45. More Brain Exercise (Namco Bandai)
46. O.M.G. (Arkedo)
47. Puzzle Quest 2 (Namco Bandai)
48. Real Soccer 2 (Gameloft)
49. The Revenants (Chaotic Moon)
50. Rise of Glory (Revo Solutions)
51. Rocket Riot (Codeglue)
52. Splinter Cell Conviction (Gameloft)
53. Star Wars: Battle for Hoth (THQ)
54. Star Wars: Cantina (THQ)
55. The Harvest (MGS)
56. The Oregon Trail (Gameloft)
57. Tower Bloxx NY (Digital Chocolate)
58. Twin Blades (Press Start Studio)
59. UNO (Gameloft)
60. Women’s Murder Club: Death in Scarlet (i-Play)
61. Zombie Attack! (IUGO)
62. Zombies!!!! (Babaroga)

Wow! what an impressive list. On top of this list, the extended feature list for the Xbox Live platform on Windows Phone 7 will include the following:

• View, access and launch your full game library from one easy-to-navigate hub. This will work from the Xbox LIVE Hub within Windows Phone 7.
• Earn, view, and track achievements: just like on the Xbox 360, you will be able to view Xbox LIVE leaderboards and build your gamerscore every time you play an Xbox LIVE titles.
• Connect to your Xbox LIVE profile and avatar, or easily create a new one right from the phone.
• Full customization will be allowed just like on your Xbox 360. You can use the same avatar for maximum effect and building up a higher gamerscore.
• Access Spotlight feeds, including the latest game titles, breaking news from Xbox LIVE, game tips and tricks.
• Play before you pay: Easily find, try, and buy the games you want, either in the Marketplace or Games hub. No matter where you purchase your games, they will all be grouped in your Xbox LIVE Hub in your phone.
• Invite, connect, and play against friends on other Windows Phone 7 phones or PCs with turn-based (asynchronous) multiplayer gaming. This is rumored to be an initial offering only and will be extended later on into full live multiplayer where you might be able to play from your Windows Phone 7 to other people on Windows PCs and Xbox 360s.

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Windows Phone 7 will also include a full avatar experience in most aspects being exactly the same as the experience found on the actual Xbox 360. The avatar you have already chosen in your Xbox 360 will be fully rendered and customizable on your Windows Phone 7. For example, there will be free items to unlock on your smartphone that will show up on your Xbox 360 and vise versa. Also you will be able to change the looks, add-ons, accessories, etc and be able to see the fully rendered version immediately. The features include contact lists with live status display, messaging, achievements, and leaderboards where you will be able to compare your gamerscore against your friends. Overall it will be a great mobile Xbox Live experience. Microsoft has not spared any details to their new product. They even include other simple, yet practical functions that your avatar now handles. For example; you can now use a bubble level, flashlight and coin toss feature where your avatar is participating in the holding of the flashlight, the tossing of the coin, etc.

One feature that comes with almost all games is the try-before-you-buy feature, which will allow you to see if you like a game before you spend any money in purchasing.

There seems to be a lot of space for creativity:

• Controls for the games will be allowed to use both touch and hardware keyboard input. This will allow for some new input interfaces as well as the classic keyboard driven.
• Crackdown 2: Project Sunburst, for example will use Bing maps as a source for creating levels where actual roads will be used by enemies to get to you.
• Game play, frame rates and overall quality seems to be absolutely up to par with the iPod, iPhone and iPad.

Cant wait for release day…

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The Press release is after the break.

Dell Creates Choice and Freedom to Talk, Watch, Surf, and Connect with New 5-Inch Tablet

ROUND ROCK, Texas–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Dell (NASDAQ: DELL):
"The Dell Streak has found a way to fit your whole world in a 5-inch screen. Its unique size will help people discover new ways to enjoy the web, connect with friends, and navigate their lives."
NEWS:
* Orders for the Dell Streak Tablet open up for U.S. priority pre-sale registrants at www.dell.com/mobile this Thursday, August 12. General availability follows a day later at www.dell.com/mobile.
* The Dell Streak is available for $299.99 with new two-year AT&T contract†, and $549.99 without. Customers who purchase the Streak, and signed up during the pre-sale program, will receive a free second-day shipping upgrade. Customers who redeem their pre-sale coupon can purchase a Plantronics Bluetooth earpiece for 99 cents while supplies last.

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Not all is bad news though, it looks like this Trojan is not as effective as intended or as bright as expected: It seems to work only in Russian networks and you must install the host package to have it installed anyway. This means that you are most likely safe… for now. This Trojan is most likely bound to evolve into a more viral and dangerous form. In my opinion, it is now only a matter of time. There is only a small step from this point to a full blown Trojan that could potentially spread across the globe and do some real harm.

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You need to have a Windows Live account (a.k.a. Microsoft Passport account), this is probably one of the first and most important things you need to do. If you don’t have one, you can get one [here], if you do… you may want to make sure you pre-setup some of the features (some new, some have already been there for a while) so that they start feeding content coming in from the web from your own family, friends and colleagues. These feeds will come into the phone from the many social networks you belong to. The main source though, will be Windows Live, and even though not as many people use it right now as a social network, it actually works as a great social network center. This means that you can access the content from a large number of social networks in a single place; just like your Windows Phone will end up being your center for updating you on the content coming in from the web.

Once you have a new Windows Live ID, you can add, remove, change settings for many social network sites. You can do that [here]. For example, you will be able to connect your Windows Live ID to your Facebook account and whenever you receive content in your Facebook wall, you would see it in your Windows Live account. You can also setup so that you Facebook status changes and is posted on the wall when you change the status of your Windows Live account. The same thing goes for pictures and other features. Most social networks have similar features, so you can count on them feeding content into your Windows Live account and your Live account feeding them. The idea behind all this is that as other people change their information or update their status in their own social networks, your contacts will automatically feed you with their own updates whether that is a brand new picture or an update with their new phone number. There are other items you can setup into Windows Live, such as RSS feeds. Let’s just say you love to read our blog, the articles written by someone in your local news station or even major news and sports sites such as ABC News, CBS News, CNN, MSNBC, Fox, ESPN, etc… then all you need to do is enter the address of their RSS feed and your phone will have readily available news from their corresponding sites, just as you would if you were going into each of them independently. Customized news from the sources you like 24/7! When your Windows Live ID is set up in your Windows Phone, you can expect all this information to come streaming into your Windows Phone automatically. Preparing your Windows Live account and keeping it updated is probably what is going to save you from having to enter (or import) most contacts into your new phone, setting up news feeds, maybe even from going to your favorite news sites for your morning news.

If you enjoy of an Xbox game every now and then, or if you play all the time on your Xbox, then you should link your Xbox Live account into this setup. If you haven’t joined Xbox Live, you can do so [here]. Your game achievements, games score and other features will become available from your phone. Some games will be available to be played from both your phone and your Xbox, so that you can get entertainment whenever and wherever you want. The avatar you created in your Xbox will show up in your phone along with the information that your profile carries for the games you are playing.

If you are a music fan. Take a look at [Zune.net], this service is going to be available for Windows Phone users. The same principle applies and you most likely will take advantage of it. If you are willing to pay a monthly fee for unlimited downloads you will particularly enjoy this service where for less than the price of one CD, you can download as many songs as you want. If you are not willing to pay a monthly fee, then simply register and you can use the service for purchasing songs whenever you want. In the mean time, your registration is free and you are not required to make any purchases.

All in all, if you have these 4 items setup, updated and prepared, you can consider yourself ready for moving into Windows Phone effortlessly.

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SliteMyTiles is a new game for Android just released to the Market place. The game is currently a freeware on it’s way to become a commercial game and a best seller I would add.

I got a pre release copy from the author a few days ago and I have to confess that once I started play I could not stop. It’s simple but very addictive puzzle game.

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You can easily access this service by pressing and holding the start key.  This shows a screen that indicates the phone is “listening”. You then say something like “Call Joe Mobile”, “Open OneNote”, etc and the phone executes exactly what you indicated.

The most useful actions to ask of the phone are:

• “Call <contact name> <phone type>” where contact name can be a first name, last name or both and phone type can be mobile, home, work, etc.
• “<search item> in <city> <state>” where search item is what you want to search for (i.e. coffee shops, etc), followed by “in” and then the name of the city and the state where you are searching that item. i.e. “Coffee Shops in Boca Raton Florida”. This pops up Bing search with the search items and location you indicated.
• “Open <application name>” where the application name is the text identifying the application icon in your app list. As long as you have that application installed, it will launch the right one, no matter how obscure the name of that application is.

There are many other actions and possible combinations to use with the Microsoft TellMe service. In all cases it took no more than 1 or 2 seconds to successfully recognize what was being said. While the request is being executed and the voice is being recognized, the screen shows a “thinking” animation that has some garbled text moving around until the text interpreted is displayed… all in all the process is very quick and surprisingly accurate.

This service seems to work very well and it makes so much more sense to use with a phone while driving a car. You won’t need to take you eyes from the road simply because you are now having a conversation with your Windows Phone.

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Today RIM and AT&T held an event to reveal their next device, the BlackBerry Slider we’ve been seeing pictures of.  Well that slider has a name, the BlackBerry Torch, named for Torch Mobile, the company they bought to build their WebKit browser (Anyone remember Iris Browser for WM?).

Personally, I think it looks kind of funky, like it could be sleeker or something like that.  But that’s just me. 

This device will be the first to run RIM OS 6 (now called BlackBerry 6), the OS that RIM hopes will bring them up to the game with iOS 4 and Android.  It includes a new home screen and menu, more social networking integration, and improved multimedia.  Hopefully they’ve improved video playback.

The Specs of the device are as listed:

• Approximately 4.4" x 2.4" x 0.57" (closed), 5.8" x 2.4" x 0.57" (open)
• Approximately 5.7 oz.
• 512MB Flash Memory, 4GB on board storage, expandable up to 32GB (comes with 4GB microSD card)
• 3.2” capacitive touchscreen (no SurePress yay) display (480×360 at 188ppi)
• 5MP camera with flash, continuous autofocus, face detection, geotagging
• 802.11 b/g/n WiFi
• GPS
• Navigation: Touchscreen, Trackpad
• Bluetooth 2.1

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The Windows Phone Marketplace will go live in 17 countries from day #1, these will include Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Spain, Switzerland and the UK for the European markets; United States, Canada and Mexico for the initial launch in the Americas; and Australia, Hong Kong, India, New Zealand and Singapore for the Asia-Pacific marketplace.

It should be expected that devices will become immediately available for the countries where the marketplace is going to be available, but no more specifics were provided.

Additional confirmations were given for the launch of devices by Samsung, HTC, Dell, LG and ASUS on or shortly after OS launch. These companies had already been confirmed previously.

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Windows Phone Live will offer a SkyDrive account with 25GB of available storage space (yes, you read correctly twenty five gigabytes). All available for passport owners and registered users of Windows Phone 7 devices. The service will sync their phone contents to the cloud service allowing to store contacts, pictures, appointments and calendars, Office files (including OneNote files), and any other files. All this without the need of an intervening PC, which will be able to sync to the phone via the Zune software for PCs. Additional services will include archival of previous versions of objects allowing a rollback to an older version of these objects in case of loss or accidental deletion. One really interesting service that none of the other devices offer is called “Find My Phone” which obviously allows you to locate, map and even ring your phone, but most interesting of all, it also allows you to lock and ultimately wipe the contents of your phone if you are convinced it fell into unauthorized hands.

While these features are somewhat equivalent to the ones offered in other platforms, they are not as comprehensive and/or free. This is a very smart strategic move for Microsoft if they want to recapture part of the market share lost since the last version was released.

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WritePad lets users take notes in their own handwriting with an iPad stylus pen, or a finger. The state-of-the-art handwriting recognition software will adapt and learn while it is being used, improving the recognition quality over time. WritePad supports simple gestures, to select text, cut, copy, paste, insert special characters, and more. The new WritePad Twitter client allows users to send Twitter updates directly from WritePad. It can also display the Twitter timeline and replies to your updates, making it possible to copy, retweet, and reply to Twitter updates.

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Enter Android, this is a great technical implementation of a general purpose OS that happens to run on smartphones. I describe Android as a general purpose OS because it is essentially being used in multiple devices, not only smartphones, but tablets, netbooks and other devices such as Google TV, etc. This has several pros and cons; in the case of smartphones and some tablets and netbooks, the carrier providing connectivity to the web is also bundling lots and los of bloatware that supposedly “help the consumer”, but admittedly by the carriers is aimed at increasing their bottom line by enticing the consumer to purchase more software for the device. As it reported earlier, some of these applications are not even full versions and need a license purchased or require a subscription to a paid service. Android being a general purpose OS has to expose multiple services and calls, in a sense the same way Windows Mobile was up until Windows Phone 7, this poses several risks. Because of this applications can eat up most of the memory needed to run basic services as voice and data communications, rendering the device essentially useless. On top of this, applications running in the background that do not act according to basic programming rules keep consuming juice even when deep in the background, which kills battery life also turning your phone in nothing but a useless brick in a few hours of pretty much standby and zero activity.

While it is mostly the carriers that add bloatware to smartphones, the manufacturers are just as guilty when they add their UI overlay of choice. Some of the many examples are HTC, Motorola and Samsung which make great phones but add UI overlays such as TouchFlo 3D, Sense UI, Motoblur, Droid and TouchWiz overlays, etc. This seemingly innocuous “UI enhancement” usually affects the performance making it noticeable slower, something never intended by Google; the creator of the OS. These overlays offer what seems to be “better customization”, but at the cost of severely crippling performance. Obviously if you were aware of these pros and cons you may have chosen differently, and at least make it YOUR decision whether you really want to add the newest shiny object at the expense of actual functionality.

On top of this there is also a considerable number of applications readily available on the Android Market, some of them even being reported as malware. One of them is the wallpaper application by a company called “Jackeey Wallpaper”. The applications affected could be “Star Wars”, “Gundam” or “My Little Pony” or all of them. The software in question extracted personal information from about 1.1 million to 4.6 million users and it was sent to a website located in China. I would stay away from all of them, even the ones I have not mentioned, just in case. If one positive can be extracted of this story is that kill-switch in the Android Market that so many complained about, it turns out to be a handy tool with these cases.

Fortunately, the Android crowd is not taking this lightly and “themes” are being offered (as opposed to full UI replacements), but the OS still has a few items that are not completely customizable.

In any case, it does seem that Android is at a turning point and has one of two different paths to choose. The smarter option is to tighten up restrictions, iOS, Blackberry OS, Windows Phone 7, Symbian are all going in that direction albeit with some restrictions being different. The other option may not be completely dumb, but keeping services, hooks and calls available will require of a resource pool larger than current devices can provide. What path will they choose? One can only infer that a smart choice will be made, but history has a way of repeating itself…

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This video proves that a simple touch affects web page loading, stopping it completely.

 

The Spot from Cameron Hunt on Vimeo.

Video Clearly Shows Antenna Defect on iPhone 4 Web Browser

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I am surprised that it took Barnes & Noble this long to get to release this version for Android because the Nook (device) is powered by the Android OS. I assume that one reason may be that the Nook (device) has a considerably different software architecture when it comes to handling screen events and features. It has two screens, one black and white and the other color; the color one being the only screen that handles touch gestures. The only restriction listed is that Android needs to be version v1.6 or newer, which is extremely likely to be the case for most devices out there right now.

As reported before, you can access a free “classics library”, that will keep growing over the weeks. Barnes & Noble is committed to providing a very rich reading experience, and that includes giving access to reading the classics.  They have started adding about 8 to 12 classics every week. The list is going to be increased as time goes by. Additionally, both the Nook device and the Nook software supports generic formats such as PDFs and ePub. The latter is quickly being adopted as a universal standard for ebooks on the web. The software allows for selecting from 8 different fonts and 5 text sizes; allowing for younger and eager to read more per page as well as older, but eager to at least read in large font as well.

The company eReader.com [here] already had an eReader software for Android. This is a company that is owned by Barnes & Noble, and has been in the eBook business for over a decade, but their software was not allowed to purchase from the B&N site unless you purchased from eReader. The Nook software as well as the Nook device allows to read the file formats supported by the eReader company, so if you happen to change your reader software, you should be able to transfer your ebooks.

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• a device with about 10-12 hours of battery life
• a very portable device in the market hole that existed between the 4.5 inches and the 9.8 inches (the smaller Tablet PC in the market at that time (Fujitsu P15/1600)).
• Instant On/Off. Hibernation or Standby in Windows 7 is close but still not there.
• an Operating System redesigned with a better touch support. More finger friendly. Creating interfaces like the Origami Project or the one installed in Surface is not enough. 

Unfortunately, the Origami Project came to life when MS was ending with XP and trying to sell the Vista Fiasco. On top of that, there was the transition in the Intel mobile processor market to the new Atom processor. The A100 and the A110 failed to deliver the performance and the battery life that we expected from them. Microsoft in another hand failed to see that even today, more than 4 years after the announcement of the Origami Project, the technology to achieve more than 10 hours of battery, keep an external design mobile enough and have enough power to move Windows 7 efficiently does not exist. At this moment to me is clear that battery life and a full multitask are not good friends. At least in the way we have it in Windows. Microsoft refused to create a new OS for Origami, something that many of us saw as the solution to increase both performance and battery live. Origami was designed to be a companion PC, never to substitute the Desktop PC at home. Then, if that the case why to load a full OS on then. What was needed was to ensure that the OS loaded in Origami was compatible with any file created in a PC such as all kind of Office Documents. That way you could have used your home PC to create and the Origami for last moment editing and show up via projectors those documents.   

Apple in the iPad found and used  the most balanced formula to take over the Origami Project.

How to achieve 10 hours of battery. Well, we have to strip down the hardware. You can’t get rid of the screen but you can get rid of all the USB modules, memory readers and HDD. Just by doing that you are gaining 60% of battery savings. Now, eliminating all that  your motherboard becomes smaller. About the size used in an iPhone or an Android phone, that means more battery savings. On top of that, add a flat battery covering almost 70% of the back area of the iPad (Check this picture). The rest is software. If you don’t have multitask then you don’t have any one sucking your battery in background.. Apple did not use MacOS in their iPad. Why? Because they did not want to send down the pipe all their battery savings that’s why they used the iOS. I believe that Jobs does not want flash because he would have problems to stop all those flash adds when the user switches from Safari to any other program. And he is right, some of those flash animations sucks a lot of resources. Of course there are other solutions for the flash issue, we have seen it in Froyo 2.2. I mention flash to show the obsession of Apple with saving battery life.

The bottom line, To gain what MS was dreaming to see in the Origami Project you have to change the whole mentality behind the design. You have to change the hardware and the software. Microsoft did not change enough the hardware and did not change at all the software.

Apple did not invent the wheel. They optimized it. And they did it right.

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Why to hide it when it’s a new feature!

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First was Nokia’s rebuttal, then RIM’s but both have pretty good points to make. Additionally, it’s worth mentioning that none of the smartphones mentioned actually lose enough signal to the point of dropping a call or broadband connection altogether. You can certainly hold all other devices from any side without the drastic loss of signal you would experience in an iPhone 4. Both rebuttals have been strong punches back. While getting to the point, they are both classy moves that show Apple’s errors while trying to give the whole issue a PR spin.

Nokia has officially responded with a long but milder statement: “Antenna design is a complex subject and has been a core competence at Nokia for decades, across hundreds of phone models. Nokia was the pioneer in internal antennas; the Nokia 8810, launched in 1998, was the first commercial phone with this feature. Nokia has invested thousands of man hours in studying human behavior, including how people hold their phones for calls, music playing, web browsing and so on. As you would expect from a company focused on connecting people, we prioritize antenna performance over physical design if they are ever in conflict. In general, antenna performance of a mobile device/phone may be affected with a tight grip, depending on how the device is held. That’s why Nokia designs our phones to ensure acceptable performance in all real life cases, for example when the phone is held in either hand. Nokia has invested thousands of man hours in studying how people hold their phones and allows for this in designs, for example by having antennas both at the top and bottom of the phone and by careful selection of materials and their use in the mechanical design.”

RIM’s co-CEOs Mike Lazaridis and Jim Balsillie have issued a statement that was quite stronger: “Apple’s attempt to draw RIM into Apple’s self-made debacle is unacceptable. Apple’s claims about RIM products appear to be deliberate attempts to distort the public’s understanding of an antenna design issue and to deflect attention from Apple’s difficult situation. RIM is a global leader in antenna design and has been successfully designing industry-leading wireless data products with efficient and effective radio performance for over 20 years. During that time, RIM has avoided designs like the one Apple used in the iPhone 4 and instead has used innovative designs which reduce the risk for dropped calls, especially in areas of lower coverage. One thing is for certain, RIM’s customers don’t need to use a case for their BlackBerry smartphone to maintain proper connectivity. Apple clearly made certain design decisions and it should take responsibility for these decisions rather than trying to draw RIM and others into a situation that relates specifically to Apple.”

Both companies point fingers at Apple’s “form over function” choices, while stating clearly that their products are backed by both R&D tests and market proven products measured in multiple decades. They also make a point of highlighting the audacity of creating a “shiny object effect” that can lead consumers to selecting a product that has not been thoroughly tested so it could be brought to market faster whose sole objective is to round up as many dollars as possible.

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ENC Security Systems Inc releases Encrypt Stick™ 4.3 – Turns any Flash Drive into a Digital Privacy Manager

Vancouver, B.C. July 19, 2010 – ENC Security Systems Inc. is pleased to announce the launch of Encrypt Stick™ 4.3. Encrypt Stick™ software turns any Flash Drive into a portable Digital Privacy Manager (DPM). The Digital Privacy Manager allows the user to easily protect, secure and manage their sensitive files.

Complimentary license keys are available to the press. Email request to Terry Johnston: press@encryptstick.com.

Everyone has private digital files that need extra security. They’re the ones on your computer or other devices that could cause serious consequences if they fell into the wrong hands: photos, videos, financial records, identity passwords and sensitive documents. Lost or stolen devices, or violated files, put you at considerable risk of embarrassment, identity theft, financial loss and marital problems — even job loss. Why take a chance when you can take a few seconds to permanently secure your digital privacy?

Lock down your files
Encrypt Stick™ is simple to download and easy to use. Important files that need to be secure are stored within encrypted Vaults. An unlimited number of vaults can be created on any type of writeable storage (hard drives, flash drives, network servers etc.). Vaults can’t be seen on a computer unless the USB is inserted and the correct password entered. Experience true digital privacy.

Encrypt Stick™ is available for Windows and Mac operating systems and can be downloaded for just one operating system or both on the same flash drive. Encrypt Stick™ is licensed per flash drive; this means you only pay once to receive both versions on your flash drive!

Encrypt Stick™ is powered by the world’s strongest encryption algorithm. ENC Security’s polymorphic encryption method creates unique encryption algorithms based on the hardware ID of each USB flash drive and guarantees your file security.

New Features for Encrypt Stick™ 4.3
- No installation of software or drivers required.
- Free updates! 
- Compresses encrypted files on the fly – Fit more on your flash drive. 
- Create unlimited encrypted vaults – Anywhere you like! 
- Customizable timeout.
- Edit Encrypted documents.
- File Wipe – Permanently eliminates files. 
- Instant lock button. 
- Leaves no footprint on host PC. 
- Password Manager – Take all your passwords on the go. 
- Password Time Out Notification.
- Simple user friendly interface. 
- Virtual Encrypted Keyboard – Eliminate Key Logging. 
- Works on any standard flash drive 
- Works with Windows XP or higher and Mac OSX 10.4+

Standard Features:
- Live search – Find your files quickly.  
- 512bit Polymorphic Encryption. 
- User friendly key recovery process to enable only YOU to regain access to encrypted files on your computer after you lost your Flash Drive.

To download our free version or to get more details please visit our new website www.encryptstick.com

Complimentary license keys are available to the press. Email request to Terry Johnston: press@encryptstick.com

About Encrypt Stick™
The Encrypt Stick software platform has been in continuous development since 2005 by some of the most brilliant and visionary programmers available in the encryption world.

With the advent of Smart Flash Drives (serial numbered microprocessors) now commercially available to the computer user,ENC has leveraged use of this same encryption technology knowledge in developing intuitive, secure and faster software than currently available.

About Polymorphic Encryption
ENC’s polymorphic encryption method creates unique encryption algorithms based on the hardware ID of each USB flash drive. Encrypt Stick’s Polymorphic encryption engine operates at an encryption speed of 500Mbit/s, which is approximately 10 times the speed of 256 AES!

About ENC Security Systems Inc.
ENC is redefining data security for individuals and organizations. Through its suite of encryption software products designed to protect computer data, internet transmissions, radio frequency identification (RFID) Cyber Space, SCADA and wireless signals ENC will provide simple to use, effective solutions for consumers, businesses, and institutions.

Press inquiries:
Terry Johnston
Media Relations 
+1-604-267-3022
Email: press@encryptstick.com

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