Short Transmissions for Tuesday
Continuing our ‘news in brief’ feature for Tuesday, here’s what’s caught our attention at Mobile Industry Review Towers:
Motorola’s Very Successful Developer Day
Things appear to be going very well with Motorola’s new focus on Android — if the number of developers attending their MOTODEV summit are anything to go by. The social media developer outreach team are to be congratulated. Here’s phonescooper’s tweet on the subject:
motorola has 800 (EIGHT HUNDRED) developers on-site at the MOTODEV summit. Not a bad number.
Canadian marketplace continues to evolve; now only about 10,000 years behind
This November, Telus and Bell Canada will both begin offering iPhone handsets to their long suffering customers. The Star comments that:
It remains to be seen what will happen to Canadian prices for iPhones and related wireless services, now that Rogers has lost its exclusivity and there will three-way competition among the long-time rivals.
Don’t hold your breath. But do expect some kind of mild gentlemanly competition. Repleted with curious ‘network access fees’ and so on. You never know, maybe even MIR’s Krystal might finally be able to take a second mortgage on her new shiny home to get an iPhone.
Microsoft Windows Mobile 6.5 release is a ‘restart’
Despite the fact we’ve been hearing about 6.5 for donkey’s years, one of Microsoft’s senior product managers for Windows Mobile has characterised the update as a ‘restart’. A highly unfortunate term because that is precisely the most popular action I associate with Windows Mobile’s previous versions. (I haven’t played with 6.5). Nicholas at eWeek has the story.
If you’re feeling that way inclined, pick up an HTC HD2 running Windows 6.5 for £549.99 from Expansys for delivery on the 12th November.
LG’s new GW620 Android Handset is en route
I’m excited to see that LG are getting into the Android business. I’ve always thoroughly approved of the fantastic LG engineering — but I’ve never, ever liked their selection of applications nor (until recently) their user interfaces. I’m looking forward to getting my hands on their Qwerty offering. There’s a photo and some brief info at LG’s UK blog.
PocketGear has picked up the deal to manage Samsung’s Widget Store
Widget Stores are fast becoming all the rage. Whether or not consumers will readily access and use them is another question. Samsung’s new TouchWiz mobile handsets will all come with the Widget Store preinstalled. Good news for PocketGear’s Fuel platform that’s underpinning the whole thing.
Download the BlackBerry Widget SDK today
I said this widget stuff was hot, right? You too can now download the SDK and get developing. It’s not as simple as knocking out a little HTML-ish file along with a few correctly formatted graphics, but a half decent developer should be able to knock something together with this SDK pretty quickly.
Vringo launches social caller ID & video ringtones for Android
This kind of thing has been missing from Android — some would say that’s good news — but I’m all for consumer choice. The service uses their ‘inverted ringback’ technology to play a video you define on the screen of the person who’s calling you. At least, I think I’ve got that right. Head over to vringo.com/ and stick it on your Blackberry/Symbian/Windows/J2ME device and find out.
AdMob announced their latest metrics report
August saw 10.6 billion AdMob requests along with the iPhone assuming the top smartphone spot in Europe (the N95 is second and rather unexpectedly, the HTC Dream is third). iPhone also increased their ‘share’ — as far as AdMob can track — from 33 to 40%. Interesting. You can download the full details at http://metrics.admob.com/.
GSMA is getting into international number portability
Neustar are managing a service that is aiming to help mobile operators identify the true destination network for accurate call routing. If this is your bag, check out the full announcement.
Nokia’s podcasts are now in one place
If you’d like to keep updated on what’s moving with Nokia, they’ve launched this nice new comprehensive podcast page here on Forum Nokia.
Right that’s the end of the transmissions today… More soon.
