Shout About Mobiles

Despite Maemo being no more (thanks to the software merger of Nokia and Intel producing the love child that is Meego), Nokia are still looking after their N900 fans. The latest Maemo update has just been released, which offers, as always, minor fixes to little bugs. And this update offers one important change, and that is video calling – Woo!

Despite the N900 having a front facing camera, which we all presumed was for video calls, the Maemo software restricted the camera so that it could only be used as a camera – so our inner vanity was appeased, but not the need to see those we were chatting to. Boo!

Along with the announcement of the Maemo update, Nokia have said they are going to start releasing more apps and games for the N900 on the Ovi Store, so good news all round.

Android 2.2 is finally being released, and it is well worth the wait! It gives a whole load of updates to what is fast becoming one of the most popular Smartphone OS’s on the market.

Amongst all the minor bug fixes and improvements, Froyo is bringing flash 10.1 - giving users a better and almost PC like web browsing experience. Flash 10.1 is in beta stage at the moment, but will be in its final state for the Froyo release.

If you thought it sounded good so far, you will be excited to know that Froyo has undergone a spring clean too! Trials comparing Froyo to Eclair (Android 2.1) has shown a huge increase in speed, with Froyo running at least twice as fast as Eclair.

All you Nexus One lovers out there can jump with joy too, because as you will be the first to enjoy Froyo, because the OTA (over the air) updates are being rolled out shortly.

HTC have confirmed they will be rolling it out to most of their Android phones, and hopefully the HTC Hero will be getting it too. My friends will be happy with the new speed of their beloved devices.

We have only just heard the news about the mobile phones that are coming with 3D screens, allowing us to view things in exciting new ways. Whether this new screen will just become annoying or not, we will have to wait and find out!

Sharp have gone on to announce that they have created a mini 3D video camera unit; it is built with two cameras, which record from two different angles. Then the huge amount of software on the chips unit processes the two images, allowing it to be played back in beautiful 720p 3D goodness. Yummy!

With all of the manufactures only offering 3D screens, it seems that Sharp have a real edge here. However, despite them claiming the chips to be ready for mass production at the end of the year, I don’t think it will be till the end of 2011 before we get to start playing with the devices ourselves.

Facebook; everybody is on it, including a lot of companies and businesses, and you will find that, if you don’t check Facebook regularly, you will miss out on parties, events and news. It seems that despite MySpace running out of steam, Facebook has the staying power, a never ending social website that has quickly but surely taken over our lives.

And Facebook has just helped themselves become that little bit more involved in your ever day life. With over 100 million people using it from their mobile phones alone, it easy to see how big it has become.

For all you mobile Facebook users out there, you will be glad to know that Facebook has got an agreement put together with over 50 networks across the globe to offer a new version of their website; it’s called Zero Facebook.

Zero Facebook is found at “0.Facebook.com” (or you can use “zero.Facebook.com” if you dislike using the numerical). The zero is a key feature as it explains the data cost of using the website, because all browsing across the website is free on your mobile phone. Woo! Clicking on links or pictures will be chargeable, however, a nice little pop up reminds you of this fact every time – so if you do not want to pay, do not click!

The site does shrink down a lot of the data too, which makes the site fast to browse through and gives you all the important things that you need, such as: options to “like” comments and posts, update your status, and many more.

But there is some bad news though folks; it isn’t available on every network, so please have a look through the following info for the good, or not so good, news and for more information: http://blog.Facebook.com/blog.php?post=391295167130.

The Palm Pre has been on sale in the USA for quite a while now, while us Brits have been stuck playing with the old Palm Pre. Boo!

However, that is all set to change soon with O2 announcing yesterday that they are going to be selling the device from the end of May. O2 have even released the price plans for both the Palm Pre Plus and for the Pixi Plus.

The Palm Pre Plus will come free on the £35 per month price plan - if you are happy to sign up for a 24month contract! If not, you are looking at a £40 monthly charge.

All the price plans come with unlimited internet (both data and wi-fi) as well as unlimited texts, with the only limit being on how many minutes you can use per month.

The phones are available on 18months price plans but you will be subject to another £5 a month.

The Palm Pre Plus comes with an increased hard drive, packing a double its processor at 16GB, and also double is the phones ram, holding a nice 512 ram chip inside its little case. And the casing, I’m afraid, is the only thing that Palm decided not to improve from the original; so it is the same cheap plastic feeling material and the sharp keypad. Bleugh.

But, all in all, a nice phone.

It seems that, despite the success of the Palm Pre and its web OS sister the Palm Pixi, Palms lack of hype has let the company down. With rumours all month of Palm being up for sale, there was a list of companies as long as your arm that were rumoured to be thinking about buying out the company.

Amongst these were; Nokia (who are really in need of a decent OS as Symbian is starting to really show its age and the Touch version still not being that touch friendly), HTC and HP as the top three.

However, as the days wore on, the companies slowly pulled out of the bidding, with HTC rumoured to have pulled out after looking at Palms books.

Yet these rumours appeared to be for nothing when Palm announced that they weren’t for sale. But, only a week had to pass before we get news that HP have paid a 1.2bn dollars for the dying company.

Good news is that HP has announced that they won’t give up on the web OS. Wooho! Since the buyout, Sprint have released an update for their Palm Pre Pluses, so hopefully Palm’s existing phones will still get the support they may need.

It seems that the biggest feat for the iPad to date, is that it managed to make the latest iPhone become relegated to the back of our minds and hearts, albeit temporarily.

A couple of months ago, with all the hype of the iPad being released, a few snapshots of it leaked out onto the internet. These pictures actually included the latest version of the iPhone, however no one noticed it at the time, so now with new pics of just the iPhone, and people have spotted it.

The latest iPhone has taken on a new shape; kit seems to be more like the iMac form with straight edges rather than being curved to fit the hand like all the previous iPhones and the iPad itself. The photos that were leaked were meant to be from an iPhone that was found lying on the floor in a pub in San Jose - that is one lucky find! (Although the iPhone doesn’t boot so not really useful for much apart from bragging rights)

With Apple firmly against Flash and the thinking being that html5 is going to replace it, a lot of websites have changed to this new format to allow support for both the iPad and the new iPhone.

But it is good to see that not all manufactures have dropped the Flash service, Android have released a beta for Flash 10.1 for their phones; although at the moment it is aimed at developers to adapt their applications and websites.

It should go to a public release shortly, so it will be joining the N900 amongst other phones at giving a brilliant web experience via Flash.

Opera Mini has finally been approved for the apple iPhone! Initially, it was only available for the phones that ran Android and Windows Mobile.

Opera are well known, and have been for a while now, as company that offers a brilliant browser for SmartPhones to use as an alternative to their default web experience.

However, not many people know that Opera actually have two browsers; the main one

(Opera) and they also do a smaller one, and this is called (funnily enough!) Mini. Mini uses less ram, less space, and is really really fast (generally about three times faster than opera), so people tend to like it, and I like it a lot!

Being this fast is not always as great as you may think, because for Opera to manage this feat, they have had to do some magic at their end. But the main reason that they have been able to achieve this is because they have stripped out loads from the browsing experience. It makes it very fast but a very diminished experience; this then leaves users with the choice of either going for speed of the Mini, or the rich experience of Opera (or the phones default browser). But, users are given a choice.

It seems yet another mobile OS is about to hit the market (well I say “about to” but it is only in the planning stage at the moment)!

The rumours floating around about HTC are that they are producing their own mobile device; it will give users greater control over their mobile phones, and HTC should be able to make them more suited to their customers.

This does come as a bit of a shock to me, as they were doing well with the mass of android handsets that they are rolling out, and these new plans would have to have half their number of handsets running android this year.

However it would be a bigger shock, and more of a worry, to Microsoft mobile division, as HTC was, and still are, their biggest customer for their windows mobile OS.

HTC have stated they will use the WM7 platform, but will they do much with it? Especially if they come out with their own OS? Lets wait and see…