Shout About Mobiles

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.

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.

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.

Alongside the TV phenomenon of HD, it seems that phones are now desperately trying to catch up with the HD revolution - at long last!

There seems to be a good collection of phones now that enjoy the ability to record in loving 720P recording. Strangely, after so long of only allowing the worst possible video ability, it seems that

Sony Ericsson are really trying to push this feature; the Satio has an update to unlock it on the device and the newly released Vivaz, having the service straight out of its shiny box.

Although we have had phones for a while now that can display and play HD films, it is good to see the video camcorders actually catching up. It’s good to see this is now an option for avid fans, so that those who want to take memories of whatever they are doing (from sporting moments or their mates successfully pulling off great tricks - or in the case of my friends, trying and failing!), they can.

The only question now is how long before we see it pushed up to the 1080i that all those graphic lovers are coveting so much.

Well, my first response to this news article was “WHAT THE HECK?! I do not want my number given out to anyone!” I got very annoyed at the idea that anyone can get hold of my number - a name and address is not tricky to find, and from that they then have my mobile number, which is always on and always with me.

Very scary! It just adds to this feeling that Big Brother is watching you - not a fan at all.

I make sure all boxes on the ridiculous online forms are not selected or ticked to be excluded, so noone but those I give my number to should have it. Now though, it appears that if I missed one little box, or marketers have my number from places, then I could be “at risk”.

Freaky…

I had a look to see how easy it was to take yourself off the list, and I’m still no clearer on how to do it.

I went to www.mobile118.co.u, and then to www.118optout.co.uk and finally to the remove me inner pages of www.118800.co.uk- and I still do not know if my number is on the dratted service!

With Networks pushing for phones to be more related to Internet. Email is starting to take over from SMS. i know that being able to send out a load of information out to people is more annoying on a small text that can only handle around 160 characters, don’t get me wrong, that is great for a quick note saying ‘I’m on my way home, put the kettle on’ but when it comes to work related tasks, having to reduce your message by using words as ‘ur’ instead or ‘your’ isn’t going to make anyone look professional. However with some of the new upcoming phones, like the world famous IPhone and the new android series of handsets they both are trying to aim for all markets and are hoping to reach out to business customers. They will fail in this task until they can sort out the business mailing lists. I know for a fact that android hasn’t got any built-in function to allow it to send or receive contacts via bluetooth, this is one easy way of quickly transferring contacts off your old handset onto your new hardware. Phones companies need to talk more with users about how they use their phones and adapt them to suit the needs of the business rather than to just offer blank canvases, expecting a third party vendor to do all the hard work.

Looking at the reports for the first quarter profits of the phone’s manufactures, it appears everyone is fairly firmly in the recession at the moment, and Nokia is really in it.Bu not LG! LG are happily looking out the window, and singing “lalalala”.

Sony Ericsson was the first manufacturer to release reports, and they made a loss of around 10% of their expected profits – that totals 385million euro loss. Ouch!

Nokia appears to be taking the full smack of the recession (not good at all – I like Nokia phones!), as they took a massive cut of 90% in profit. Big ouch! That equates to a drop from 1.2 billion euro, to only a mere 122 million euro.

I have also heard rumors (although nothing concrete), that Motorola are spending stupid amounts of money to try and save money (not sure how that works), and may be initiating job cuts costing about 256 million if the rumor is to be believed.

LG’s song of “lalala” is doing them the world of good though. Despite them shipping out a lower amount of phones (a 7% drop), they did make a good 2.8 billion dollars out of handset sales, which is a huge 22.6% better than last year - so they really aren’t looking like they are being affected too greatly.

I am not sure how they have managed to do this, but a few people believe it is due to them wining the mid range market. However, Nokia are selling loads of 5800’s which is in the mid-range market, so LG may be in for some competition in the next quarter. LG are confident that they can branch out into the top end of the market as well now, they have the S-class UI making its entrance with the likes of the LG Viewty smart and the LG Arena.

I have recently twittered on quite a bit about the Google-phones.
Why?
Because I like them!

Google has come a long way from its search engine beginnings; it is now everywhere! Emails, SatNav, phones… It’s getting to be a lot like Microsoft – when you think of computers, you think of Microsoft. And now when you think of the internet, you think of Google. With its fingers in increasing amounts of pie, this company is the way forward. And now it’s had a nibble at the phone market and found it very tasty, it doesn’t appear to be going anywhere soon!

So, let me explain the Google-phone numbers. So far, we have three: the G1, the G2 and near-confirmed whispers of the G3. Each of these devices has had the software designed by Google, but the hardware is designed by the manufacturer - HTC for the G1 & G2, and apparently Huawei for the G3.

With the rumor mill rife with talk of the G3, Google must be happy that their “little” operating system is doing so very well. They have just released an SDK (software developer’s kit) for OS version 1.5, and it seems that it won’t be long before we get a new version of this ‘always on the up’ OS.
The main difference, so I have heard, is that the new version 1.5 is based on the cupcake branch of the OS (cupcake being the jargon name for their on screen keyboard), which promises to deliver various improvements over the current version. The OS version 1.5 is meant to be released with the G2 when it comes out in April.