Shout About Mobiles

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…