Mobile Web News, Week of November 5, 2007

Get Pandora on AT&T
Pandora
is a renowned Internet radio station now available on your AT&T
mobile for a 5-day free trial and $8.99 a month thereafter, provided
you have one of these phone models: the Samsung SYNC, a717, and a737;
the Motorola V3xx and RAZR 2; the LG trax; and existing LG CU400 or
CU405 models.

Pandora started its mobile radio service with Sprint in
May 2007. For Sprint, it worked on FUSIC phones by LG, A900 and A920 by
Samsung, and 7500 and 8400 by Sanyo and all Sprint Power Vision phones.
Sprint offers a free, 30-day trial and a $2.99 a month subscription
thereafter.

Sadly, because of licensing hassles, Pandora is now available only in the US.

Source: appscout.com

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Sony Moves Towards the Mobile Web

Sony Ericsson is
out with a mobile web-savvy instrument, the K660. It works on superfast
HSDPA networks and has some neat features for mobile web access, such
as light-up access keys.

Source: mobileburn.com

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Google’s New Android
Google has just announced it’s long-awaited operating system for cellphones: Android.

Android will be made available under an open-source license, and a system development kit will be made available later this week for developers to create applications for Android.

Google has signed up many partners for the cause, albeit few
of them are majors: T-Mobile, HTC, Qualcomm, Motorola (MOT), Sprint
Nextel (S), Telecom Italia, NTT DoCoMo, Broadcom (BRCM), and a phalanx
of other mobile-related companies.

The kicker is that handsets with Android will appear only in the second half of 2008, which makes industry experts speculate that the announcement was primarily a PR exercise!

Source: GigaOm.com

Technorati Tags: pandora, att, k660, google, android

Mobile Web News, Week of October 22, 2007

Blackberry Users: Facebook in the Near Future

(a) Are you a Facebook regular??
(b) Are you a Blackberry user??

If you answered ‘yes’ to both the above, then read on.

Otherwise please find something gainful to do and do it!

Coming back to the subject, the facility will be available “later this year”.

However, seems like you can download it right now from the Blackberry site (oxymoron?).

Source: switched.com
 
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Sync Desktop and Mobile Bookmarks with Opera Link
Using the Opera browser?
Using the Opera Mini 4 Beta browser on your mobile? 
Wanna sycnchronize the bookmarks on both of them?

Well now you can, with the “Opera Link” service provided by Opera software. Open a “MyOpera” account on Opera.com and from your desktop Opera choose “synchronize bookmarks”. Then open Opera Mini 4 Beta on your mobile and choose the link of the same kind.

Shazam, your bookmarks are synced on your mobile and desktop!

Source: brighthand.com
 
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Japanese Women Fight Gropers… Shyly
Much to my surprise, Japanese men grope women in Japanese trains.If it had been the US, said women would scream, stop the train and file a sexual harrassment suit. But the Japanese (and other Asian) women are non-protesting to men by nature.

Now there’s a anti-groping mobile app by Takahashi the games developer that quickly displays a protest message on the woman’s screen for her to unobtrusively show the groper. The message can be one of the following: “Excuse me, did you just grope me?” “Groping is a crime,” and “Shall we head to the police?”

Something is better than nothing, I guess!
 
Source: MobileCrunch
 
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Instant Comparison Shopping with mShopper from Verizon
You’re in a store and you want to buy that exercise bike. How do you know the price is good?

Simple. Launch mShopper on your cellphone, enter the first two letters of the brand and model number. Bang! The best price on the market appears. If you like the merchant who offers that price, you can buy from them with a single click.

mShopper is available from Verizon’s Mobile Web 2.0(SM) service for $5 per month.

Source: CNN-Money

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Instant Mobile Video Sharing with aFLIX
Heard of aPIX?  That’s the paid mobile service to which you can upload and share  pictures taken on your mobile. Now its creator, FunMobility, has launched aFLIX: take videos with your mobile, upload and share them immediately. 

The service also enables rating videos straight from mobiles, and flashes the highest-rated ones on your mobile screen.

FunMobility offers carriers the service and does not sell to subscribers directly. $4.99 per month is all it takes (on the average), depending on who your carrier is…
Source: Marketwire

Technorati Tags: facebook, blackberry, mshopper, verizon, japan, groping, opera, video sharing

Mobile Web News, Week of October 8, 2007

Skype and 3 Working on Free Internet Cellphones
Looks like soon UK Skype users will be able to phone other Skype users without call charges. The calls will be made the usual Skype way, i.e.  over a broadband Internet connection.

Users will, of course have to pay for their broadband connection usage, but this will work out a lot cheaper than making a conventional voice call.
Source: msnbc.msn.com

 
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Hooray, Mobile Firefox is Here!
…and it will be shipped out in 2008, according to Mozilla’s VP of Engineering Mike Schroepfer.

Reducing the footprint of Firefox’s Gecko 1.9 rendering engine is one of the things Schroepfer and his team are working on to make Firefox fit into the small memories of typical smartphones.

Compatibility with ARM processors is another goal that Mobile Firefox will achieve, thanks to the fact that ARM Ltd. is sponsoring part of the development.

I’m personally a Firefox fan, and this news brings untold joy to my heart, especially since it’s Friday!
Source: linuxdevices.com
 
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Google Buys Jaiku
Jaiku is a small, relatively new mobile social network based in Europe and founded by Jyri Engeström and Petteri Koponen.

Source: GigaOm
 
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Technorati Tags: Google, Jaiku, ARM, Mozilla, Firefox, mobile, gecko

Mobile Web News, Week of October 1, 2007

“When You Get to Mount Everest, Call Me on Your Mobile”
This is what your friends will be telling you next time you scale the peak. This is because China Mobile has contracted with Huawei Technologies to set up a solar-powered GSM base station there by the 2008 Beijing Olympics. The base station will link to the rest of the world by satellite.

Be sure to  upload pictures of the summit to your Facebook account through the mobile web…
Source: MobileCrunch
 
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Verizon’s Voyager: Thank God Almighty, We’re Free at Last (to Browse)
Verizon has finally seen the light:  it no longer seeks to limit mobile web surfers to a few web sites of it partners. With the new Voyager phone (made by LG), you can go anywhere you want on the web.

The Voyager has a physical keyboard as well as a touch screen, which one might say puts it ahead of the iPhone. And of course you have to surf using Verizon’s 3G wireless broadband network, but so what. IMHO Verizon is getting real and moving in the right direction!
 
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A Flash Player For Your Mobile Phone
How many times have you been frustrated that you can’t view a Flash presentation on your cell phone? 10? 20? 230?

Adobe has come out with the Flash Lite 3 Player that solves the problem. It works with several mobile operating systems, including the Symbian OS of Nokia,  Qualcomm BREW 2.x/3.x and Microsoft Windows Mobile 5.

Can’t wait to get it down to my Nokia N73!!
Source: Infosyncworld