Linux-based Android and LiMo Dominate Mobile-Phone Show
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Open-source Linux is coming of age for mobile phones. While Google's Android platform has attracted attention at the World Mobile Congress in Barcelona, Spain, so has LiMo, another Linux-based platform.
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Music, ringtones, cameras, browsers and other 'extras' have become the norm among mobile devices.
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Samsung  and LG  Electronics  on Monday showed new phones using free  Linux software from Mobile Linux foundation, which said in  total 18 phones from seven vendors would use its software.
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Internet search giant Google unveils software it hopes will power a variety of future mobile phone handsets.
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After replacing paper maps for millions of drivers, GPS technology is now being put into mobile phones and was one of the most-hyped developments at this week's Mobile World Congress.
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The first mobile phone fitted with Google's Android software platform has made its debut in Barcelona at one of the world's biggest telecom trade shows, Google said Monday.
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Open-source OS offers several advantages, phone maker says.
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What might your mobile future look like? Sitting at the airport, you pull out a laptop or personal digital assistant and watch TV, delivered through Wi-Fi. Perhaps you'll grab an MP3 player instead, but rather than listen to downloaded tunes, you check out Internet radio. Or maybe you'll just make a call but thanks to the headset into which you are speaking, the person at the other end can make out your voice and not the blur of jet engines taking off at the same time.Each scenario is already possible, as evidenced last week in La Jolla, Calif., during the sixth annual DemoMobile conference. The gathering is a showcase for promising wireless technologies targeted at people on the go. Three dozen companies participated, many start-ups, representing more than &#36;142 million in cumulative venture funding.Consider the scope: Luxembourg's Skype Technologies demonstrated free software that lets consumers make voice calls over a Wi-Fi-capable Pocket PC.Handmark of Kansas City, Mo., showed off Pocket Express, a wireless information service for smart phones. If a phone has "location-based" capabilities, Handmark can provide listings of nearby restaurants or theaters, and map the fastest route to that spot.Xora in Mountain View, Calif., lets companies track the whereabouts of mobile employees via its GPS TimeTrack offering. And EverNote in Sunnyvale, Calif., has software that lets someone organize notes on a PC, then synchronize them with portable devices.OurPictures unveiled the OurPictures Mobile service. With a single click, consumers can send photos taken with a camera phone to designated PCs, TVs, printers or a local photo processor. And games publisher Sorrent showed off a new way to punch in your vote: its Bush vs. Kerry Boxing cell phone game. The results of every Bush/Kerry rumble on every portable phone are scored on a pugilist poll posted at Sorrent's site; as of Wednesday, Kerry was out-pointing Bush by about 2,350 votes. Other would-be knockouts:&#8226;Couch computing. The &#36;800, 2.3-pound wireless Pepper Pad 2 from Pepper Computer in Lexington, Mass., lets you browse the Web, do e-mail, play videos and games and more. Due in January, it has an 8.4-inch display, Bluetooth, an SD card slot and 20 GB hard drive. It also has a directional game pad and small lighted qwerty keypad that is split so that half flanks the left side of the screen and half, the right.&#8226;Making a motion. Synaptics is behind the track-wheel on Apple's iPods and the touchpads on several notebook PCs. The new MobileTouch platform is Synaptics' foray into cell phones. You'll be able to scribble on the screen or scroll by using your fingers to lightly make small gestures across a keypad (or other interface), just as you do with a touchpad. I was wowed even more by technology out of Oulu, Finland, where F-Origin originated a "motion control solution" called Iris. Consumers using a phone or computer with F-Origin's software will be able to control the orientation of the screen by merely tilting and moving the device. What you see on the display corresponds to the angle in which you rotate the gizmo. F-Origin takes advantage of gravity sensors.&#8226;That's (mobile) entertainment. ViewSonic's new Wireless Media Gateway and Wireless Media Adapter (&#36;799 packaged together, and coming later in the year) represent the company's move into wireless networking. The product line is designed to deliver digital videos, music and pictures to any monitor or TV in the house, at better-than-DVD quality. The company says it can stream video to a single TV at up to 10 megabits per second or two different streams at 5 megabits. You can also print from the gateway devices and take advantage of 80 or 120 GB storage capacities.Watching TV on a handheld is the idea behind WiFi-TV from OnAir Entertainment in Sunnyvale, Calif. OnAir is working with hot-spot providers to deliver TV or video-on-demand at public places. Consumers can access an interactive programming guide and pause live TV. OnAir is conducting a free trial at the Austin airport, though the company expects people to eventually pay about &#36;5 for a day pass.Meanwhile, another Silicon Valley start-up, AudioFeast, is focusing on Internet radio for portable music players. Its virtual broadcasting network delivers refreshed content from A &amp; E, BBC Radio, NPR and Sporting News Radio, among others. You download software onto your computer, then choose the channels you want to sync with a compatible MP3 player. A one-year AudioFeast subscription costs &#36;50. Contact my phone. Is there anything more tedious than entering hundreds of phone numbers into a phone? Palo Alto, Calif.-based Vazu has come up with a suite of services that lets you automatically transmit selected contacts, as well as such Web data as driving directions or movie schedules, to a phone. Vazu's Internet Explorer plug-in places a small "V" icon next to a phone number on a Web page. When you click on the icon, the contact name and number are sent to your phone. What's more, users of Outlook, Outlook Express, Apple Mail and Linux Evolution can dispatch contacts via Vazu to their phone's address book. Lose a phone? Vazu can serve as a backup to your data. &#8226;Now hear this. Logitech, Plantronics and Aliph submitted headsets for a Sound Off challenge voted on by conference attendees. The winner was Aliph's Jawbone, based on military-grade technology. To prove that this funky-looking &#36;150 "adaptive" headset can suppress background noises while keeping a caller's voice audible, Aliph conducted a crowd-pleasing experiment. First a caller had a noisy blender behind him. When Jawbone's technology was applied, the person could be heard clearly, not the blender. Aliph successfully repeated the exercise with a boombox. The coup de gr&#226;ce: The caller could be heard over a weed whacker. It is made possible by a sensor that feels vibrations on your cheek. Jawbone works with phones from Motorola, Nokia and Sony Ericsson.&#8226;Mobile marketing. Intrigued by the Armani, Gap or Toyota ads in the September issue of Jane? Snap a picture and e-mail images to the magazine. You'll get back text messages with tailored promotional offers. It's part of a promotion based on technology from conference demonstrator Mobot.The Waltham, Mass., company was but one demonstrator to give a hint where mobile marketing is heading. MediaTile of Scotts Valley, Calif., delivers point-of-sale digital signs. Digimarc in Tualatin, Ore., places invisible digital watermarks into banner ads. When a consumer takes a picture of, say, a movie ad, they might see a trailer on the phone or directions to the nearest theater. Another demonstrator, DRM Labs of Dallas, uses text messages to send digital coupons called Voupons. For these schemes to pan out, consumers must "opt-in; privacy must be respected."This is just the tip of the iceberg for many of the companies exhibiting at DemoMobile. Indeed, I expect to explore some of these technologies in future coverage. After all, what could be more mobile than the pace of change?E-mail ebaig@usatoday.com
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IT'S wild and will earn you the stripes on the communication paradigm. We're talking about an innovative device in telephony architecture called Zebra.
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When users log onto Google Calendar from their Web-capable mobile phone, they see appointments with date, time, location and description.
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(InfoWorld) - Despite signs that mobile Linux is gaining momentum -- such as the launch ofÂ Motorola's Linux-based Razr2Â -- heated competition, confusion about goals, and slow-moving consortiums may be hindering growth. These developments are an indication of how much may be at stake. Between 2006 and 2012, cumulative Linux mobile device shipments are expected to reach 331 million, said Stuart Carlaw, an analyst with ABI Research. Such predictions are drawing interest to the segment from handset manufacturers, software developers, and carriers. The LiMo Foundation, the Linux Phone Standards Forum (LiPS), and the Open Source Development Labs' Mobile Linux Initiative are among the new groups formed over the past couple of years to try to reduce the fragmentation in the mobile Linux market and to encourage interoperability. But at least one mobile Linux vendor is critical of their progress. "They're still trying to figure out where to hold meetings," said Jim Ready, CTO and founder of MontaVista, of the activities of some of the groups. Progress at organizations like LiMo has been extremely slow, agreed Dan Cauchy, director of product marketing at MontaVista. "I'm concerned about what that will mean to the actual marketplace because each member company is building phones regardless," he said. Phone makers and software developers don't want to wait for the groups to decide on platforms and standards so they continue to make products that may not ultimately conform to the parameters set by the groups or interoperate, he said. Mobile phones are already plagued with interoperability issues that make it difficult for applications to run properly on all handsets. This problem hurts users interested in applications that are incompatible with their handsets. Also affected are software developers who have to make multiple versions of the same application for different handsets. Some operators, including Vodafone, have said they will soon require that all of their handsets run only two or three specific operating systems as a way to ensure that applications will work across all phones. The operators don't want to introduce Linux devices into their lineup of phones if they only exacerbate the interoperability problem. While MontaVista is active in many of the groups, it is also continuing to work closely with handset makers to meet their needs. According to Cauchy, 90 percent of mobile Linux devices--including Motorola's Razr2--are running MontaVista Linux. Confusion about goals in the industry could also be dragging down progress. "It's clear that the leading operators are telling the industry to consolidate," said Jason Whitmire, general manager of mobile solutions for Wind River, a Linux software developer with products for mobile phone vendors. "They expect to use only one OS stack or maybe two, so they have asked the industry to join together and do something." By his count, there are 22 different flavors of mobile Linux. But MontaVista has a different perspective. "Some of these consortiums are under the impression that they'll provide one stack to satisfy the world and I think carriers are saying, 'I don't think so'," said Cauchy. Choice is one of the main reasons driving the mobile Linux industry. In an ironic twist, Symbian, the mobile phone operating system, was first created by a group of mobile phone makers that feared that Microsoft, which had just entered the mobile market, might dominate like it did in the PC industry. But more recently, Symbian has begun to dominate the smart phone market enough that mobile operators wanted to be sure they had another choice, Carlaw said. Mobile Linux is an attempt to ensure that Microsoft and Symbian aren't the only options, he said. "The whole point is to have choice and alternatives," said Ready. "It's because of this paranoia about having one supplier ... that's why these consortiums show up." Too much choice, however, has been causing problems. At a mobile Linux conference in Madrid this week, fragmentation was a key concern particularly among smaller operators, Whitmire said. Without consolidation, they see costs related to supporting mobile Linux soaring, he said. Wind River, MontaVista, and others have one less potential competitor to worry about. During a keynote presentation at the Madrid conference, Red Hat said it has no intention of entering the embedded device Linux market. Fragmentation is an issue in mobile Linux, but some advancements are happening, Carlaw said. He's seen real progress in terms of different layers of the stack working together. It's been more difficult to improve on "horizontal" fragmentation. But that's starting to get better too, he said. For example, the LiPS Forum recently began working with the Open Mobile Alliance to improve interoperability both between mobile Linux devices and between Linux and non-Linux phones. It's natural to have this amount of fragmentation at this stage of the market development, and companies appear to have the incentive to continue to work it out, he said. "Carriers are still saying they're looking at Linux as a long-term prospect," he said.
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The Frankenstein-style gadget combines audio/video playback, VOIP, Wi-Fi, pseudo-GPS and podcast software. In Listening Post.
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Mobile Internet Devices will surf, play music and video, take calls and pictures--and more.
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Mobile devices and home novelties dominate the IFA consumer electronics show this week.
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For many of us, the latest mobile telephones on the market are simply cool gadgets for making calls, with a few nifty electronic extras -- MP3, agenda, e-mail, image capture -- tacked on.
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At the GSMA conference in Barcelona, the biggest buzz is about prototype phones running the Google-backed Android operating system. Although they're little more than circuit boards and screens, these phones -- from a variety of manufacturers -- show how the so-called "GooglePhone" is shaping up.
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As Linux for mobiles gains momentum, ZDNet UK looks at the first reprogrammable device to target the developer community.