Is It a Clam Or a Phone?
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Motorola unveils the top of its new phone line. Also: IBM organizes a public effort to help us all & hellip;.  Microsoft takes hold of GarageBand.com to give unknown artists a chance & hellip;. and more.
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I'm getting a new mobile phone :) In the whole spectrum of digital opportunities, mobile is where the next big battle lies and I'll be rejoining the fray. It's eight years since Western Mail & Echo bought my first mobile. Four phones later my new one will bear no resemblance to the first.
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How much would you pay for a mobile phone that seems as heavy as a brick and cannot even take pictures? Up to 32,000 US dollars, if the phone carries the name Vertu.
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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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Big touchscreens, multiple-megapixel cameras, maps, and more: Cell phones unveiled in Barcelona this week will soon make whatever's in your pocket or purse seem dated. Here are some of the most interesting.
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Convenient and beguiling, the cell phone nevertheless is devil's handiwork. Don't think so? Read on. Commentary by Momus.
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Reg review Mobile phone styling comes to the MP3 world
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[Technology India]: Washington, Nov 26 : How about a cellphone that can intelligently advise you on what or what not to do based on your track record?
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Rounding it all up Mobile Workshop One handset or two? That seems to be a major point of discussion in the quest to square the mobile device circle.â¦
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Linksys has an iPhone too, announced well before Apple's product of the same name. It's a phone to use with VOIP services, so why don't they call it something else?
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3G in the home ip.access has launched a consumer-friendly 3G cell, called Oyster, that's designed to be plugged into the internet. Oyster routes normal 3G calls over the customer's broadband connection; supplying all the advantages of a VoIP solution with none of the complexity.â¦
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By Prasanna Raman  * ON the editorial floor where I sit, often a frog's croaking is heard. The first time I heard it, my colleagues and I thought a frog was moonlighting as a journalist here. But, it was just the journalist's cell phone's ringtone.
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Research In Motion on Thursday introduced its latest BlackBerry phone called "Pearl," which takes a more stylish approach to handset design in attempt to appeal to both business users and consumers alike. Photos: View images of the BlackBerry Pearl
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The iPhone doesn't look, sound or feel like other cellphones. With its smooth, almost button-free contours, it could be the product of an advanced, alien civilization.
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What's the proper use of a speaker phone? A colleague uses hers to listen to voicemail messages and to make all of her outgoing calls so that I can hear the dialing. It's very distracting and annoying.
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A minor data disaster reveals a small flaw and briefly dampens my early adopter's enthusiasm, but Steve Jobs' wonder phone remains my favorite gadget of all time. Here's why. Commentary by Leander Kahney.
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By Vijayan Menon  IN the mobile world, time and space will have no significance given the feverish pace at which technology is advancing.  It was not too long ago when a mobile phone was a chunky, brick- like gadget that had a limited range and which one lugged around.