SmartPhones/NextGen Telephony: News That Matters

Posted on February 14th, 2008 in Gadgets, Phones, Windows Mobile

Just wanted to share some pieces that generated a variety of “hmmm”, “ahaa” and “wow” from me:

China Mobile said it will join Vodafone Group plc and Verizon Wireless in an ongoing trial of LTE technology…….The trials — which include three powerhouse network operators — underscore the momentum LTE is gaining as a leading 4G technology possibility vs. WiMAX and Ultra Mobile Broadband.

“HMMM” – U go LTE!!

Telstra Launches the i-mate Ultimate 8502 and 9502 in Australia:

Telstra and i-mate have today launched the i-mate™ Ultimate 8502 and i-mate™ Ultimate 9502. Telstra is the first operator to deploy these devices globally and both devices will be exclusive in Australia to Telstra customers. Building on a five-year partnership which has seen the successful launch of 10 i-mate™ devices on the Telstra network, Telstra has teamed up with i-mate™ again to release the Ultimate mobile devices.

“AHA” – So, they are not vaporware after all !!

Android SDK m5-rc14 now available:

*New user interface – As I mentioned when we introduced the m3 version of the Android SDK, we’re continuing to refine the UI that’s available for Android. m5-rc14 replaces the previous placeholder with a new UI, but as before, work on it is still in-progress.
*Layout animations – Developers can now create layout animations for their applications using the capabilities introduced in the android.view.animation package. Check out the LayoutAnimation*.java files in the APIDemos sample code for examples of how this works.
*Geo-coding – android.location.Geocoder enables developers to forward and reverse geo-code (i.e. translate an address into a coordinate and vice-versa), and also search for businesses.
*New media codecs – The MediaPlayer class has added support for the OGG Vorbis, MIDI, XMF, iMelody, RTTL/RTX, and OTA audio file formats.
*Updated Eclipse plug-in – A new version of ADT is available and provides improvements to the Android developer experience. In particular, check out the new Android Manifest editor.

“WOW” What else can I say?!!