Saygus VPhone to bring video calls and a bit of chub to Android and Verizon

If you know that your personal happiness lies somewhere in the Verizon / Android abyss but neither the Droid nor the Droid Eris are hitting the spot, you might consider trying something completely out of left field. How "left field" are we talking here? Well, for starters, odds are good that you've never heard of a company called Saygus, and its shiny new QWERTY slider, the VPhone, won't be offered directly from Verizon -- it's a product of the carrier's Open Development initiative. Sure enough, that handset we spied a few days back is real, and the specs are all panning out: 624MHz PXA310 XScale core, 512MB of Flash on board coupled with 256MB of RAM, 3.5-inch capacitive WVGA touchscreen, WiFi, a 5 megapixel autofocus camera, front-facing VGA camera and -- of course -- EV-DO Rev. A support. The current incarnation is running Android 1.6, but it should be running 2.0 by the time of its launch next year, along with getting some Google-certification to let it run the Google apps. Saygus' real thrust here is apparently two-way video calling (good thing they picked Verizon, huh?), though they aren't showing it off just yet. The hardware itself is rather chubby, but it leaves room for an oversized QWERTY keyboard that could very well solve your Droid woes. No word on price or a firm release date.

Windows Mobile 7 'Maldives' test program reportedly on track for Q1 2010 release to OEMs

Ballmer may have wanted it to be out yesterday, but it looks like the initial release of Windows Mobile 7 may now finally, actually be in sight. According to ZDNet Taiwan, the mobile OS is now on track for a release to OEMs for testing (the so-called "Maldives" program) sometime in the first quarter of 2010, and will be launched publicly sometime in the third quarter of the year (or about a year after the release of Windows Mobile 6.5) -- all of which more or less lines up with earlier rumors of a release to manufacturing in Spring 2010. If past history is any indication, however, it seems likely that the earliest builds of the OS could be circulating around the usual channels well before that -- probably right on the heels of the release to OEMs.

Hey, Google: failing to spellcheck Android 2.0 can have 'undesireable consequences'

Hey, Google: failing to spellcheck Android 2.0 can have 'undesireable consequences'

 

Palm Shows Ares WebOS Development Tool

Palm will introduce a Web-based development environment for WebOS applications, called Ares, by the end of this year.

Ares got its first public demonstration on Thursday at the Open Mobile Summit conference in San Francisco. It is designed to make it easy for developers to pull various components together in Javascript to build applications for the Palm Pre and Pixi, the two handsets that run Palm's WebOS.

The storied mobile-device company is up against tough competition for developers against the Apple iPhone, Google Android, Research In Motion BlackBerry and other mobile platforms. It released the WebOS SDK (software development kit) to a select group in April and to the public in July. The company said the SDK has been downloaded tens of thousands of times.

Ares will give developers another way to write WebOS applications and will allow fast development through a drag-and-drop interface, Palm said. It's designed to help Web developers make the leap to becoming mobile developers, said Michael Abbott, senior vice president of application software and services at Palm. Ares will be available by year's end through the WebOS developer site.

It won't require any downloads or configuration, Abbott said. The environment includes debugging and a mechanism for developers to share libraries and APIs (application programming interfaces), Abbott said.

In a demonstration at the conference, a Palm engineer created a search application for the Flickr Web photo site. Using a simulation of the WebOS phone interface, he dragged logos, a search field and button, a list widget and other components onto successive screens of the application. To link the new application to Flickr, he used an Ajax request that called a Flickr API.

Within the phone emulator in Ares, developers can see what the application will look like in both portrait and landscape view. When the application is finished, the developer can package it up, download it to a phone to try it out, share it with friends or submit it to Palm's application catalog.

Palm is moving cautiously on its application strategy. Developers who got the SDK on its early release in April have been able to put their applications on Palm's app catalog since October, but there are only about 300 applications on it today, compared with about 12,000 for Android and more than 100,000 for the

Palm will introduce a Web-based development environment for WebOS applications, called Ares, by the end of this year.

Ares got its first public demonstration on Thursday at the Open Mobile Summit conference in San Francisco. It is designed to make it easy for developers to pull various components together in Javascript to build applications for the Palm Pre and Pixi, the two handsets that run Palm's WebOS.

The storied mobile-device company is up against tough competition for developers against the Apple iPhone, Google Android, Research In Motion BlackBerry and other mobile platforms. It released the WebOS SDK (software development kit) to a select group in April and to the public in July. The company said the SDK has been downloaded tens of thousands of times.

Ares will give developers another way to write WebOS applications and will allow fast development through a drag-and-drop interface, Palm said. It's designed to help Web developers make the leap to becoming mobile developers, said Michael Abbott, senior vice president of application software and services at Palm. Ares will be available by year's end through the WebOS developer site.

It won't require any downloads or configuration, Abbott said. The environment includes debugging and a mechanism for developers to share libraries and APIs (application programming interfaces), Abbott said.

In a demonstration at the conference, a Palm engineer created a search application for the Flickr Web photo site. Using a simulation of the WebOS phone interface, he dragged logos, a search field and button, a list widget and other components onto successive screens of the application. To link the new application to Flickr, he used an Ajax request that called a Flickr API.

Within the phone emulator in Ares, developers can see what the application will look like in both portrait and landscape view. When the application is finished, the developer can package it up, download it to a phone to try it out, share it with friends or submit it to Palm's application catalog.

Palm is moving cautiously on its application strategy. Developers who got the SDK on its early release in April have been able to put their applications on Palm's app catalog since October, but there are only about 300 applications on it today, compared with about 12,000 for Android and more than 100,000 for the iPhone. Abbott said Palm wants to make sure all the pieces are in place before its full launch at year's end, when all developers will be able to submit their apps. For example, the company doesn't want to launch without all the necessary development tools in place, he said.

Ares will work on a variety of Web browsers, including Firefox and Safari, though Palm has not worked on making it work on Internet Explorer, Abbott said.

. Abbott said Palm wants to make sure all the pieces are in place before its full launch at year's end, when all developers will be able to submit their apps. For example, the company doesn't want to launch without all the necessary development tools in place, he said.

Ares will work on a variety of Web browsers, including Firefox and Safari, though Palm has not worked on making it work on Internet Explorer, Abbott said.

NOKIA'S FIRST NET LOSS

Nokia, which is known to everyone as the largest producer of mobile phones in the world, had its first (since 1996) net loss. Its loss is about 559 million euros (and profit is only 1.09 billion euros a year).

Sales became much smaller up to 9.8 billion euros. Nokia’s sale has dropped to 7.2 percent this year.

Nokia Siemens Networks ordered operating losses of more than 1.6 billion euros in 2007 and 2008, because it was struggling against carrier spending cuts. The Chief Executive Officer informed that they were not going to stop supporting Nokia Siemens Networks actions in order to make its performance better in future.
The company has sold about 16.4 million smart phones. In comparison with the previous quarter this quantity was16.9 million.
As for sales of multimedia phones, they are 4.5 million now, and last quarter there were sold 4.6 million phones. 4.4 million of the E series of phones is sold at present time and last quarter 4.7 phones were sold.
Nokia said about a scaled down version of the N97 touchscreen device in the quarter as it readied the N900, the first phone that used a new software platform.

The Release of Nokia N900 Is Postponed to November

It will be the first device that uses an open-source Linux operating system.

It will have the following characteristics: have a 3.5-inch touchscreen with 800×480 resolution. It will have full Flash 9.4 support.

The device will be equipped with 600MHz ARM Cortex-A8 CPU and a graphics chipset that supports OpenGL ES 2.0 features. GPS, Wi-Fi and 256MB of RAM are also can be used as it supports HSPA 3G.

Moreover, it has a 5-megapixel camera and 32GB of onboard storage as well as microSDHC slot that enables to have additional 16GB.

iPhone worm did users a favour, says online poll

Most people believe the author of the first worm targeting Apple's iPhone did users a favour by raising awareness of the device's security flaws, a survey has revealed.
 
In a survey conducted by security firm Sophos, 76% of respondents said the Ikee worm was an acceptable way to raise awareness of poor security.

The Ikee worm can infect only iPhones that have been modified or "jailbroken" to run unauthorised software. It does nothing more malicious than replace the wallpaper with an image of 1980s popster, Rick Astley. It then seeks out other vulnerable iPhones to infect.

Only 15% said worm author Ashley Towns has broken the law and should be investigated by the police and fewer still (10%) felt he acted recklessly.

The poll result is "shocking" according to Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant at Sophos.
"It's a depressing notion that most people think doing harm and breaking computer crime laws is a good thing," he said in a blog posting.

Every victim of the iPhone worm will have to take steps to return the phone to normal, said Graham Cluley.

In an earlier blog, he warned that there is a danger the Ikee code could be modified to steal personal information.

"A more malicious hacker could take the code written by Ikee and adapt it to have a more sinister payload," he said.