Stefan Constantinescu has loved technology since as far back as he can remember. It started with computers, but in the past few years his passion has turned to mobile devices.
He has been blogging since 2006 and joined IntoMobile in the summer of 2007, then got a job at Nokia in March of 2008, but has now rejoined the IntoMobile team as of June 2009. He is currently based out of Finland.
Stefan is a mobile phone enthusiast who lives and breathes devices that connect to the internet and he knows that there are others like him out there. He is strongly opinionated and enjoys a good debate so leave comments in his posts and he’ll get back to you!
Way to crush people’s dreams Craig. Just over a week ago I live blogged the Intel-Nokia (NYSE: NOK) conference call where they announced they’ll be working together to create a new class of devices and usher in an era of unprecedented connectivity. Former Intel CEO Craig Barrett was in Helsinki yesterday and he told Retuers that “we will have to wait a few years to see if the deal is successful.”
Not one, not a couple, but a few. I’m not surprised really, an Intel Atom processor still consumes an order of magnitude more than the equivalent ARM processor, just keep your expectations in check. Don’t expect to see Intel based smartphones for a long, long time. 2011 we may see high end models, but 2012 is more likely.
ZTE, the Chinese handset maker who makes devices for operators world wide and has a nice chunk of market share in China, has submitted the Coral 200FM to the FCC for approval. It’s a budget device, specs are unknown, but the thing that stands out is the solar panel on the back. We heard about this thing back during Mobile World Congress, and people said it would be nothing by vaporware. Looks like they’re wrong.
The Nokia (NYSE: NOK) E75 is the first Nokia to feature a slide out QWERTY keyboard, it is also the first Eseries device to run S60 3rd Edition Feature Pack 2 and feature a 3.5 mm headphone jack. It has WiFi, GPS, a 2.4 inch 320 x 240 resolution screen, 3.2 megapixel camera and if you want to know more check out the product page. When it launched it came in black, and now they’ve added a red version. There should be more colors coming out, when I was testing the device it came in … wait I don’t think I can tell you that
Don’t mind the fancy suit case, you’re not going to get that. It’s all a part of Nokia’s blogger out reach program to stir buzz. It’s on Amazon.com for $450 by the way, the USA version.
TracFone, a prepaid mobile virtual network operator in the United States who peddles to drug dealers and illegal immigrants, just launched a new sub brand called “StraightTalk.” Prepaid never really was big in America, while in Europe and Asia it is the way a majority of users consume, but with the economy in a nose dive, and The New York Times stating today that unemployment has hit the highest levels in 26 years at 9.5%, people will want to control their spending.
For $45 per month, with no contract, you get unlimited voice, unlimited SMS, unlimited 411 and 30 MB of data. That is what I call a steal. If it still isn’t cheap enough for you, you can opt for the $30/month plan which provides 1000 minutes, 1000 texts, 30 MB of data, and unlimited 411.
This isn’t prepaid how I’ve grown to know and love it in Europe. In many of the countries I’ve been to and picked up prepaid SIM cards, you load the card with credit and then when you reach closer and closer to zero remaining credit, you top up your SIM card. With StraightTalk you pay a monthly fee, regardless if you use your mobile phone or not. That $45 will get you unlimited voice and SMS for 30 days, after that you have to pay another $45. In Finland if I go on vacation in a cottage and don’t touch my phone except to send a few text messages, I pay for those few text messages and that’s it. If I was on StraightTalk, I just wasted $45.
There will be taxes and other fees, so who knows how high that $45 will really become, and you can only choose from a Motorola (NYSE: MOT) W385, Motorola RAZR V3A or LG200, but still, this is crazy cheap for America in terms of rates per month.
Trimming in Public is a series where I go through my list of 293 RSS feeds, 10 feeds at a time, give some detail as to why I subscribed to a particular feed, and then decide whether or not to keep on consuming that feed. In Episode 1 I explained what RSS is and how to use it, please read that if you need a refresher on why RSS is awesome and why you should be using it if you take reading news on the internet seriously. The prefix to Trimming in Public is “Becoming a better blogger, reader and helping me take out the trash.” For the bloggers out there who read IntoMobile, I hope you get a better idea of what I do to keep on top of the news. For the readers who read IntoMobile, I know that this site isn’t the only mobile focused technology publication on the internet, and by sharing which sites I read I’m hoping that you’ll keep on coming back here. Taking out the trash has an obvious explanation, I can’t keep up with my RSS feeds and need to trim my list. For those who want to download my complete list of 293 RSS feeds, feel free to grab my OPML file.
Check out Episode 12 after the jump, and all episodes by clicking on the Trimming in Public tag:
Recently proposed legislation in the EU that would have seen mobile phones reclassified as “multi-functional devices” and would have raised taxes by as much as 14% has been killed. Mobile phones shipping with TV receivers, would have received an increased tax of 14%, and mobile with GPS functionality would have become 3% more expensive. A Nokia (NYSE: NOK) spokesperson said “Nokia is very pleased that the Commission is taking this view and that the uncertainty surrounding the issue is now being removed.”
“We need more products and businesses free of tariffs, not less, and therefore today’s decision and the backing that was achieved is a very positive signal,” Swedish Trade Minister Ewa Bjorling said in a statement.
This doesn’t change the fact that a Nokia E71 is $300 on Amazon.com, yet in Finland the same device is 370 EUR or $518.63.
Where is that extra $220 going? Do you live in a country in the EU? What does a Nokia E71 cost you?
Nokia (NYSE: NOK)’s Ovi Maps 3.0 just launched, and I’d love to tell you what it’s like, but I’m such a huge fan of Google (NSDQ: GOOG) Maps that I see no compelling reason to switch. For those of you living in nations that have expensive data plans, Nokia Maps is for you since you can preload maps. For those of you who need turn by turn navigation, Nokia Maps is for you. For the rest of you, the majority of you, just go to google.com/gmm on your phone, download, and enjoy.
Why all the negativity? You need to download a file on your computer, to install an application on your phone. How silly is that? Even more silly, the file you need to download to get Maps 3.0 on your device will only work with a PC. Sure Google Maps may not have “3D landmarks for over 200 cities, rotation, tilting, night view, and fly-overs and fly-throughs” or “enriched POI information by Lonely Planet, Michelin and Wcities, as well as a weather service that provides 24 hour and 5-day forecasts”, but the search works remarkably well and when I’m trying to find a bodega at 4 in the morning in a rough neighborhood, I want to see accurate results and fast.
A memo has just leaked from AT&T saying that the day the iPhone 3GS launched, it broke almost every record AT&T has ever had. Along with that, the day Micahel Jackson died, AT&T’s network was processing around 65,000 text messages a second. Crazy stuff:
1. Fact of the Week: On June 25, the day Michael Jackson died, text messages sent on our network spiked at 65,000 messages per second — the largest volume ever recorded — surpassing events like American Idol voting and New Year’s Eve, when millions of our customers wish their friends and family a happy new year via text.”
2. “iLaunch day 2009 was one for the record books, as AT&T customers scrambled to get their hands on the fastest, most powerful iPhone yet.
Here’s a look at some of the milestones we achieved:
* Best-ever sales day in our retail stores
* Second-largest traffic day in our retail stores
* Most transactions processed via our IT systems in a single day
* Most upgrade eligibility checks in a single day
* Largest order day in att.com history
* Largest features sales day in att.com history
On this year’s launch day, iPhone sales exceeded sales recorded on 2008’s iPhone launch day, Black Friday 2008 and Dec. 26, 2008 — all heavy-volume sales days. In fact, this year we surpassed 2008’s launch day sales at about noon Central time, and sustained our previous peak hour record, also set in 2008, for 11 straight hours.
Palm (NSDQ: PALM), with webOS, has shown the market that making a platform based on standard HTML, CSS, and web hooks that tie into system level components, was possible and could be done elegantly. Ian Hickson, the man writing the HTML5 specification, who now works for Google (NSDQ: GOOG), would like the browser to be the platform of choice one day. Millions of people around the world use an email client, or social network, or other service that can be accessed from any computer that has access to the internet. Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) wasn’t going to sit still and watch the connected world progress toward web based applications and keep on trumpeting the notion that the operating system underneath is irrelevant.
Helen J. Wang, senior researcher in the Systems and Networking group at Microsoft Research Redmond, is working on Gazelle; a browser that isn’t really a browser that runs on an operating system that isn’t really an operating system. The concept she and her team are developing is currently just a research project, but the fundamental question they’re trying to answer is: what if we built a browser with the best parts of an operating systems?
“Everyone accepts that applications need to run on operating systems,” Wang says. “However, this has not been the case for Web applications; they depend on browsers to render pages and handle computing resources. Yet browsers have never been constructed to be operating systems. Principals are allowed to coexist within the same process or protection domain, and resource management is largely non-existent.”
I’d be more excited if a product group was working on this instead of a research group. Microsoft has the worst track record when it comes to supporting internet standards, so why would they want to mature this into shipping software? Still, cynicism aside, this only confirms Google’s best on the internet as the platform for the future, Palm’s webOS as the ideal way to build an OS, and the growing importance that software that connects over the internet will be to our daily lives. Expect to see browsers on mobile phones only become more powerful and have access to more of the local data that sits on your device.
While people are wondering if they should make their children learn Chinese, for if any nation is going to dominate the economy of the next century, chance are it will be them, Google (NSDQ: GOOG) has now made it easy for international users to use Google on the go. Today Google Mobile now supports 38 languages in over 60 countries, and if I could find the list of what those 38 languages are I would share it with you.
In the screenshots they posted it looks as if they’ve added Russian and Indonesian.
