Sorry for the delay, y’all – between recovering from CTIA, and some technical difficulties, the podcast fell to the wayside for a few weeks, but we’re back on track now.
San Diego had a few treats in store for us, like the Samsung Moment and the Behold II, but there was a lot happening with T-Mobile (NYSE: DT) both before and after CTIA: the details of Project Dark came to light, so Will and I hashed out what hardware financing means for American wireless (mostly good things). On the downside, T-Mobile Sidekick data outage was a big blow to the brand’s credibility, and we wonder if cloud computing really is all it’s cracked up to be.
Of course we have more toys to give away – this time two pairs of in-ear headphones from Ifroz, specifically the EarPollution Timbres, with in-line microphone. Wooden gadgets are pretty sweet in terms of style alone, but in terms of sound quality, reviewers have been largely happy with ‘em. They normally retail for $49.99, but you can get two chances to win by A) dropping a comment in this podcast post, and B) tweeting using the hastag #intomobile. U.S. readers only please, international shipping will cost as much as the headphones themselves.
Here’s a look at Motorola (NYSE: MOT)’s CTIA WITE 2009 booth from the San Diego Convention Center showfloor. Sure, it’s a little late, but better than never.
Motorola’s booth was dominated by Android. As you can see from the photos, the booth was all about Android and the new Motorola CLIQ. Android is at the center of Motorola’s plan to regain lost mobile market share, so it wasn’t surprising to see Motorola’s booth decked out in little green robots. There was even a “little person” walking around, playing DDR and posing for photos in an Android costume.
Will any of that matter to the consumer? Not if they don’t get to see it. To that end, enjoy the photo gallery!
During the recently ended CTIA WIRELESS I.T. & Entertainment 2009, Verizon (NYSE: VZ) shared some numbers about its mobile navigation service – VZ Navigator. Here’s what we’ve learned:
More than 65% of VZ Navigator customers use the service more than three times a week;
So far in 2009, VZ Navigator users made 11.5 million more inquiries than in whole 2008;
Searches for traffic updates and detours around traffic congestion hit more than 8.5 million per month, an increase of 93% from the previous year;
VZ Navigator mobile consumers ran more than 480,000 searches to find gas stations;
Searches for movie theaters were up more than 125% over last year, climbing to more than 1 million a month;
Weather information was also popular with more than 1 million a month requests, a 128% increase from 2008.
And that’s about it. For the record, VZ Navigator is available for $9.99 a month for unlimited access or $2.99 for a one-day use on select Get It Now-enabled phones and select BlackBerry (NSDQ: RIMM) and other smartphones. VZ Navigator Global is available on the BlackBerry Storm, BlackBerry Tour and HTC Touch Pro2 smartphones for $19.99 per month…
Kempler & Strauss, the folks behind the “W” watch phone we covered recently, have used the CTIA in San Diego to show off their Billionair 7 Windows Mobile smartphone. Here’s the specs rundown:
HSDPA supporting speeds of up to 14Mbps on the downlink
WiFi, Bluetooth v2.0
3-megapixel camera
microSD memory card slot
The best thing is the price. It’s just $275 for the unlocked device, which makes it a great deal and an even better entrance to the smartphone world. Kudos to Kempler & Strauss for pulling this out.
Sony Ericsson (NYSE: SNE) didn’t have a CTIA booth this go around, so they sent their Sony Ericsson XPERIA X2 with the “Windows Phone” booth to keep things interesting. There was no way I wasn’t going to get my hands all over the X2’s improved arc-slider and 3.5-inch OLED touchscreen. The X1 launched Sony Ericsson’s high-end XPERIA brand with high-end style last year, leaving some big shoes for the X2 to fill. We just had to find out if it did.
Changed from the X1 days is the touchscreen. The XPERIA X2 boasts a 3.5-inch capacitive touchscreen that’s flush mounted. No more recessed resistive nonsense here. The arc-sliding keyboard is more comfortable and feels less cramped than the X1’s. And, of course, there’s the 8.1-megapixel camera tucked into the curvy shell.
The Panel UI still allows you to change your homescreen to fit your changing needs and moods. There are new Panels available too: a kind of cheesy Sim City-esque Sony Ericsson panel, new Windows Mobile 6.5 panels and more. The new Slide View feature takes center stage in the X2’s interface, serving up an inspired shortcut menu design that makes it easy to hop around oft-used phone features like missed calls, messages and panels.
We’ll let the video and photo gallery do the rest of the talking.
After getting a demo of some of the cool vector map capabilities on the N900 at CTIA, I prodded a Nokia (NYSE: NOK) rep about what they’ve been working on with augmented reality (since zooming down to street level on the map to check out the 3D rendering of a stadium was awfully close). He mentioned that there’s an project in alpha within Nokia that involves OCR character recognition that would effectively translate text seen through the camera into other languages. Sounds like a logical extension of Point and Find. Camera quality is a bottleneck, but now that phones are getting into the 8-12 megapixel range and optics are continually improving, picking up small text is becoming less of an issue. Given, this program will probably produce the garden variety hilarity of Google (NSDQ: GOOG) translations, it’s all you would need to get by in a foreign country.
And let’s face it: you know you’re living in the freaking future when you can point your phone at a bunch of alien characters and have them magically make sense. Combined with something like Sakhr’s voice translation software, one could be well-armed to handle some pretty exotic locales.
Ever wanted to use an iPhone for work, but got stuck with the standard issue BlackBerry (NSDQ: RIMM)? Well, Good Technology has made progress on their iPhone application, the back-end management for which was announced in the spring, and was showing it off at CTIA. The app has all the usual fixings, like e-mail (complete with push notifications and tomato splat on the home screen), contacts, and calendar items, all synced up to your enterprise Exchange or Domino server. The Good app uses enterprise standards for encryption like AES, and through a web-based management console, IT admins can manage employee mobility. I’m still dubious on whether or not Good’s admin side is as robust as RIM’s, but even if it’s not, I’m sure it will offer a reasonable suite of tools to work with. No word on pricing just yet, but it should be available in the App Store in the next couple of weeks. For a closer look, check out their data sheet or sign up for availability notifications.
CTIA Fall 2009 isn’t the biggest show we’ve ever been to. In fact, this particular conference might be the smallest CTIA we’ve ever attended. But, that doesn’t mean there’s a lack of cool hardware to ogle on the showfloor. Take the Nokia N900 for example. It’s Nokia (NYSE: NOK)’s latest Nseries smartphone, and the first of the Nseries lineup to run a non-Symbian OS. Nokia tapped its Maemo development team to craft a version of the Linux-based operating system for the new Nokia N900 smartphone, and we have to say it’s light-years better than S60. Say what you want about Symbian, just don’t say it’s “good.”
Anyway, enough ranting about Symbian. The Nokia N900 is a true multi-tasking powerhouse. The N900 is powered by the same 600Mhz ARM Cortex A8 processor that you’ll find crunching numbers inside the iPhone 3GS. Nokia uses that awesome processor to bring serious multi-tasking to the Nokia N900. Take a look at the video below and you’ll see that the N900 we were playing with was running no less than six apps at the same time – no saved-state nonsense, this was legitimate multi-tasking. One of the apps (a game) even displayed an animated thumbnail showing the game in action while running in the background.
The UI is smooth and lag-free. Flick your finger on the touchscreen and you’ll be treated to a bit of kinetic scrolling. Maemo 5 supports widgets too, which means you can fill your three homescreen panes with all sorts of little info-windows that pull social-network information in real-time. And, as an added bonus, Maemo 5 runs a Mozilla-based web browser that boasts full Flash 9.2 support. This isn’t the crappy Flash Lite that some folks have been saying is a good alternative to real Flash support (even though it really isn’t). This is real Flash, running real fast and real smoothly.
As for the hardware, here’s a quick rundown. The Nokia N900 features a 3.5-inch WVGA capacitive resistive touchscreen, 5-megapixel Carl Zeiss camera (with dual-LED flash), 32GB onboard storage, 3G data, GPS, WiFi, FM radio and that speedy 600Mhz Cortex A8 processor. In a nutshell, it’s everything you’d expect from Nokia’s latest Nseries flagship.
You can pre-order the Nokia N900 from NokiaUSA.com for $649. Have at it!
Okay, let’s face it: there are people in your social networks you just want to mute sometimes. Inane tweets, stupid Facebook status updates, or a continual influx of devilishly entertaining links distracting you from doing something productive. On the flip side, sometimes you want to be on be on the pulse of things and just want to hear it all. Well, this neat little address book app for iPhone called Orbit has an ingenious feature called Social Volume which lets you do just that.
At its core, Orbit aims to handle all of the native personal information management tasks under one roof – e-mail, phone, text, and social networking. The way Social Volume works is that you can adjust the frequency of updates from user-specified groups of contacts and specific types of updates. An “Inner Orbit” group lets you handle your top-priority contacts separately, along with being able to optionally populate the address book through Facebook.
I’d really like to see Trillibis plug multimedia social networks like last.fm and Flickr into their app, but in the end, I just really like the idea of Social Volume. It strikes me as a real poignant and natural thing for someone to do on their social networks; “I don’t hate you, but please, please, just shut up for a little while.” Free iPhone and BlackBerry (NSDQ: RIMM) apps will be arriving before the end of the year, with Android following shortly thereafter in 2010.
Rock Band is on its way to the iPhone! Forget everything you thought you knew about beat-matching music games on the iPhone, EA Mobile’s Rock Band is by far the best in its class. We had a chance to sit down with EA Mobile at CTIA WITE 2009 to get a sneak-peek at Rock Band for iPhone, and it’s looking good. The game gives you the option of playing on your own, taking a world tour (as you unlock points for new songs) or jam with up to four of your iPhone friends in person or over the internet. Linking up for 4-way multi-player mode is done over Bluetooth, so you don’t even have to worry about finding a hotspot to get your jam on!
The iPhone port of Rock Band gives the gamer the same look and feel as the console version – graphics, gameplay and sound effects are all very familiar. Just like the console version, Rock Band for iPhone offers four different instruments to play – bass, guitar, drums and even vocals. The game comes loaded with 20 songs, all of them master versions from the real-life band (no cover songs). And, with in-app purchases now supported on the iPhone OS 3.0, Rock Band for iPhone will allow you buy new song packs directly from EA Mobile. How sweet is that?
[Update]
There’s no hard launch date set, but the game is going in for AppStore approval within a week. After that, it’s up to Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) to pull the trigger.
Keep reading for our sneak-peek video of the upcoming Rock Band iPhone game!
Sorry for the delay, y’all – between recovering from CTIA, and some technical difficulties, the podcast fell to the wayside for a few weeks, but we’re back on track now.
CTIA Fall 2009 isn’t the biggest show we’ve ever been to. In fact, this particular conference might be the smallest CTIA we’ve ever attended. But, that doesn’t mean there’s a lack of cool hardware to ogle on the showfloor. Take 
Rock Band is on its way to the iPhone! Forget everything you thought you knew about beat-matching music games on the iPhone, EA Mobile’s Rock Band is by far the best in its class. We had a chance to sit down with EA Mobile at CTIA WITE 2009 to get a sneak-peek at Rock Band for iPhone, and it’s looking good. The game gives you the option of playing on your own, taking a world tour (as you unlock points for new songs) or jam with up to four of your iPhone friends in person or over the internet. Linking up for 4-way multi-player mode is done over Bluetooth, so you don’t even have to worry about finding a hotspot to get your jam on!
