By Dusan Belic on Wednesday, November 25th, 2009 at 3:18 AM PST In Symbian
Symbian Foundation is stronger for yet another member company. It’s FancyFon Software which provides a portfolio of solutions for the mobile device lifecycle management market, enabling any number of mobile devices to be centrally and remotely managed over the Internet.
Like any other member of the foundation, FancyFon gains the immediate right to license the Symbian Foundation platform, royalty free and without source code fees; participate in the governance of the foundation; and take part in joint marketing and branding campaigns.
Commenting on the announcement, Symbian’s Shaun Puckrin said: “The Symbian Foundation welcomes FancyFon into the community. Developers and ISVs are crucial to creating the richest possible user experiences. We are eager to see the innovations that FancyFon Software will bring to Symbian consumers.”
Just a late night quickie here for the BlackBerry Storm 9520 users. OS 5.0.0.341 has leaked and is available right here for download. Keep in mind this is a very unofficial release, so if you do decide to download and install, do so at your own risk. Backup your device and take all necessary precautions before you proceed. Or not.
As always if you give this a whirl, be sure to let us know if you notice any major improvements. I’ll be here awaiting your comments.
Earlier this month you may recall the TELUS LG IQ making a cameo in a Best Buy mobile ad. The device that was once a bit of a mystery is starting to come out into the light, today in the form of a few spy shots.
The IQ features a 3.2″ touchscreen, 5.0MP camera with video, and a full and somewhat luxurious slide-out QWERTY keyboard. The IQ will be TELUS (NYSE: TU)’ first device to offer Windows Mobile 6.5… I can’t imagine there being much (if any) demand for Win-Mo, but good on TELUS for mixing it up a bit here.
I’m by no means a Windows Mobile fan, but I’d sure like to get my hands on this bad boy… I’ll see what I can do…
Sometimes size doesn’t matter. Most other times, though, size really counts. Take smartphones, for example. We’re always looking for a thin waistline (we’re a superficial bunch), big helpings of processor power, and a huge touchscreen. It’s all about size. We would have never thought a Windows Mobile device would be the first smartphone to completely meet all those criteria. The HTC HD2 Windows Phone packs in a 1Ghz Snapdragon processor and a 4.3-inch capacitive touchscreen into a package about as thick as a No. 2 yellow pencil. It’s about as good as it gets for Windows Mobile. Heck, the HD2 massive touchscreen, powerful processor and impressive 5-megapixel camera make the handset one of the best phones of the year.
What? A Windows Mobile phone that’s actually worthy of competing at the same level as the iPhone and Android phones like the Motorola (NYSE: MOT) Droid? You bet your ass. Here’s the thing: HTC does a great job of covering up the Windows Mobile interface with its own TouchFLO 3D UI (infused with HTC’s “Sense” design philosophy, of course). So, the HD2 might be a Windows Phone, but with the TF3D interface in place, it’s easy to forgive the HD2’s WinMo roots.
Add in a dash of 4.3-inch capacitive touchscreen goodness, sprinkle on a 5-megapixel camera with dual-LED flash, and add a pinch of GPS, 3G data, WiFi and digital compass, 3.5mm headphone jack, and a microSD card slot, and the HD2’s recipe is sure to please even the staunchest Windows Mobile haters. The barely-there bezel surrounding the touchscreen really highlights the ginormous display – it dominates the handset.
Some say the display is too big, which makes the handset too big, but we have to disagree. The HD2 is just thin enough to pull off the bigscreen look without feeling bloated or unwieldy. It feels a little wide in the hand, but nothing we couldn’t get used to. And, when you’re watching a music video or browsing the web, any complaints about the HD2’s size immediately vaporize into the ether.
We’ll leave the Windows Mobile commentary for a full review, but for now, enjoy the HTC HD2 hands-on video and photo gallery!
Do you have bunch of different logins and passwords that you have to remember? Maybe all those pot brownies and bong hits in college destroyed your working memory. Whatever the case, you’re probably in need of a solid password manager app for your iPhone. Lucky for you, 1Password Pro for iPhone is now available for FREE on the AppStore.
1Password Pro is a special edition version of the award-winning password app on the iPhone. It saves your usernames, passwords, credit card numbers, notes and other sensitive information so that you don’t have to worry about remembering your password. 1Password will even log you into websites with a single tap.
1Password Pro was $4.99, but the price has been completely slashed for the Thanksgiving holiday. It’s now free and ready for your download. Even if your memory hasn’t vanished up in a cloud of skunky goodness, 1Password will probably make your life a lot easier.
Ashok Kumar, an analyst with Northeast Securities, is now the butt of all my “people who work in this industry who have no clue what they’re talking about” jokes. This time last month he told The Street that Google will be releasing their own Android device, only to be burned a few days later by the head of Android Porject, Andy Rubin, who said “we’re not making hardware, we’re enabling others to build hardware”. Kumar now has new information, and I’m being a total idiot for linking to it, but here it goes:
This handset will have a “large touchscreen display” and will have a processor “nearly twice as fast as the iPhone 3GS”
It will “probably” run a new version of Android called Flan
The device will “probably” be built by HTC and have a Qualcomm (NSDQ: QCOM) processor inside
At this point in time you may proceed to slap your forehead.
If Google ever released their own mobile device, which they’re not going to, they would be alienating handset makers.
If Google ever released their own mobile device with unlimited free calls, which they’re not going to, they would be alienating handset makers and operators.
Will there be a version of Android called Flan? Absolutely, Andy Rubin already talked about, and he confirmed it will support advanced 3D graphics.
Will there be an Android device, built by HTC, with a processor from Qualcomm that is nearly twice as fast as the iPhone 3GS? Yes. Just take the HTC HD2, which has a 1 GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon processor inside, compared to the 600 MHz processor inside the iPhone 3GS, slap the latest version of Android on it, and there is your mythical Google Phone.
What next Ashok Kumar? Are you going to tell people that the next version of Android, the one after Flan, will be called Gelato and it is going to power the new Google Phone? It’s going to be 4 times faster than the iPhone 3GS, has the ability to tell you where the nearest café serving a hot steaming cup of decaffeinated “shut the fuck up” is, and best of all adds the ability to purchase said cup of coffee with Google Checkout!
A quick OS update for the BlackBerry Bold 9000 users out there. No, it’s not 5.0, but this release does bring us up to 4.6.0.307. You can nab the update here. This update is official, and comes to us from the SK Telecom (NYSE: SKM) BlackBerry (NSDQ: RIMM) download site. If you could really care less, then hmmphhh… you might as well wait for 5.0, right?
If you do proceed, make sure you backup your device and take all necessary precautions. Even though this is an official release, sometimes things do go fubar with updates. Again, you can nab OS 4.6.0.307 for the Bold 9000 right here.
Note: On the download page, hit the dropdown and select ‘BlackBerry Bold (TM) 9000 smartphone’ to proceed.
As promised, the Nokia (NYSE: NOK) N86 is now available at Rogers (NYSE: RCI) for $99.99 on a three-year contract after rebates. That price point is a sweet spot for a handset with an impressive 8 megapixel camera, full-bodied smartphone OS, and a form factor that still appeals to the feature phone crowd. Rogers is really going to have to bring it with their holiday lineup if they’re hoping to compete with the impressive selection Bell and telus are offering thanks to their shiny new HSPA networks. If Rogers’ “webphones” campaign pimping out the Sony Ericsson (NYSE: SNE) X1, LG Eve, BlackBerry (NSDQ: RIMM) Bold 9000, and the HTC Magic is their big holiday push, it’s clear they’re more interested in beating competitors on pricing rather than highest-end hardware. Interesting strategy – we’ll see if it pays off. You can pick up the Rogers N86 online right now, or check out our review before taking the plunge.
Taptu has grown up quite a lot since I last played with their service. In my September 2007 review I said:
“If you’re adapt at Google (NSDQ: GOOG) (NSDQ: GOOG) than Taptu may or may not be useful to you. Simply adding words such as “wiki” or “lyrics” after a search query usually makes Google get an idea of what it is you’re trying to find.”
With the release of their Android application today, things are looking mighty different from the original, almost laughable, user interface. They’ve put a filter on web results so you only see content optimized for mobile devices. Whether or not that is a good thing is debatable. Would you prefer more search results or fewer search results optimized for your screen? They’ve also integrated the “OneRiot” service which aggregates what people are talking about at this very second on Twitter, Digg, and other social networking sites, and present those terms to you as queries you may want to plug into the Taptu service. Chances are you open a search application to find an answer to a question in your mind, not to see what the world is talking about. Then again, there may be a few of you out there who are concerned with appearing to be “in the loop” as Malcolm Tucker from “The Thick of It” would say. If you’re one of those people, then Taptu rocks.
Look, is it smart for a company like Taptu to compete with Google? Yes and No. Yes, it’s nice to see something different than the usual list of 10 links Google’s mobile optimized search engine provides. No, it’s stupid to pour resources into what is nothing more than a fancy front end, which Google can copy, to a search engine that crawls a very small subset of the internet.
Give the Taptu application a go on your Android device and let me know in the comments what you think about it.
Here’s a piece of software that should’ve come pre-installed with every Palm (NSDQ: PALM) Pre. It’s called Precorder and as you can guess from its name, it brings video recording to the webOS platform. Still in alpha, Precorder is a homebrew app that lets users capture 480×320-pixel video at 30fps in H.264/AVC format. Moreover, it allows controlling of the built-in LED light so you could continue your clip even in the low-light conditions. Audio can also be recorded, but that’s not a big deal.
On the downside, there’s no video preview presented while recording, but I assume that will be changed as soon as Precorder hits beta. Plus, the app is free, so we shouldn’t ask for too much… Search for it in the Palm App Catalog and let us know what you think.
Symbian Foundation is stronger for yet another member company. It’s FancyFon Software which provides a portfolio of solutions for the mobile device lifecycle management market, enabling any number of mobile devices to be centrally and remotely managed over the Internet.
Just a late night quickie here for the 
Do you have bunch of different logins and passwords that you have to remember? Maybe all those pot brownies and bong hits in college destroyed your working memory. Whatever the case, you’re probably in need of a solid password manager app for your iPhone. Lucky for you, 1Password Pro for iPhone is now available for 
As ![taptudroidcropp Taptu releases an Android application, makes mobile search touch friendly [Verdict: Who cares?]](http://images.intomobile.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/11/taptudroidcropp.jpg "Taptu releases an Android application, makes mobile search touch friendly [Verdict: Who cares?]")
