I took the morning to check out a contest RIM and Rogers (NYSE: RCI) were holding at the University of Ottawa called CampusChase, where teams of two run around town like headless chickens on a scavenger hunt for big prizes. Rogers wasn’t quite ready to show off the Bold 9700 just yet (all of the promos were for the Curve 8520), but it was still a ton of fun hanging out with the BlackBerry (NSDQ: RIMM) mascots for awhile. Here are a few pictures of the booths, contestants, and the warm-up just prior to the race. One of my favourites is of the two Bolds getting a little friendly. CityChase goes all over, so be sure to check out their schedule to see if it’ll be happening in your city any time soon.
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.
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.
Midomi, an online community for amateur singers and music identification service, will be extending into Android soon. Until now, Shazam had struck me as the best mobile music ID service out there, but after seeing Midomi in action, I can see how handy humming a song could be when you’ve got it stuck in your head, or don’t have a chance to jam your phone right against a radio’s speaker. After either grabbing a sample of the song in question or simply speaking the artist/title, Midomi Ultra presents options for buying the track, YouTube videos, album information, lyrics lookup, and just about anything else you would want to know about a song. One of the key differentiators with Midomi is the social element – it’s heavily geared towards connecting you with people who have looked up similar music. Unfortunately, the app will be exclusive to the Motorola (NYSE: MOT) Cliq for the immediate future, but if you happen to be packing an iPhone, Midomi has got you covered.
A nice little treat from RIM last night at CTIA was these two devices, the BlackBerry (NSDQ: RIMM) Bold 9000 and Curve 8520, in a brand new white paint job. We had heard rumours about the white Bold hitting up AT&T (NYSE: T), but the new 8520, which will be joining its black and blue brothers on T-Mobile (NYSE: DT), was a welcome surprise. T-Mobile’s offer is available now, and I’m sure AT&T’s will go live soon.
Slacker, a great music app for BlackBerry (NSDQ: RIMM) and iPhone, will be launching on Android and Windows Mobile tomorrow, allowing you to browse, favourite, and discover music on your smartphone. The launch will come with some new Twitter integration which will let you tweet whenever you favourite a new track, and share a link to the station you’re listening to so your followers can take a listen for themselves. While Slacker might lack the immediate convenience of over the air downloads, its sideloading setup allows for much higher-quality tracks. Just like the previous versions, the app will be free to download, but of course you’ll always have the option to buy the tracks to do what you will with. Licensing issues are still a thorn in Slacker’s side; if you live anywhere other than the U.S., you won’t be able to use the service. Otherwise, take a look at Slacker, and keep an eye on their mobile app page for some fresh goodies tomorrow.
UPDATE: Slight miscommunication. It’s only the twitter feature launching today – Android and Windows Mobile will be arriving at a later, undisclosed date.
Here we are. It’s the eve of the iPhone 3G S launch, and the excitement is growing. In just a couple handfuls of hours, Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) will let loose the iPhone 3G S on the US. Come tomorrow morning (June 19), Apple stores across the country will open their doors, applaud the die-hard fans waiting in line, and proceed to dole out Cupertino’s latest smartphone hotness to anyone with the right number of greenbacks.
So, to continue our tradition of camping out for an iPhone bringing you live coverage of iPhone launch-day crowds, IntoMobile will be broadcasting live from the Santa Monica Third Street Promenade Apple Store in beautiful Southern California.
With a little luck, you’ll get a first-hand look at what Apple fans look like in their natural habitat (the Apple store, of course), and you might even get to chat with the IntoMobile team! The feed will go live shortly, so make sure to keep checking IntoMobile.
[Update]
Okay, we’re live! Hop in the chat room and let us know what’s on your mind.
Consolation prize - you see that fancy schmancy IntoMobile t-shirt that Will is rockin’? Well we’re giving away a couple IntoMobile shirts as consolation prizes. It’s no iPhone 3G S, but they sure are darn comfortable tees!
Remember: We’ll be announcing the third and final winner in our iPhone 3G S giveaway at midnight tonight! Make sure to enter in time!
Okay, okay, roll in those tongues ladies, this is about Rogers (NYSE: RCI)’ first Android-toting smartphones, the HTC Magic and Dream, not your beloved Joshua Jackson of Dawson’s Creek fame, however dreamy and/or magical he may be. As mentioned, Rogers has announced the first Android devices in Canada for $149.99 on three-year contract, and are offering a promotional $30 6 GB monthly data plan. You can pick ‘em up in storesnow.
One of the biggest questions that lingered after their launch event in Toronto was “why did it take so long for Android to get to Canada?” I’d like to think that Rogers was taking the high road and waiting until Exchange support was available, but it seems more likely that they didn’t hop on board last fall like T-Mobile (NYSE: DT) US did because the iPhone 3G was still fresh out of the gate and they didn’t want to cannibalize any sales; even now, based on some of the ads they showed us, it’s clear Rogers is pushing the slider Dream more than the newer, more impressive, full-touchscreen Magic.
Hit the jump for some first impressions of the HTC Magic and HTC Dream from Rogers, and a bunch of pictures both of the handsets and Joshua Jackson, if you’re into that kind of thing.
RIM’s biggest BlackBerry (NSDQ: RIMM) show of the year is now officially on and the the keynote is gonna kick things off. We aren’t expecting anything big (like the a device announcement), but will probably have some cool stuff for enterprise and admins. Woop! Show’s starting. Time to liveblog.
8:44 – Mike Lazaridis talks up BlackBerry’s birthday, success and growth.
8:47 – Mike intros BES 5.0. Web-based console, end-users get remote access, e-mail flags and folders. Same ol’.
8:52 – Beta testers give their testimonials. Glowing all around – high availability, failover, easy upgrade, solid security.
8:56 – Mike talking about making BlackBerry an all-in-one connection back home while staying secure. Now talking about Chalk Media. Hmm… I’m listening… Dang, moved on to Mobile Voice System. Was hoping maybe there was some announcement with Chalk there. Podcast software bundled with OS might have been cool.
9:00 – Wireless Presentation Solution for projecting PowerPoints gets mentioned. Would like to have seen more of it, though.
9:03 – Mike goes off stage. More peppy video testimonials.
I took the morning to check out a contest RIM and Rogers (NYSE: RCI) were holding at the University of Ottawa called CampusChase, where teams of two run around town like headless chickens on a scavenger hunt for big prizes. Rogers wasn’t quite ready to show off the Bold 9700 just yet (all of the promos were for the Curve 8520), but it was still a ton of fun hanging out with the BlackBerry (NSDQ: RIMM) mascots for awhile. Here are a few pictures of the booths, contestants, and the warm-up just prior to the race. One of my favourites is of the two Bolds getting a little friendly. CityChase goes all over, so be sure to check out their schedule to see if it’ll be happening in your city any time soon.
Midomi
A nice little treat from RIM last night at CTIA was these two devices, the BlackBerry (
Here we are. It’s the eve of the iPhone 3G S launch, and the excitement is growing. In just a couple handfuls of hours, Apple (
Okay, okay, roll in those tongues ladies, this is about Rogers (
