Microsoft’s Sphere display in action

• Sphere
• Another Video

[Via Ducknetweb]

Hands-on Video HTC Touch Pro

The HTC Touch Pro has been available in UK for few days now. Chris at MobileTechAddicts just posted a hands-on video for your review. He is very happy with the usability and the performance of the TouchFLO 3D.

You can also read his post about some published benchmark results HERE!

Qtrax: Free Download Latest Songs

Qtrax, a legal Peer-to-Peer music distribution that allows listener to download legally DRM’ed songs and play them back offline on your PC.

The player client is ad-supported and currently carries hundreds of Radiohead tracks. Hundreds of Marvin Gaye tracks. Hundreds of Trisha Yearwood tracks. Qtrax has some of the hottest new releases as well as a growing catalog of traditional classics, all high fidelity. Install the player and get your favorite music now - for free.

Download HERE (Windows only, Mac support is coming soon)

Requirements

› Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0
› Windows Media Player 11
› 733 MHz Pentium III CPU (Recommended: 1.5 GHz Pentium IV or comparable)
› At least 256 MB of physical RAM (Recommended: 512 MB)
› At least 40 MB of available space on your hard drive
› 16 bit sound card (Recommended: 32 bit Sound Card)
› Speakers or headphones

Apple might get an order of 200,000 iPhones

According to ZDNet Australia, Global banking giant HSBC is considering ditching the BlackBerry and adopting Apple’s iPhone as its standard staff mobile device, a move that could result in an order for some 200,000 iPhones, which will be the single largest order to date.

"We are actually reviewing iPhones from a HSBC Group perspective … and when I say that, I mean globally," HSBC’s Australia and New Zealand chief information officer Brenton Hush told ZDNet.com.au yesterday. HSBC is using about 300,000 employees worldwide.

The event seems to indicate that Apple’s strategy starts come to fruition by moving the consumer oriented iPhone toward business world with the addition of the Exchange support.
[Via ZDNet Australia]

Twitter Europe Changes SMS Approach

In an effort to reduce the SMS cost, MobileTechAddicts reports Twitter will be introducing several new, local SMS numbers in countries throughout Europe, in the coming weeks and months. These new numbers will make Twittering more accessible for all the folks who have been using SMS to send long-distance updates through the existing UK number +44 762 480 1423.  Twitter gives the below reasons:
Why Stop Sending SMS To Some Countries?
Mobile operators in most of the world charge users to send updates. When you send one message to Twitter and we send it to ten followers, you aren’t charged ten times—that’s because we’ve been footing the bill. When we launched our free SMS service to the world, we set the clock ticking. As the service grew in popularity, so too would the price.

“Our challenge during this window of time was to establish relationships with mobile operators around the world such that our SMS services could become sustainable from a cost perspective. We achieved this goal in Canada, India, and the United States. We can provide full incoming and outgoing SMS service without passing along operator fees in these countries.
We took a risk hoping to bring more nations onboard and more mobile operators around to our way of thinking but we’ve arrived at a point where the responsible thing to do is slow our costs and take a different approach. If you don’t live in Canada, India, or the US, then we recommend receiving your Twitter updates via one of the following methods.”

• m.twitter.com works on browser-enabled phones
• m.slandr.net works on browser-enabled phones
• TwitterMail works on email-enabled phones
• Cellity works on java-enabled phones
• TwitterBerry works on BlackBerry brand phones
• Twitterific works on iPhones

[Source Twitter Via MobilettechAddicts]

Motorola Motorokr T505 More Than Just a BT Visor Speakerphone

Just like the portable GPS, the visor Bluetooth speakerphone is getting popular, especially in few states that require the use of hand-free device while driving.

Motorola already has a couple of models but this Motorokr T505 has a little more in its sleeve.

Beside the main duty of pairing with your cellphone for hand-free dialing, the device can receive BT A2DP (Stereo) and re-transmit the audio to your car stereo via an FM transmitter. The music will pause for incoming calls.

With the exception of the iPod, most mobile devices now offer A2DP stereo BT streaming, this is a convenience way to share your music with passengers. However the audio quality should suffer with double hits (A2DP and FM transmitter). The device costs around $90 HERE!.

Must Have: Backup Your Firefox Environment with FEBE

While we are waiting Mozilla to provide a personal profile residing on the cloud for Firefox. FEBE could be the recipe for restoring painlessly your entire Firefox environment should you have to re-install Firefox on your new computer. An ideal tool for advance Firefox users having tons of extensions, themes or novice users for bookmark backing-up.

FEBE (Firefox Environment Backup Extension) allows you to quickly and easily backup your Firefox extensions. In fact, it goes beyond just backing up — It will actually rebuild your extensions individually into installable .xpi files. FEBE backs up your extensions, themes, and (optionally) your bookmarks, preferences, passwords, cookies and just about everything else Firefox offers (it can even backup/restore your entire profile). The back-up file can reside on your computer or Box.net online storage service. But if your backup file is not larger than your Web based email service provider, I’d suggest just to email yourself.

Features:

• Schedule automatic backups on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis.
• Save backups in time-stamped folders to easily identify when the backups were created. Specify how many folders you wish to keep and FEBE removes the oldest.
• Backup reminder. FEBE can alert you if a backup has not been completed in a specified number of days. (Yay)
• Comprehensive results report with links to the author’s extension/theme homepages.
• User-defined backups. Make backups of virtually any file or folder - Firefox related or not. Just specify what to backup and FEBE does the rest.
• Extensive built-in help files. Just click the little blue information icons in FEBE options.
• FEBE 6.0 uses native Firefox zip/unzip components. Much, much faster than previous FEBE versions that depended on external, third-party utilities.
• Upload backups to your Box.net account automatically or with a single click. (FEBE 6.0)
  * Verify your extension directory. Upgrading to Fx 3.0 sometimes leaves garbage in the extensions directory. FEBE can clean it up. (FEBE 6.0)
• Quick Backup. You can quickly backup as many or as few individual extensions/themes as you like. They can be saved together in a single, installable xpi file (Similar to CLEO). (FEBE 6.0), etc..

Download FEBE extension HERE!

Get The Olympics On Your WM with Levono & Zumobi

Lenovo, the main sponsor of the Summer Olympics 2008 in Beijing partners with Zumobi, to offer a free app for Windows Mobile users

The  app called the “Olympic Zoom Space,” which is available via a free download at http://lenovo.zumobi.com.

The app interface features 4 panels that let you quickly and easily view news and photos from the web without need of your web browser.

The app features news, blogs, photos, and other updates from Lenovo’s “Olympic Podium” website, a portal for all the Olympics information. [Thanks Scott D!]

VITO Winterface 1.1 Released

VITO Technology has releases  a new update Winterface 1.1, a Windows Mobile shell that helps you to organize/re-arrange applications and settings of your Windows Mobile to your likings.

The highlight of this release is the start gesture “rainbow” was replaced in the new version by upside down tick. Moreover, it has become possible to add to the main screen not only applications, settings and contacts but also any files on your Pocket PC. Besides, calendar and tasks now can notify you about upcoming events, appointments and tasks. Minor bugs have been also fixed.

Other improvements include:

• The start gesture, now the application is started with the help of the upside down tick ^. This gesture is unlikely to interfere with other applications so that Winterface couldn’t pop out each time you slide the screen. Drawing the gesture "tick" or letter "v" on your screen can close any application you are working in.
• Tasks and calendar enhancements: organizers and reminders have red indicators with numbers above Calendar and Tasks icons to show active tasks and upcoming events. When tapping Calendar you can see a semi-transparent window with all events. If you need to edit time or event you can go to the calendar if not you may return back to the screen. As for the tasks, pressing the icon you are put straight to the Tasks to look at them and to edit.
• Quick access to files.  "Files" was added to the menu with possibility to switch off the lock screen.

Winterface is available for $19.95 at HERE!  There is also a free 14-day trial

Read more VITO’s Press Release

Explore other application from VITO HERE!

iPhone is Coming to Best Buy store Near You

Starting September 7, US customer can pick up Apple iPhone at Best Buy stores.

According to the US retailer, the 8GB and 16GB iPhone 3Gs will go on sale at 970 Best Buy stores and 16 smaller Best Buy Mobile stores at the same price as AT&T stores and Apple Stores. Users have to  have to sign a two-year contract with AT&T.

This is an extension of the current agreement that Best Buys are carrying iPod, Macs, etc..

The move is not related to the Carphone Warehouse & Best Buy agreement to sell unlocked cellphone that we announced earlier HERE.

Obviously, there are more Best Buys stores across US including some smaller towns that Apple or AT&T stores are not present.

Gmail Unscheduled Outage, Google Says Sorry!

Yesterday, Gmail went down for a couple of hours, I remember this was the first extended outage so far occurred.  Luckily Twitter was up and was used by several users as an alternate way to communicate.

Any way, the root cause of yesterday failure seemed to be related to  an error on the Google back end (obviously) but it should all be fixed now. Below is the “sorry letter” from Google Blog:

“Many of you had trouble accessing Gmail for a couple of hours this afternoon, and we’re really sorry. The issue was caused by a temporary outage in our contacts system that was preventing Gmail from loading properly. Everything should be back to normal by the time you read this.

We heard loud and clear today how much people care about their Gmail accounts. We followed all the emails to our support team and user group, we fielded phone calls from Google Apps customers and friends, and we saw the many Twitter posts. (We also heard from plenty of Googlers, who use Gmail for company email.) We never take for granted the commitment we’ve made to running an email service that you can count on.

We’ve identified the source of this issue and fixed it. In addition, as with all issues that affect Gmail and our other services, we’re conducting a full review of what went wrong and moving quickly to update our internal systems and procedures accordingly. We don’t usually post about problems like this on our blog, but we wanted to make an exception in this case since so many people were impacted. In general, though, if you spot a problem with your Gmail account, please visit the Gmail Help Center and user group, where the Gmail Guides are your fastest source of updates.

Again, we’re sorry.”

[via Jmorganmarketing]

Speculation iPhone 3G Poor Reception Could be Related to Infineon bad batch

Followed to the inquiry for a survey of Apple iPhone 3G reception issue by Cnet, GigaOm also reports some speculation from Richard Windsor, an analyst with Nomura Securities. In a research note today, he said: “We believe that these issues are typical of an immature chipset and radio protocol stack where we are almost certain Infineon is the 3G supplier.”

The bad batch of Infineon chips power the iPhone 3G seems to be caused by poor packaging by Nvidia and similar problem has been more visible with laptop.

There are no details from NVidia nor Apple about the problem, please take this with a grain of salt. This could explain some users replace their faulty device with a different one and have seen improvement.

[Via GigaOm]

Bring Your Google Calendar & Contacts to Outlook

As you know Gmail already provides POP/iMap for your Outlook email service, but Google Calendar and Google Contacts don’t have yet the way to get on your Outlook client as one single solution.
(Note that Google provides the Calendar Sync tool to sync your calendar) .

KiGoo is a simple solution (it is not a sync solution)  that allows outlook user to Manage Google Calendar and Contacts through the Microsoft Outlook® interface.

- Kigoo brings in to your Outlook Google Calendar as a separate calendar – that can be managed side-by-side with your traditional calendar

Same thing is applied to Contacts

Key Benefits
Manage Exchange and Google Calendars & Contacts in only one program !
Check free/busy availability of all Google Contacts who shared their   information !
See, Browse, Update, Email and invite your Google Contacts from   Microsoft Outlook !
No synchronization needed!
Real Time access!
Easy installation!
Supports Microsoft Outlook 2007 and MS Outlook 2003! NEW
KiGoo is free for non commercial use!

Download HERE!

Get Diamond Look With just a .Cab file…

The Diamong TouchFLO3D continues to be an object of affection among Windows Mobile users. The skinners are getting more sophisticated with this latest released from Bdoig and jdune,

The package is for QVGA device, it still needs Wisbar Advance Desktop and Wisbar Advance skin engines. Both can be purchased (trial available) at Lakeridgesoftware.com.

Read HERE for complete instructions.

Calling for Help to 3G iPhone Customers

Several 3G iPhone users have run into 3G reception issues during their first month. News.com is conducting a survey and needs more data from all of you at different locations. If you’re an iPhone 3G owner in the U.S., they need your help. 

Simply go to this post, In the comments section the following:

• Area in which you live.
• Date on which you bought your iPhone 3G.
• Do you live inside an area labeled as 3G as shown on AT&T’s coverage map?
• Have you experienced problems with dropped calls or flaky 3G connections? Please elaborate.

This part might require you to be on hold for a while, but it could be potentially very interesting: please call up an AT&T customer service representative and ask them if the primary 3G tower near your home or that your phone is currently using runs on the 1900MHz frequency or the 850MHz frequency.

If you’re an AT&T customer using another 3G phone on the network, please also respond with your location and whether or not you’re having the same kinds of issues. And if you’re outside the U.S. and can share your experiences, that would also be helpful.

Visit Tom Crazit’s survey HERE!