• BBC reports that a study shows that SMS improves language skills. That’s absolutely gr8.

• T-Mobile’s Samsung Memoir get reviewed here, here and here

• Israeli operator Pelephone invested 1.2 million dollars in a concept store in Tel Aviv .

• According to ABI Research mobile internet search increased  by 14% this year, Taptu thinks it should be more social.

• If you are looking to burn some time with your iPhone, you should try these 5 apps .

• A great comparison between the n85 and new Nokia N86.

• The Guardian will go fully mobile, boosts with ads on next month.

• Nokia Siemens Networks will supply China with 2G and 3G mobile equipment and services worth 880 million Euro.

• Now you can track how many iPhones visited your site

• One day, one app, this time: Google App for Wimo

It was back then in 2002 when the first mobile phones with cameras gradually became a “must have” feature.
In those days those mobile phones began a new era, the era of the MMS.
soon after the mobile phone equipped with a camera transformed the digital photography for ever. Since then, the MMS did not succeed in most markets, mobile services professionals learned about the spontaneous behavior of mobile photography users (as they shoot for fun pictures that are usually are not meant to be printed), and that the mobile phone with their physical attributes cannot replace digital cameras in terms of quality even in cases where they are equipped with good optics from Leica or Carl Zeiss.
2009 now draws as the year that mobile phones aim (again) to officially replace digital cameras (Not all of them, of course).

The  new Samsung i8910 or the Omnia HD equipped with: 8 megapixel auto focus camera with LED flash, geo-tagging, Face detection, Smile Shot, Blink  Shot, Wide Dynamic Range (WDR) and HD video recording at 24 fps is one of these devices that aims to do so.

But Samsung is not the only one, there are  the Nokia N86 , Sony Ericsson W995 and the soon to come Sony Ericsson Idou with 12 megapixel camera.
Moreover the mobile phone will flourish where the digital camera failed at Geo-Tagging and in connected enviorinment and photos based contextual awareness.

True iPhone Killers

From June 29, 2007 when the first iPhone went on sale until those days the iPhone did not  have the honor to  fight against an appropriate rival.
The amazing multi-touch screen, the full web browsing experience, the slick and intuitive UI and the apps ecosystem all those did not get a comprehensive answer from the manufacturers.
But now it seems that the manufacturers succeeded in fully understanding the success of the iPhone and to create true competitors to the iPhone.
The Nokia N79, Samsung Omnia HD, HTC Diamond2 and the Palm Pre that will probably hit the market on march this year.

Mobile OS War

Now after the missing piece of the puzzle is revealed, and the WinMo 6.5 was ofically announced, the mobile OS war have began.
Microsoft, Nokia and Google are fighting to power more and more devices, and Apple, RIM, and Palm that are trying to create the best OS using thier own devices.
All of them aim at the devlopers, they all offer them a great way to sell their apps and to create apps ecosystem just like apple did.
The day we will choose our mobile device by OS is not far, HTC and other manufacturers are all playing the game.
A game that will do good  to devlopers and to consumers as well.

Palm announced the “webOS” a mobile operating system that puts the “Mobile OS war” in a new light.
Do not get me wrong, Palm is not in good shape at all, just look at Palm’s financial report which indicates more than 500 million dollars of net loss, and a 100 million dollars investment that eclipses just a bit the bad situation of Palm.

The iPhone, created a situation that developers were just waiting for Apple to release the Platform SDK, and the rest is history.
Android backed up with the internet giant Google and about 60 companies including manufactures and carriers, offers  developers a whole Eco-system that can start on one device and ends up with 20.
And Symbian that’s come with the experience of years and millions of devices that are already out there.
It seems that the Palm’s WebOS will tell developers something like this ” Hi we got a cool device, and developing apps is just an ease give it a try”
That is the crucial point for Palm, if developers will leave the WebOS and will put all their efforts on iPhone or Android based device, The Pre can be an amazing device but soon there will be a better one.
Or, developers will  pay attention to the WebOS and the PRE will be just like its ancestor, the Pre will die and long live the WebOS.
Meanwhile all is just an expectation and we will just have to wait and see, if  the PRE, is just the begging or the end of Palm.

BTW Palm apps can not be called WebApps, Apple already uses this name for the web based iPhone apps.

Today, the mobile operators dominate the content market by controlling the mobile portals that are pre-configured to the devices they sell.
There is a shift to “off-portal” content consumption where users buy and download mobile content from sources other than the mobile operator.
There are two main problems with off-portals; The major one is the billing problem because off-portals cannot use the mobile account in order to charge the consumer (unless they use different solutions that the operators offer).
The second problem is the marketing, how do you move a crowd of consumers who are used to consume their content easily from the operator’s portal to use other portals where most users do not enter web addresses that are not precompiled on the phone.
These factors held back some of the progress and explosion of the mobile content market.

Now come Steve Jobs, with the AppStore and forces operators to use Apple’s content store for their iPhone. Of course this is something the mobile operators should not like as they need to get a smaller share of the revenues from the content. The secret is that it is not too bad for the operators. Apples marketing machine wants you to think that every new mobile purchased is an iPhone but the numbers show a different thing. More than everything, the iPhone is a hyped device. And as such a device, they know that the losses from the content are limited to the small market of iPhone users. This comes with the fact that when you launch an iPhone you get all the benefits of launching the hyped device which position you as an operator as a trendy operator with “cool” devices.
So you lose some revenues but you gain some publicity and branding points… when these elements are weighed in some cases they bring more benefit than losses to the operator.
AppStore benefits a standardized way to bill the customer using the operator, marketed by the operator and using inherent tools in the device.  So the AppStore is actually a crack in the dam of the operators’ supremacy in mobile content. Somehow device manufacturers succeeded in penetrating the closed garden of the operators.
Still, operators do have control over the devices and the network and they can limit the move if they realize it is an imminent risk.
Google with its  Android Market tries to follow Apple’s footsteps and if they succeed their potential is much greater than the AppStore. Android is an OS for licensing and many manufacturers plan to have Android-based devices while AppStore leans on the iPhone alone.

The long tail of mobile developers suffered a lot when working with the operators who requested support for usually over 20 different devices and a developer needed to negotiate and work directy with different operators in order to distribute his or her software.
In a single OS and detailed specification, like in the case of the iPhone and the Android phones the headache of cumbersome porting is spared.
Developers only need to have an account in the store and declare their requests in terms of revenues per item.

Now, Symbian, the dominant mobile OS company needs to somehow fight back and provide its developers with the right platform to distribute their content directly to the end-users. With over 100 Million devices in the market, if Symbian gets to offer the same offer, we do expect to see major changes in the content market.

Update: It seems that Microsoft “App store” named Skymarket will be launched  with the new Windows Mobile 7 OS.

Android Market pictures:

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Two new Nokia N-series phones N79 & N85

Nokia announce today on the new N-series phones to its multimedia phones portfolio.
The first is the Nokia N85, The device share the same design factors as the N81 which was the first to include the Navi-Wheel.
The Nokia N85 is a 5 megapixel shooter with A-GPS, Wi-Fi and FM receivers.
It runs on Symbian OS S60 FP 2 which is displayed on a 2.6 inch AMOLED screen with 16 millions colors and an accelerometer.
As a High-End multimedia device the N85 will support all of Nokia OVI services.
The N85 will be on sale on October and will cost 660 US dollars.

Full specification

The second device is the successor of the N78 The new Nokia N79.
The N79 has a smaller screen than the N85, A 2.4 TFT screen.
More or less the N79 share the same features like the N85: 5 megapixel camera, A-GPS and Wi-Fi.
Again all OVI services can run on the device.
More interesting is the come-back of the XperssOn covers the N79 comes with two additional covers in retail.
The N79 will be on sale from October at the price of 515 US dollars.

Full specification

HTC dual keyboard smartphone

While HTC is getting the EISA (European Imaging and Sound Association) award for its iPhone rival, the HTC diamond, HTC is introducing The S740.

The dual keyboard smartphone design inspired by the diamond and touch diamond devices.
It runs Windows Mobile 6.1 and has Wi-Fi and A-GPS.
The devices will start to be sold the next month in Europe.

Full specification

HTC “Dream” is FCC approved

The FCC approved the HTC Dream the first Andorid based mobile phone that will launch on T-Mobile this year.

The full specification (Not confirmed) By AndroidGuys

• 528Mhz Qualcomm 7201 processor
• Data kit for USB connectivity in the box
• 64MB Internal RAM
• 128MB Internal ROM
• 1GB MicroSD card
• 5 Row QWERTY keypad
• Trackball
• Dedicated camera button
• 3.1MP camera (no flash) 2048 x 1536
• Video playback files – H.264, streaming, 3GPP, MPEG4, and Codec 3GP
• Dedicated YouTube Player
• Audio playback files – MP3, AAC, AAC+, WMA, MPEG4, WAV, MIDI, REAL AUDIO, OGG
• Wallpaper supports JPG, BMP, PNG, and GIF
• Speakerphone (mono, natch)
• Ringtones (MP3, AAC, AAC+, WMA)
• HTTP, WAP Push, xHTML
• Bluetooth (class 1)
• Picture Caller ID
• SMS and MMS support (Take that Apple!)
• POP, IMAP, and SMTP, AOL, and GMAIL email
• AIM, MSN, YAHOO, and GTALK messaging
• Quad Band (850, 900, 1800, 1900)
• 3G
• 802.11b & 802.11g
• UMTS (1,4), HSDPA, SUPL
• 1150mAh battery
• Screen size is 3.17″ with HVGA (480 x 320)
• Handset 117 x 55 x 16mm
• 5.6 oz weight
• Sync capable with Google Calendar
• Downloadable content via Android Marketplace
• Google Streetview with built-in compass

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