BuZZone is either a great new way to chat on your Windows Mobile or a complete waste of time - it’s really too early to say.
A Bluetooth Instant Messaging app, BuZZone is simple to use and a free download, but you have to wonder - who is this aimed at?
The developers reckon it will see heavy use in ‘trade shows’ (chatting to other attendees about ‘business information’) or in nightclubs (chatting to other drunkards, presumably) . The app lets you publish a personal profile and periodically search for nearby contacts with similar interests.
The only fly in the ointment is the microscopic odds of there being anyone else in the vicinity with a copy of BuZZone, much less one who shares your interests.
The best use case I can come up with for this is in a classroom as an alternative to passing notes under the desk. Not that many schoolkids are rocking Windows Mobiles, but you never know - BuZZone might be the killer app that WinMo needs & this time next year we will all be chatting away via Bluetooth… but I wouldn’t hold my breath if I were you.
The blog of UK mobile retailer Dial-a-Phone has a post claiming that LG’s Viewty is outselling the iPhone in Europe, after LG released figures saying it had sold 310,000 Viewtys since the handset went on sale five weeks ago.
To some extent, this is speculation, since Apple hasn’t released any sales figures for iPhone in the UK or Europe yet. Of course, its failure to do so has fuelled the rumours that the sales haven’t been great - something bolstered by the odd report that iPhone activations haven’t been quite as numerous as Apple and O2 were hoping in the UK.
Viewty’s success spells danger for Apple, because it’s seen as one of the iPhone’s most powerful rivals. From personal experience, I can testify that Viewty’s camera makes mincemeat of the iPhone’s, even if its touchscreen interface isn’t quite as intuitive. The battle between the two will be a defining mobile trend in 2008.
(via Dial-a-Phone blog)
If there’s one thing worth grumbling about with the iPhone, it’s the 8GB capacity - particularly as the iPod Touch has double that. However, industry analysts are predicting that the problem may be solved at the Macworld Expo in January, with a new 16GB iPhone.
What’s more, Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster reckons the price point may stay the same, which would be a bit frustrating for anyone who bought the 8GB model just before Christmas. What analysts don’t expect at Macworld is the long-rumoured 3G iPhone, which is expected to be launched later in 2008 rather than at the start of the year.
Of course, Apple boss Steve Jobs does love to keep people guessing, so there’s no guarantee that Apple won’t spring a completely different iPhone-related surprise at Macworld. Downloadable games on iTunes? A GPS accessory? A native Facebook application? Watch this space…
(via Bloomberg)
Nokia Beta labs have officially released MUPE - Multi User Publishing Environment - a sort of applications framework-cum-social network thing that makes it easier to create multi-user games and apps.
To use it, you just need to install the (Java) client on your phone and you can then download any of the apps that have been created with the MUPE developer tools. So far, most of these seem to be games, but there are a growing number of social apps like Books and Gathering.
MUPE apps can be location-aware (on supported handsets) and this opens up a lot of interesting possibilities, both for local social-networking and location-based games (Nokia laser tag, anyone?)
MUPE has been available as an open-source project for a few months, but now it has been adopted as a Beta Labs product you can expect more developers to join in the fun.
O2 has finally caught up with its rival networks in refreshing its Active mobile internet portal.
The new-look site will according to O2, ‘for the first time’, look and feel the same regardless of whether its being viewed on a 2G or 3G handset. ‘First time’ for O2 at least, as Vodafone and others have been doing this for ages.
A useful personalisation feature is that the user’s most visited sites will be shown at the top of their homepage, with content viewed tailored to suit their browsing habits. For instance, if someone likes football and browses a lot of news, results and transfer stories, then these will appear at the top of their homepage.
It sounds interesting and we’d love to hear about user’s experiences, because if sounds like O2 owners will finally get the browsing experience Vodafone offers with its Mobile Favourites service.
LG’s been crowing about its success again, now claiming that it’s going to sell 700,000 touch-screen Prada handsets by the end of the year.
Certainly LG has had a particularly success year. In the last couple of months alone it’s claimed to have sold over 15m Chocolate handsets and then that its second touch-screen handset, the Viewty, sold out its first shipments in three weeks, with the latest figure being 310,000 in just two months.
Considering the Prada was only released in March in four countries before a wider global release, this isn’t bad going for LG’s first touch-screen device.
[Via Mobile Entertainment]
It seems it isn’t all plain sailing on the development of applications for Google’s Android platform.
has taken a look at the Android SDK (Software Development Kit) and found a few issues with it. Developers getting are frustrated by bugs on Android’s SDK and no way to document them for future reference.
There seems to be a general feeling that the Android platform isn’t ready for a big push at the moment with more work still to be done.
However, Ryan Paul of Ars Technica did say that despite some limitations with Android’s SDK, he still sees it as a ‘viable and effective platform for application development’.
With Apple expected to launch its own iPhone SDK to developers next year, it seems Google needs to pull its finger out to steal a march on Apple.
This year it seems like the Nokia NSeries devices have been breeding like rabbits. We have the N81, N82, N95, N95 8GB and N73, and now the daddy of them all has emerged – the N96.
Pics have appeared on Flickr, originating from a Chinese source of a real-life, actual N96 handset – apparently not a mock-up or render, but actual pictures.
Jusding by the pictures, the N95 is a dual-slider with a button-less top screen (presumably for touch-screen controls?). It also has a navigation wheel like the N81’s with media controls. The OS is apparently the S60 3rd edition FP2 (i.e. Symbian OS 9.5).
Camera-wise it has a five-megapixel camera with the now ubiquitous (on NSeries at least) Carl Zeiss optics. Interestingly, there’s a stand on the back of the N96 for easier media viewing
There’s no official news on this device yet, but judging by the success of the N95 (and its 8GB incarnation), this could be the big handset of next year.
[Via Intomobile]
Guess what? Nokia’s N-Gage service has been delayed YET AGAIN! It was originally going to be launched this week with much fanfare and a sigh of relief from expectant mobile gamers.
Now it seems it won’t be launching this side of Christmas after all. A post on the official N-Gage blog says that despite teams of people ‘around the world, literally, working overtime’, there are still some ‘unexpected difficulties’ with the N-Gage First Access software.
Apparently an internal test run with over 1,000 testers found an undiscovered issue with the service. Thankfully the games and service in general are apparently working okay but N-Gage First Access isn’t.
Now it looks like the New Year at the earliest. Damn.
Do you ever get bored with your mobile’s wallpaper? Pulsepaper is a S60 3rd Edition app that replaces your boring old static wallpaper with an ever-changing array of images.
Version 1.0 of Pulsepaper just let you cycle through a list of predefined images but, with v 2.0, makers Pulse Data Service have turned a run of the mill wallpaper rotator into a fully Web 2.0′d image gallery.
The app lets you select an ‘image source’ which can be a list of JPGs, a Flickr account or a Google Image Search keyword. You can also just select from a list of themed categories like ‘Night’ or ‘Sports’. Once you have you starter image, Pulsepaper will replace it three times a day.
In what could be the marketing move of the decade, the only feature missing from the free version of Pulsepaper is the ability to search for ‘adult’ content. (Or, at least, ‘unfiltered’ content via Google Image Search
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