K-NFB, a company affiliated to the US National Association for the Blind, make a product called the “knfb Reader” - this is basically a digital camera attached to a PDA running OCR and text-to-speech software.
The idea is that blind and partially sighted people can point the device at some text (e.g. a sign or a printed page) and let the PDA analyse it and read it out to them. The system works well, but the reader is bulky and costs just under $4000.
If you think “a digital camera attached to a PDA” sounds a bit like a mobile phone, perhaps you should consider applying for a job with K-NFB’s R&D team.
knfb Mobile Reader uses a Nokia N82 to do the ‘camera & PDA’ bits, but otherwise operates just like it’s predecessor.
The reader is still expensive at around $1500 plus the cost of the handset, but is a lot easier and more discrete to carry around and, of course, can be used as a mobile phone to boot.
Californian developers SkyFire are running a private beta of a new mobile web browser that they claim will offer a ‘desktop’ browsing experience with full AJAX and Flash support.
Details are sketchy at the moment - the private beta is US-only and even there SkyFire are being pretty tight-fisted with the invites - but the browser seems to work a little like Opera Mobile, using a proxy server to compress and optimise pages to better suit a small screen and slow connection.
SkyFire currently works only on selected Windows Mobile devices, but full Windows Mobile and Symbian support is promised.
As soon as Pocket Picks can get it’s eager mitts on a copy we will give you a full review but until then, check out this demo video:
The spate of YouTube players for Symbian and Windows Mobile as well as the new official Java client may leave owners of older, less capable mobiles feeling a bit left out.
ByWiFi.com is a mobile web service that will convert YouTube and MetaCafe videos into the widely-used 3GP format. 3GP is playable by most 3G phones, and is optimised for download size and speed.
You can either browse to the site directly using your phone’s browser (it’s text-only, so it shouldn’t tax even the stingiest data tariffs) and download directly to your phone, or use a desktop PC or Mac and copy the files manually.
There may be some teething troubles - I wasn’t able to get any converted files to retain their soundtrack - but this is still a useful trick to get bigger video clips onto your handset. Even smartphone owners can take advantage of the faster download speed, providing they don’t mind the drop in picture quality.
Nokia’s Mobile Web Server is an app that until now had fairly niche appeal - a mini web server that lets you access the contents and services of your phone via a wifi connection.
This may sound a bit like Nokia PC Phone, but where that app ties your phone to a Windows PC, running the server app on your phone makes it accessible from any browser.
Nokia Beta Labs have decided to make the web server even easier to use with My Mobile Site Widgets. Despite its dull name, MMSW is a great looking collection of desktop mini-apps that run as part of the Yahoo! Widgets Engine.
There are widgets to show your phone’s battery level and signal strength; an SMS widget that can read and send messages to your contact list; a drag’n'drop call widget that can accept numbers from anywhere on the desktop and a photo gallery that plucks images directly from your phone’s memory card.
The widgets require a system that can run the Yahoo! Widget Engine (Windows XP, Vista or ac OSX) while the mobile web server has been tested on the Nokia N80, N93 and N95
Ever since Apple announced earlier this month that it has sold four million iPhones, people have been trying to work out why there’s such a big gap between that and the sales figures announced by its operator partners. US operator AT&T says it’s activated two million iPhones, while it’s thought that O2, T-Mobile and Orange between them (in respectively the UK, Germany and France) haven’t shifted more than 340,000.
Bernstein Research analyst Toni Sacconaghi has been doing some digging, and reckons that a million iPhones have been unlocked to work on other operators - representing 27% of total sales. Meanwhile, he reckons that Apple stands to lose over £250 million in revenues if the trend continues - this is based on the revenue operators pay Apple, and its target of 10 million US iPhone sales by the end of 2008.
This is all based on guesswork, of course, but it shows that in the US at least, iPhone-unlocking has gone beyond the province of a few geeks. It’s not great for Apple, but is far worse news for its operator partners. I wonder how many of us Europeans have unlocked iPhones…
(via BBC News)
A little bird tells us that the iPhone SDK key has been leaked. For those of you that don’t know what that means, the SDK key is the top secret code that iTunes uses to verify applications for the iPhone. This means that if someone codes a homebrew application of their own and somehow manages to implement the SDK key, it should be possible to load the application onto your iPhone, without unlocking your device.
To be honest we can’t say for sure whether or not the key is legitimate but something tells us we won’t have to wait long to find out. In the meantime, lets just be thankful that Apple is going to let third party apps onto the phone legally anyway and ay no attention to that list of letters and numbers in the picture above (wink wink etc).
(Via The Boy Genius Report)
Although Nokia has had its name dragged through the mud in Germany somewhat lately, it seems that the savings the company is set to make by seeking cheaper manufacturing might be put to good use.
The company has just announced that it has joined the WWF Climate Savers program as a part of a company wide initiative to improving energy efficiency and reduce carbon dioxide emissions across its business.
Some of the projected targets include halving the stand-by energy used by its handset chargers, switching to green electricity to power 50 per cent of its facilities by 2010 and cutting the overall energy needs of its sites by 6 per cent by 2012. If Nokia can make these projections then it stands to set quite an example for the rest of the industry. Here’s hoping other mobile companies will follow suit.
(Via Nokia)
It seems that Phillips isn’t the only company looking to muscle in quick on folding display technology for phones. A patent has cropped up revealing that Motorola has been pondering the idea too.
The interesting thing about the tech detailed in this patent is that the coiled screen would become solid when fully unrolled. More intriguing still is the fact that the patent also details foldable screens as keypads which suggests some sort of touchscreen element.
Although there are no guarantees that this will come to market, it is exciting to see a proven handset manufacturer dabbling with folding screen technology. Could the touchscreen’s days be numbered?
(Via Unwired View)
As part of a wider shake-up of its tariffs, O2 has announced some changes for iPhone users. And as far as I can tell, they’re all good. If you’re on the basic £35-a-month iPhone contract, your voice minutes will be tripled to 600 a month, while your texts have been more than doubled to 500 a month. The changes will take effect automatically in February.
Meanwhile, the £55 tariff has been scrapped in favour of a new £45 tariff, which has the same amount of minutes (1,200) and texts (500). If you’re on the £55 tariff, you can choose to switch to this, or go for the all-new £75 tariff, which offers 3,000 minutes and 500 texts a month. On all three tariffs, you’ll still get unlimited data browsing and free access to The Cloud’s Wi-Fi hotspots.
Hurrah! The reason for the change is to bring O2’s iPhone tariffs into line with its other contracts - the operator will now have six simple price points, which users can then customise with bolt-ons.
New O2 iPhone tariffs
Things may be looking up for those anxious early adopters who are desperate to get their hands on a real live Android phone.
Bug Labs have announced that their upcoming modular gadget kit will supoort Google’s new mobile OS, allowing anyone with just a little too much time on their hands to start developing Android apps.
Bug modules are an “open source, web-enabled, modular software and hardware platform”. What this means in practice is a collection of self-contained gadgets like touch screens, accelerometers and GPS receivers that snap onto a base unit and can be programmed using Java to create completely new gadgets. They are somewhere between incredibly cool and irredeemably geeky.
There is no mobile phone module as yet (i.e. nothing you could plug a SIM card into) but the devices can use wifi for internet access so knocking up a VoIP device should be relatively simple.
Could 2008 see the first homebrew gPhone?
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