The mobile phone has officially celebrated it’s 100th birthday. What’s that you say? Mobile phones have only been around for about 30 years or so? Well yes, that’s what you might think and popular wisdom would place those hulking breeze block like behemoths favoured by slick Wall Street crawlers of the 80s as the first examples of mobile phones.
According to the Telegraph however, the first mobile telephone was in fact invented by Nathan Stubblefield in 1908 and came complete with a bulky metal transmitter that makes a mobile phone from the 80s look like a starved iPhone. The telephone was comprised of some wire suspended between metal rods with the transmitter placed on a train carriage or boat. When the vehicle was close by, a signal was sent wirelessly to a telephone onboard using magnetic fields which could be heard near the other end of the wire through another phone. Clever stuff in it’s day, even if it seems caveman-like next to today’s tech.
Ok so this is a bit of a cheat in that it wasn’t really a mobile phone as you and I know it but hey, you know us, any excuse for a party.
Forget all that boring stuff about mobile email, web browsing and document editing. The real reason for getting a Nokia tablet is so you can control puppy robots. Watch the video above for proof… (via Pankaj Nathani)
With many environmentalists concerned with the amount of energy that is wasted by devices that remain plugged in on standby it is worth bearing in mind that most phone chargers spend more time plugged in and not charging anything at all. Even if you unplug it when not in use, if you charge your phone overnight, the phone will be fully charged after a few hours and you are wasting energy.
Nokia has come up with one solution in the form of the ‘Zero Waste’ charger. This clever little device works a little bit like one of those power-surge protectors you might use with a lawnmower or a drill. A big green button on the back of the charger turns on the power. When your phone is charged, the button pops out and the power is cut off.
Nokia news blog NokNok.tv got their hands on a prototype model and put together this video for your viewing pleasure:
Clever S60 programming nerd over at the Symbian Freak forums have cooked up an app called ROMPatcher which is able to modify the ROM containing the operating system itslef - allowing fundamental changes and interesting tweaks to be made in the way your phone works.
The app uses a technique where a cpy of the ROM is made in the phone’s memory, then modified (’Patched’). The phone then uses the modified version of the ROM - leaving the original untouched and nice and safe, so you can roll back to the pre-patched ROM the next time you restart your phone.
Already, there are a number of patches available including one that enables several hidden menu options on the S60 interface and another that bypasses the Symbian app security - allowing users to run unsigned apps.
It should go without saying that this kind of hack is strictly for advanced users and please, PLEASE take a backup of your data before you go and play around.
If you give this a try, why not let us know how you get on? Are we entering a bold new era of S60 tweakage, or just bricking a load of perfectly good phones?
O’Reilly Radar is reporting news of a new web service that claims to offer real time decryption of the GSM protocol.
Cracking GSM encryption has always been a computationally intensive process but thanks to a technique known as Rainbow Tables (essentially, this just means working out a lot of the hard sums in advance and storing the answers in a huge lookup table) a lot of the work has already been done.
The other ingredient is a device called a Universal Software Radio Peripheral (USRP) - unlike most receivers that can pick up, say, FM transmissions, TV or mobile phone signals the USRP can receive the lot. It is relatively simple to program the device to isolate particular signals and these are then digitised for analysis by the cracking service.
What does this mean for the security of GSM phone calls? Well, according to O’Reilly, the service should let you grab a live GSM call and begin listening in on it within 30 seconds.
The article (and the researchers behind the service) are at pains to point out that it is illegal to intercept other peoples’ calls and that you should only try this with your own phone - advice which I am sure will be followed to the letter.
Ok, so it looks like 2008 is definitely the Year Of The Watchphone.
First we had the shiny Cool G108, then came the more wearable Van Der Led WM2 and now we have what is claimed to be the first Windows Mobile watchphone.
Groaning under the weight of its name, the EPOQ Multimedia Windows Mobile OS Wrist Watch Mobile Telephone runs Windows CE 5.0 and boasts a 1.45-inch screen, GPR, a 1.3 megapixel camera, wifi and up to one gigabyte of T-flash memory.
That tiny screen allows stylus input with handwriting recognition and the thing even supports Skype.
The watch looks quite thin and wearable. Best of all, it is actually watch-shaped - you use the phone features via a bundled Bluetooth headset. The whole thing is nicely set off by an alligator skin strap.
As usual, we have no idea if anyone will actually buy this - much less wear it - but this has to be one of the better watchphone efforts so far.
If you want to be the first kid on your street with one of these things, they go on sale on Friday the 25th of April for $629.95.
Actually, that would just sound normal. Umm, how about, “If a mobile receives an SMS in the forest, does anyone read it?”
Depends on the network coverage, I suppose.
Anyway, enough with the koans - check out the bling on the Buddha Phone!
This beautiful bit of tat was discovered for sale in Shenzhen. It is apparently plated in 24 karat gold and can actualy be ued to make phone calls - which is a nice bnus.
We spotted this on Engadget, but the original (Google translated) page is a goldmine for fans of wobbly Engrish.
For example - “This gem with evil may decorative buttons than unusual, it is Buddha video button.”
Interestingly, the characters around the edge are described (I think) as “stainless steel body of the fuselage with the gilded frames, like Journey to the West and some of the incidents that caused the Jiasha shiny.”
Which (again, I think) means they relate to the Buddhist classic ‘Journey to the west‘ - the inspiration for crazed seventies TV classic Monkey
.
And that is why this is better than ANY phone Nokia, Samsung or Apple will ever produce.
The planet is in trouble. The climate is changing, icecaps are melting and the air around us is choking up with pollutants and you, yes YOU, are making it worse every time you plug your mobile into the wall.
What is required is some way of telling you that your mobile is fully charged and you can stop plugging it directly into the still-beating heart of spaceship earth. Somebody caring, somebody conscientious, somebody.. er.. small and furry.
www.mocarbon.com is an initiative from Australian mobile developers Moket that provides an animated Flash background of a squirrel who will helpfully let you know that your ohone needs charging, tell you when it is plugged in and then get all arsey with you if you don’t unplug it again when the battery is full.
Seriously, the little fella goes from the polite “Your phone is now charged. Please unplug your charger” to yelling “DO IT!” while shaking its tiny squirrel fist at you.
There is a selection of other characters too - I quite like the bear. The bear looks like he really, really wants to help but will be forced to cut you if you go against his wishes.
No pricing info available as the parent site is undergoing a refit at the moment, but a list of Flash 1.1 compatible handsets is available here.
Loudly informing loved ones that you are ON THE TRAIN will soon be much clearer - or it will if you are on one of the 52 Virgin trains that are to receive signal repeaters to boost mobile reception.
Repeaters grab 2G & 3G signals, boost them and retransmit them. Virgin plans to roll out repeaters on all 52 trains running its London to Glasgow route by November this year.
The ability to chat on the train might come at a cost though - a survey by Vodfone into business users phone habits reckons that around 70% of people have discussed business in public on their mobile and around 15 % have spoken about confidential business information over the phone.
On the flipside, a worrying 26 % claim to have followed up on evesdriopped business leads.
It’s good to talk, but maybe it’s better to text?
Playing games on a mobile can be a frustrating experience - N-Gages aside, few phones are built for the the precise controls that any decent action game requires and fat-fingered players won’t know whether they are running or jumping.
Sure, there are specialist game pad add-ons available, but these are not cheap and few but the most dedicated mobile gamers would actually pay for one.
MobiPad lets Wii owners use their magic wands with their UIQ or S60 mobiles.
The app pairs your phone and a Wii controller via Bluetooth and runs on all Symbian OS S60 3rd edition and UIQ3 devices.
In practice, the Wii controller works like as standard ‘Gameboy style’ D-Pad and button combo. The Wii controller’s motion-sensors are supported by MobiPad’s code but the developers are still figuring out what to map it’s controls to on the phone. Perhaps as we see more accelerometer based games appearing this feature might come into its own.
MobiPad is a free download, available here.
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