Fring is a service that we have ceased to explain each time we write about it, we have come to expect that what it is, is a given to our readers. Perhaps that is a slightly lazy/premature attitude to take towards a technology that is barely a household name (mobile VoIP) but either way it doesn’t matter now as Fring has won itself enough recognition to justify a Wikipedia entry, surely a yard stick of success in anyone’s book.
Indeed the company recently revealed to Pocket Picks that it is gaining 100,000 new members every month. Not the sort of figures one sniffs at we think you will agree. In any case if you are not one of Fring’s new, existing or soon to be customers and have no idea what we are talking about, you can find out about the call cost saving application in our archives or of course by giving good old Wikipedia a poke.
Google and Yahoo! quite clearly dominate Internet search engines but on mobile there’s more scope for a mobile-specific engine to stake a claim for itself.
We recently tried what we thought could be one of the easiest mobile search engines around Taptu, but now there’s another pretender to the crown – Boopsie.
Ignore the odd name, because Boopsie is something different. It uses Smart Prefix to search via short codes. Instead of having to type the whole search term on your phone’s fiddly keypad, Boopsie requires only the first few letters of each search. For instance, “Arctic Monkeys” would simply be “ar mo”.
The potential for incorrect searches is naturally high, but Boopsie reckons its users can reach over 90% of Wikipedia entries in only seven button presses.
To help, Boopsie has organised searches into specific categories like Wikipedia, sports scores, weather, local listings etc, to help make it easier.
Boopsie works on almost any Java handset and pretty much every mobile OS, and the free app can be downloaded from Boopsie.
As users of the world’s biggest probably-correct encyclopedia - Wikipedia - will know, a Wiki is an easily-edited collection of linked web pages. What is less well known is how useful a personal wiki can be for organising notes and scraps of information.
Unyverse Mobile Wiki works as a client app for Wikipedia, allowing quick searches and offline browsing. It also lets you maintain a number of other public and private wikiwebs. These act as discussion groups, notepads and contact lists.
This is a lot for a mobile app to cope with (not to mention a lot of typing to perform on a tiny keypad) and so Unyverse works in tandem with a web app that lets you cut ‘n’ paste data and sync it to your mobile.
Unyverse is a free download for Windows Mobile, BlackBerry and Java phones.
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