The iPhone is set to get a facelift. Apple will show off a new version of the iPhone operating system, iPhone 3.0, on March 17, along with a new version of the phone’s software development kit.

While details are scanty, iPhone 3.0 could include features such as universal search, multi-media messaging and an updated user interface.

Apple will unveil the new SDK and OS at a media event for reporters and bloggers at Apple’s Cupertino, California campus, starting at at 10 a.m. Pacific next Tuesday.

“In the past two weeks Apple has introduced new Mac hardware and a new iPod shuffle, for which the company simply issued a press release,” says Gene Munster, an analyst with Piper Jaffray in a note. “The fact that Apple is hosting an event for the iPhone OS 3.0 shows that it will likely involve meaningful changes to the iPhone feature set.”

The software preview event could also be a sign that an iPhone refresh is coming this summer. Version 2.0, the last big upgrade to the iPhone OS, was released in July last year, along with the new iPhone 3G.

Apple CEO Steve Jobs will likely be a no-show at the company’s event, but Apple won’t let that hold it back. In January, Jobs said he will take five months off for medical leave. In his place, it’s possible that marketing head Phil Schiller, who keynoted at Macworld, will lead the event; iPhone software chief Scott Forstall is also a likely candidate.

Some bloggers and analysts have been suggesting that Apple will launch a new version of the iPhone at its Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) in June. But new hardware will require an updated SDK and possibly a new version of the operating system. Those speculations align well with Apple’s planned event next week.

Among the features that users can expect with the new iPhone OS are multimedia messaging and tethering via Bluetooth and USB, according to the Boy Genius Report. Universal search and a redesigned user interface are also possible, says Piper Jaffray’s Munster.

Palm, which is set to release the Palm Pre phone in the next few months, will have universal search as one of its significant features. Universal search allows users to look through their contacts, emails and documents on their phone as well as search the internet with a single search string.

Apple’s last enhancement to the iPhone software came in November 2008, when it offered Version 2.2. The update offered features such as Google Street Views, improvements to email and measures to reduce dropped calls.

Wired

The Japanese Fujitsu company introduces the F705i, a 3G mobile phone that is said to be the world’s thinnest with its impressive 13.7mm in thickness. The phone is also waterproof and can take a 30 minute dip at 1 meters depth without being damaged. It features a 1.3 megapixel camera with “Quick Zoom” and can be used as a videophone.

More photos of the Fujitsu F705i at Akihabara News.

Source: Geeky Gadgets

The Samsung F490 has been launched a wek ago, but not at CES. As expected, the touch-based phone from Samsung looks pretty. The cellphone has a 3.2-inch 262,000 color touchscreen, 5 megapixel camera and supports HSDPA at 3.6Mbps. No release date yet for the US, but it looks like it will reach Europe first for a whopping $734 without contract.

Tri band GSM (900/1800/1900), UMTS 2100, HSDPA 3.6 Mbps 3.2&Prime 262K Color 16:9 Wide Full Touch Display with Haptics feedback Croix interface 5 mpx camera, video recording (MPEG4, QVGA at 15 fps) Front camera for video calls Video playback at 30 fps 130 MB of Internal memory Built-in mobile Google apps microSD card slot standard 3.5 mm headphone jack Bluetooth 2.0 (A2DP+AVRCP), USB 2.0 Dimensions: 115 x53.5 x11.8 mm Weight: 102g

[Gizmodo]

 

This is probably one of the better looking Skype mouse combos we’ve seen so far. It’s also equipped with a 2.5mm earphone jack for “extra privacy”.

This Skype Phone doubles as an 800 DPI optical mouse making this an excellent idea for managing the area around your desk. It also has a built speaker for handsfree skype communication or listening to music.

Features:

• 128×64 pixel LCD screen with backlight
• Hi-Fi Speaker
• Connect with USB to your computer
• 800 DPI optical sensor
• Crystal clear audio with 16bit 48 KHz sampling rate
• Also compatible with Internercalls, SparVoip, NetAppel, poivY
• VoipDiscount, VoipCheap and WebCallDirect, VoipStunt, VoipBuster
• Multi-Language Support
• Supplied Earpones for privacy

The Mouse Skype Phone with 2.5mm Earphone Jack retails for $22.26 (Sample 1+) from the Chinavasion website.

Via geekalerts 

Not matter you are iPhone owner or not, you may probably know its camera cannot record motion video. iPhone’s 2.0 Mega Pixel can only capture still images. But, iPhone’s native applications power seems can go for no limit. Monster and Friends develop a very amazing program that adds video recording function to iPhone. Right now you can capture 5 seconds video at 10 frames per second. The developer said the final version should be able to record 30+ frames per second with unlimited length.

The beta is available here, here or here. The first link is from winandmac.com  which does not require any registration. The other 2 is from the source website which provides you more detail.

[via ModMyiFone and WinAndMac]

On the surface, the mobile Web is a happening place. There’s the iPhone in all its glory. More than 30 companies have signed up for the Open Handset Alliance from Google, which aims to bring the wide-open development environment of the Internet to mobile devices. Nokia, which owns nearly 40 percent of the world market for cell phones, is snapping up Web technology companies and has made an eye-popping $8.1 billion bid for Navteq, a digital mapping service. There are also the requisite start-ups chasing the market.

In 2000, the wireless application protocol was supposed to bring the Internet to the cell phone. Our hero turned out to be a flash in the pan. That was attributed to a lack of high-speed cellular data networks, so a frenzied and costly effort to build third-generation, or 3G, networks ensued. But at a recent conference, 3G was called “a failure” by Caroline Gabriel, an analyst at Rethink Research. She said data would make up only 12 percent of average revenue per user in 2007, far below the expected 50 percent. (The 12 percent figure does not include text messaging, but you don’t need a 3G network to send a text message.)

Similarly, surveys by Yankee Group, a Boston research firm, show that only 13 percent of cell phone users in North America use their phones to surf the Web more than once a month, while 70 percent of computer users view Web sites every day.

“The user experience has been a disaster,” says Tony Davis, managing partner of Brightspark, a Toronto venture capital firm that has invested in two mobile Web companies.

While many phones have some form of Web access, most are hard to use–just finding a place to type in a Web address can be a challenge. And once you find it, most Web content doesn’t look very good on cell phone screens.

Even the iPhone’s browser can disappoint. It has a version of the Apple Safari browser that doesn’t support Flash, a programming language widely used on Web sites, so users are limited in what they can see on the Web. And, you pay a lot to experience the pain of surfing the mobile Web. Lewis Ward, an analyst at the International Data Corporation, compares the mobile Web today to AOL before it went with flat-rate pricing in the early 1990s. Most people surf on a pay-per-kilobyte model, which encourages them to surf as fast as they can, he says.

The carriers, however, seem to be having a change of heart about the mobile Web. AT&T has allowed Apple unusual control over the network in the iPhone, and Sprint and T-Mobile have signed on to the Android development platform of the Open Handset Alliance.

Industry watchers think that having started, the mobile Web will inexorably open over the next five years, solving many current problems.

For instance, there’s the challenge of finding things on the Web from a mobile phone. John SanGiovanni, founder and vice president for products and services at Zumobi (formerly ZenZui), which was spun out of Microsoft Research, says his company hopes to make it easier for phone users to find phone-ready versions of sites they want. On December 14, it plans to introduce the beta, or test, version of its slick-looking software. It will include colorful “tiles” that phone users can “zoom” into and out of quickly as they move from site to site. (The tiles resemble the iPhone’s widgets, or icons on a desktop computer.)

Zumobi hopes that cell phone users will adopt tiles as their entry point to the Web; the company offers a scrolling interface of 16 such tiles that provide information with mass appeal, but users can set their own preferences. Software developers will be able to build a tile–in fact, Amazon.com has 12 ready to go–and put it on Zumobi’s platform. Tiles can carry ads as well, creating revenue potential for carriers and developers.

The chairman of Zumobi’s board is Tom Huseby, a longtime entrepreneur and investor in the mobile business and now managing partner at SeaPoint Ventures. Mr. Huseby says the mobile Web is going through a predictable cycle involving the development of handsets, networks, and markets. Now it is in the last phase of innovation: figuring out how customers want to see the Web from their phones. He says the answer will be to give people what they want, when they want it.

“You got to have open systems, to allow the vast creativity of people to take place,” he says. Zumobi, Android, and other developments, he says, will help create such openness.

Other approaches to solving this problem include Yahoo Go, a mobile Internet product certified to display Web pages correctly on more than 300 handsets, and another from InfoGIN, an Israeli company whose product automatically adapts Web pages to work on cell phones.

The plot has plenty of time to twist yet again. Nathan Eagle an M.I.T. researcher, is working on mobile phone programming in Kenya, where he’s teaching computer science students how to build mobile Web applications that don’t use a browser. Instead, they rely on voice commands and speech-to-text translation to surf the Web

“People talk about the mobile Web, and it’s just assumed that it’ll be a replica of the desktop experience,” Eagle said. “But they’re fundamentally different devices.” He says he thinks that the basic Web experience for most of the world’s three billion cell phones will never involve trying to thumb-type Web addresses or squint at e-mail messages. Instead, he says, it will be voice-driven. “People want to use their phone as a phone,” he says.

For now, widespread use of the mobile Web remains both far off and inevitable.

Source: The New York Times

According to reports, HTC has received ODM orders for a Windows Mobile smartphone from Sony Ericsson, which is expected to ship sometime in the second half of 2008.

So far, there isn’t too much news on the topic and no specs have been announced, but definitely look for more information as it becomes available.

Akihabara news

This camera is a 12,24Mpix DSLS receive both the EXMOR Image censor and BIONZ image procession technology, a magnesium alloy body, HDMI output, 3″ Extra Fine LCD, AF 11 points, a 5Fps setting (Thanks to the BIONZ Technology), Dual Memory Slot (CF and Memory Stick). 

Picture gallery of α700 is available here

Source: Akihabara news

While Nokia will be launching the N81 in London tomorrow, here are some images of what the future looks like. The N81 certainly looks extremely sweet, bringing 8GB of flash memory to truly make this a portable entertainment device in addition to voice call capabilities. Word on the street has it that the 8GB N95 along with a slew of XpressMusic handsets will also be paraded at the London event.

More at Ubergizmo

IT Administrator Kevin Miller has decided not to support the iPhone on his company’s network. Find out why and what Apple could do to change his mind.

Dear Apple,

I know you’re a consumer-oriented company, but when you make products so cool my users just can’t help themselves, you make problems for me. My users love the look, the features and of course the bragging rights that come with an iPhone, so it was inevitable that they were going to come to IT and ask the dreaded question, “Can I use this at work?”

Well Apple, you’ve made me do something I don’t like to do — I said no. It didn’t have to be this way; I could have said yes to your iPhone if only you’d done a few simple things:

1. We don’t use IMAP or POP3, so users have no way to check their corporate e-mail through Exchange. IMAP would leave out some of the best functions of Exchange in regard to calendaring and contacts, which users now rely on to sync when they’re on the road. You’ve got all the components set up with Mail and Address Book—now we just need to get them to sync directly to our Exchange server.

2. What happens when a user’s pretty new toy gets lost or stolen — along with heaps of sensitive corporate data? What do you think the incidence of iPhone theft is going to be like? I need to know I can remotely wipe or kill the device to keep it out of the hands of evildoers.

3. What’s up with the aging wireless technology? Today when every smartphone is EVDO and 3G, why is the iPhone is stuck with 2.5G? Downloading attachments over 1MB shouldn’t be a hassle anymore. You’re missing out on a huge market by cutting out critical business features every other smartphone has already.

While we’re at it, I’ve got some other issues too, of a less technical nature.

Read full article at bMighty