Posts filed under News

An odd lot, those Android modders. Clearly bored, one of them tinkered with Android a bit until it responded to the accelerometer all the way round. So now, whenever you turn your T-Mobile G1 round, the display turns too. But not just between portrait and landscape modes – all they way round, turning your homescreen completely upside down.

Which, if you find the G1’s chin mildly annoying, is quite handy, as it puts the chin at the top!

Completely useless, but a marvellous example of just how customizable Android is.

(thanks, as ever, to @terminal7 for the pic).

With Apple attempting to sue the pants off HTC and in the process starve the mobile Web from any form of competition, innovation, and, perish the thought – choice, Google has waded into the battle by backing its Android OS and manufacturers to the hilt.

In response to Apple’s pitiful law suit, Google said:

“We are not a party to this lawsuit. However, we stand behind our Android operating system and the partners who have helped us to develop it.”

This is cracking news. Apple’s actions, both with its lawsuit against HTC and its over-zealous censorship of the app store, are appalling. Mobile choice in the US has always been restricted, and competition and consmuer choice has suffered as a result. The US mobile phone market has traditionally been at least a year behind Europe as a direct result.

Just when all that looked to change, with Google, Apple and Palm leading the smartphone challenge and looking to dominate the next wave of mobile devices, Apple at a stroke aims to kill the innovation stone dead. Its lawsuit aims to stop HTC, and, by extension, Android, from being sold in the US.

If they succeed, then the only smartphones left in the US will be the iPhone and Palm. Nokia has no carrier deals in the US for its high-end phones; Blackberry is too business-oriented to be classed as a smartphone in the same way the iPhone and Android phones are; and the most successful Windows Mobile phones are made by HTC!

So if the US wants to keep on seeing restricted consumer choice and limited innovation in its mobile phone market, then let Apple do its worse.

I’m not sure what’s more ironic: That Apple under Steve Jobs turned into the very Big Brother figure its original iconic Apple Mac adverts sought to destroy; that the most capitalist market in the world is the least free as far as mobile phones are concerned; or that Google, the one company people associate most with being the next Big Brother with all the data it has on its all, is actually the White Knight in the story!

How weird the mobile world can be at times!

[Source: Engadget Mobile, HTC.cc]

Back in 2001, Microsoft laid siege to the Web. Thanks to its dominant desktop position, it dominated the browser market with IE6 and ultimately killed off its competitors. The result was years of stagnation, a willful disregard of Web standards, and a Web development environment that actively discouraged any innovation throughout the Noughties.

Today, Apple is doing the same to the mobile Web. Not by a dominant market position, but by a lawsuit for patent infringement that it’s thrown at HTC.

And not just any old lawsuit. If they win, Apple will get a permanent injunction against HTC, which will bar them from importing or selling touchscreen smartphones in the US, along with triple damages and maximum interest for all such smartphones they’ve already sold.

In other words – the end of HTC, the end of Android, and the end of any innovation in the smartphone market.

This is is huge. This has the potential to be more damaging than Microsoft ever thought of being.

Read on for how Apple is threatening the mobile Web in the most aggressive attack yet made.

Nokia fans have been sorely disappointed this week as a raft of news from other manufacturers has come streaming out of Barcelona, whilst all Nokia had to talk about was their forthcoming alliance with Intel with the Meego platform.

Fear not, though, Nokia fans, for news reaches us that the company is now working with old foe Qualcomm on a new handset that will be powered by the 1GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon processor.

OK, so this would have been more impressive this time last year, when Toshiba announced the first mobile phone to use the same processor, but at least it means we’ve finally got a fast Nokia on its way!

[Source: IntoMobile]

Finally, we have a tonne of other Android news on unofficial Android day, including:

Inbrics will be launching the Inbrics M1 at MWC 2010 next week. The M1 is a 3.7″ Android phone with slide out keyboard, and what Inbrics are calling a “convergence controller”, which will push data to any device the user chooses. Intriguing!

This year, we’ve been treated to the Google Nexus One, HTC Supersonic, Nokia X6 (out today), Sony Ericsson Vivaz and X10, and a pair of Palms, to name just some of the highlights.

And it’s still only January!

I say this because today, the whole mobile phone and gadget industryies are battening down their hatches ready for the big one – the Apple Event of the Year, where Steve Jobs will be announcing not just that Apple tablet thing, but also (possibly) the iPhone version 4.

Consequently, there isn’t a peep to be heard from the rest of the mobile phone industry, as they know any new announcement now would be lost in a blizzard of hype in seconds!

It’s exciting stuff, though. Will the iPhone 4 herald a new chapter in the iPhone’s history, able to take on the new challenge threatened by Android? Or will it just be an incremental upgrade, with the Apple Tablet taking centre stage? Will Steve Jobs even mention the iPhone, for that matter (of course he will!)

We’ll know tomorrow at 6pm GMT. Stick with us, as we’ll be live-blogging the event again (albeit from across the pond!), focusing on the mobile news. We’ll also be tweeting all the important juicy bits, so follow us if you can’t make it to your PC in time.

After all this excitement, surely next month will be calmer (no wait, next month’s MWC 2010!!!)

Spotify have confirmed they have no intention of developing a Spotify app on the Maemo platform. This is bad news for owners of the Nokia N900, and shows one of the dangers of choosing a phone with a limited market share.

As I’ve been saying for ages, only the most popular mobile phone platforms will attract developers, and the platforms with poor developer support will face a death spiral of decreasing demand as few companies develop their apps on it – which in turn feeds reduced demand as no-one wants a smartphone with no apps!

Nokia will drop Symbian on its top-end N-Series phones in favour of Maemo – that’s the latest rumour flying around the tech blogosphere after a marketing manager at a Nokia N900 meet-up said yesterday that Symbian “…would not be used on N-Series between now and 2012.”

This is huge news. Nokia have spent a fortune on Symbian, both in extending the operating system, and in buying Symbian – the company – for 264 million Euros back in June 2008. To admit that Maemo will be used in its high end phones in the future is a tacit admission that Symbian has fallen behind in the smartphone race and can no longer support the kind of features that smartphone users have come to expect.

More details after the jump.

Nokia has released a video showing what it sees the mobile phone of 2015 will be like. It won’t be like this pic – that’s just a concept phone from last year – but it will be shiny, sleek and sexy. Perhaps the biggest change from today’s phones will be the way it integrates with the world around it through services and software. To enable this, Nokia are currently working on a huge range of services and software that will help your device learn about your preferences and present them whenever you need them.

Hang on a minute, though – that would have sounded nice and futuristic back in 2007, but anyone who’s used an Android phone, iPhone or Palm Pre recently will instantly be familiar with this scenario. That’s not a vision of the future, that’s the vision of a touchscreen smartphone with Google’s apps installed!

Check out the video yourself after the jump and see what you think.

Nokia has released a new teaser video of its Maemo mobile operating system. Maemo is the software that powers the Nokia N900, which has just been released. I saw a preview of the N900 a few months ago, and was very impressed, particularly when comparing the N900 to the N97.

However, I was confused back then as to why Nokia was effectively competing with itself with two mobile operating systems (the N97 uses Symbian), and I’m even more confused with this video – it’s not a teaser for the N900, it’s a teaser for Maemo!

Check the video out for yourself after the jump – and see if you can make sense of it!