Posts filed under News

Our sister-site MediaMentalism.com, which is undergoing something of a renaissance (“about time,” somebody shouted!) has news of a new Google app that enables a mobile phone to stream music, pictures and videos between your PC and any suitably-equipped home device such as your TV or Hi-Fi.

You can use your phone to select videos from your PC, and then wirelessly stream them onto your TV, all via the comfort of your armchair. Effectively, your mobile phone becomes your new remote control.

Of course, not all mobile phones are capable of doing this, but a surprising number are. Read on for more details of what’s involved.

Things really are being all shook up in the mobile phone world. Hot on the heels of Motorola splitting itself in two comes news that Sony Ericsson has canned two of its eagerly awaited smartphones – the Sony Ericsson P5i, codenamed Paris, and the Sony Ericsson G702 (codenamed BeiBei). These phones have been talked about and debated for months now, with people split on whether the liked the design or not.

Clearly the same debate was happening within Sony Ericsson, too, and those people who decided that the phones were not up to scratch won out and killed them. Fevered debate around the blogosphere speculates that the P5i was killed off because its feature-list was already behind that of its competitors even before it was released. This would be bad enough for a low-end phone, but for a smartphone, it’s techno-suicide!

However, that’s not all – the blogosphere itself may have had something to do with their decision…

Things are looking pretty grim for Motorola. The US giant, which used to be the world’s largest mobile phone manufacturer, has decided to split itself in two, spinning off the loss-making mobile phone division as a separate company, and concentrating instead on cable-TV set-top boxes, walkie-talkies and handheld scanners.

The reason for this is that the mobile devices division is losing so much money ($1.6 billion in just 18 months) that it’s in danger of dragging the company down with it. By spinning the division off as a separate company, it’s hoped that it can refocus its energies onto the mobile phone market and turn itself around, while a separate Motorola that focuses on set top boxes and the like will not be hurt should the new mobile phone company ultimately fail.

Sounds simple, but Motorola really has its work cut out – the cost of splitting the company in two is estimated at $750 million, while the new mobile phone company may need up to $4 billion just to stay afloat for the next two years.

More details after the jump.

How’s this fore a juicy piece of news? Sony are rumoured to be working on a PSP phone. Nothing new there, a PSP phone’s been rumoured for years, ever since the first Sony brand (Walkman) was added to a mobile phone and people started wondering what other brands Sony might offer up.

But note that I didn’t say Sony Ericsson are working on a PSP phone – I said Sony.

Amid what analysts are describing as “an increasingly frosty relationship” between Sony and Ericsson, Sony are apparently considering developing a PSP phone all by themselves, leaving Sony Ericsson to develop far-feebler gaming phones such as the F305 that was announced last week.

You’re Swedish, you’re bored, and all you have to occupy yourself are a vibrating mobile phone, a condom, some lube…and an idea.

Yes, unlike countless millions of teens across the globe who would perhaps come up with a slightly different idea, these Swedes decided that the best thing to do with such apparatus was to have a race between their be-sheathed mobile phones. Not entirely sure I want to know what the winner received!

As if that wasn’t bad enough though, they also devised a sailing contest, rigging up their phones with a splendid looking sail. If you think I’m mad, just check out the vids after the jump (and I apologise now for the extremely bad Swedish renditions of Rod Stewart’s “We are sailing”!)

Watch phones have been a dream of futurologists for years, but as is often the case with predicting the future, utopia has turned into hell. Rather than the dream of a wrist-based communications device, reality has slapped us in the face, as usual, and given us the QKFone WF820 instead. Looking like the ill-conceived love child of a dung-beetle and a maximum security arm restraint, the QKFone WF820 is quite literally a cheap mobile phone with a poor quality plastic moulding wrapped around it to make it fit on a wrist.

Well, I say “fit” on a wrist; it’ll wrap around a wrist alright, but the thing’s so huge you won’t be able to move your arm with it strapped on.

The list of features this thing has aren’t bad for a watch phone – GPRS, FM radio, 1.3″ TFT screen and Bluetooth – but it’s not a watch phone, is it, it’s just a crap phone hiding in an oversized watch mould!

Enough of the rant. If you can stomach it, there are tonnes more pics of the contender for the world’s ugliest phone award 2008 after the jump.

Google Android has three main features for develops:

Integrate – lets you use existing Google code, such as Maps, and share data, for example between the browser and Google Maps.

Extend – lets you build on existing Google apps, such as Google Maps, and enhance their functionality. The example shown lets you use Google Maps to locate taxi cabs near you. The app uses the built-in Google Maps app and extends it, adding its own functionality on top of Maps to create a brand new app.

Replace – you can easily replace components. For example, if you don’t like the existing contact manager, you can replace it with a different one from a third party. Not just add a new contacts manager, but completely replace the default one that Google provides.

This makes developing apps much easier, and should let the end user customize their phone to the n-th degree, and get access to a rich ecosystem of new apps that will constantly be developed.

I’m live here at Google I/O at the first Google Android session. So far we’re going fairly tecccie into the software guts of Android, which I appreciate some of you may not be that interested in, but we’ve been promised the latest news on Android at the end of the session – watch for a separate post on that in about 40 minutes’ time or so.

In the meantime, for those of you interested in Android under the hood, there’s loads more info after the jump.

Google have been showing off more of the Google Android mobile platform at the Google I/O conference at San Francisco, which just happens to be where I am now! A working model of an Android handset has just been shown, and it look fantastic. Of course it comes with a touchscreen – what mobile phone doesn’t these days. But the ease of use of the touchscreen rivals iPhone in terms of its ease of use and genuine capability.

Google have attempted to replicate the desktop on the mobile phone. An Android phone lets you create shortcuts to your apps just like you can on the desktop. You can move your icons around on the desktop with your finger, and switch between different running applications just by touching your finger on the screen and swiping it left and right. There’s a status bar at the top of the screen that provides common functions to your phone. Simply place your finger on this bar and drag it down, and a new screen slides down showing all the main functions of your phone.

Android phones use the WebKit browser, but not just for viewing web pages. You can use what Google calls Views to create new apps using the functionality of WebKit. So you get the browser view, for example, and the Maps view, which obviously lets you work with Google Maps.

And it’s the maps that brought the biggest round of applause at today’s opening keynote. Not only was an Android handset shown with standard Google maps on it, in both map and satellite view (both of which rendered very quickly); Google also demonstrated StreetView on an Adroid handset. StreetView, for those who don’t know, is Google’s technology that lets you see photos of a city or town. Not just any photos – they’ve taken literally millions of photos of inidividual locations, letting you scroll forward and move left and right 1 metre at a timne, effectively seeing what the place looks like through a series of photos.

What Andoid adds to the mix is GPS and a compass. Yes, just like Nokia’s forthcoming 6220 Navigator phone, Google’s Android handsets will come with compasses. One was demonstrated with a compass built-in. Google StreetView was called up, with a photo of the street being displayed. As the phone was turned left and right, so the photo turned left and right in real time. This brought a huge round of applause, and looked seriously cool. You can literally move around a city thousands of miles away in real time just by moving around with your Android phone in your hand.

Imagine how useful this could be. Like the look of a hotel in a brochure? Great, but as we all know, brochures are never exactly accurate! What’s next door, for example, or round the corner? With StreetView and an Android phone, simply locate the hotel and get a picture of it. Turn round with your phone in hand, and see a 360 degree sweep of what’s around it. Move forwards and backwards, and see what buildings (or building sites!) are to the left and right of it. How close is it to the beach? Have a walk and find out!

Android looks glorious. It works as well as the iPhone, it’s more functional than the iPhone, it’s entirely open source, and it’s going to be a hugely disruptive technology. I could be being blinded by the Google hype, but I really do think I’ve just seen the future!

I’m now attending the dedicated Google Android track, and will have more updates for you shortly. Oh, an dloads of Android pictures too!

I’m off on my hols again, so posting may be a bit light for the next few days. One place I’m off to, though, is Google I/O, Google’s developer’s workshop in San Francisco that starts next week.

Among the things being discussed will be Google Android, so I’ll be able to report back with the latest news on Google’s open mobile phone platform straight from the horses mouth, so stay tuned.

In the meantime, check out our archives and have a wander through the thousands of posts and articles on mobile phones that I’ve written over these past few years.