happy birthday
“Computerworld” reminds us that the iPhone is now a year old…
“Consider that more than 1 billion mobile phones were sold globally in 2007, with thousands of models introduced. But the model that had everyone’s attention for much of the year sold just 5.4 million units through March 2008, according to Apple. The company predicts that it will sell 10 million devices this year, partly because of innovations in the iPhone 2.0 version due this month.”
“No mobile phone, nor arguably any electronic device, has ever generated so much interest so quickly.”
“Few companies have managed to penetrate such buyer mind share with a single device in a year’s time,” says Michael Gartenberg, a JupiterResearch analyst and a columnist. “What’s significant is how iPhone’s impact has been far greater than the numbers sold.”
Here’s my favourite iPhone video from last year by David Pogue, one of the best tech journalists around.
And of course fring is celebrating the iPhone’s first birthday too. (See here for more details)
bluetooth locks
One of my favourite sites, Lifehacker, has recently featured two applications for Windows XP users that allows them to automatically lock their computer when they are away. Or at least the owner’s bluetooth enabled mobile handset is away. The applications are both free and open source. There’s “Blue Lock” and “BtProx” . There is also “LockItNow” (see here) . The Mac world has a rich choice of BlueTooth enabled tools already, (see here), but my guess is that the Windows world will catch up soon.
Don’t know much about Blue Tooth? Well check out this Youtube.
fring wins again
Did you know fring won the 2008 Wireless Broadband Innovation Award for “Best VoIP Product or Service“?
what goes up, must come down
It looks like everybody is on Twitter these days. Even London’s “Tower Bridge” now microblogs von Twitter.
See here .
Don’t know how to run Twitter on fring? See the video…
fring in the news
fring gets mentioned in a recent ‘VOIP News‘ article. (See here). They discuss some of the drivers behind the VoIP marketplace, including a couple I hadn’t heard of before. For example VoIP technology, unlike ‘traditional’ telephony, gives users multiple choice in interaction. They can make voice calls, but they can easily send text chats too. And then there is ‘presence’, they can more easily see if their contact on the other end is there or not.
fring also got a mention this week in an item on the Symbian Developers Journal site called “The Definitive iPhone Overview Guide with Tips, Tricks, Apps and Dev resources” (see here). ” Fring is a native application that aggregates all the various IM services including those that provide VOIP and allows you to use the VOIP parts of the services as well as the IM parts (as well as providing connectivity to other VOIP services such as Skype ) - its very slick and I’m glad they finally released a native version for the Iphone.” They think we’re slick!
web phone future
In this recent O’Reilly conference podcast, Alex Russel argues that the restrictions on developing third party applications for smartphones, particularly across platforms, means that web phones are the way of the future.
See IT Conversations here for details.
This youtube demonstrates a number of “Ajax” based menu alternatives designed for web phones.
more green gadgets…
There is a new green gadget designed to use wind power to charge your mobile phone. It’s called a HyMini
I think this might be useful for camping trips.
See the HyMini generator ‘demonstrated’ on youtube here.
watch them whiskers
Remember the series of items we ran on this blog on Tin Whiskers? The ‘growing’ problem that impacts the hi tech world. Well there is a great article on “The Guardian” web site (see here) with an excellent micro-photograph of whiskers. This is just fascinating.
long live CDMA! long live Hedy Lamarr!
As reported here on the fring Australia blog earlier, Australia’s CDMA network is dead. But code division multiplexing, the technology…that actually had film star Hedy Lamarr as one of it’s founders (see here) … lives on in the 3G world. Don’t believe me?
Well check out this brief podcast, part of Hill Associates’ excellent and highly recommended “Podsnacks” series explaining the mysteries of data communications. (See here). The code division approach lives on, even if CDMA, at least in Australia, is buried.
Now if all this is too geeky, and you’d prefer to hear about Hedy Lemarr’s brush with high technology, check out this Youtube story. The role of Hollywood siren Hedy Lemarr as a technology pioneer is one of the great stories of the geekdom.
On the other hand, if you’d prefer to just look at images of Hedy Lemarr, well Youtube can help too.
seeing red
It’s a phone, it’s a laptop. No, it’s a RedFly! RedFly shows that it’s “possible to do real work” on a smartphone.
It’s early days yet but it looks like the boundary line between smartphones and ‘laptops’ is becoming less distinct.
