“I love my iPod, but I do not love that it’s basically a PC accessory. No PC (or Mac) nearby means no content on the iPod, and no updates. There’s got to be a better way. I’ve previously covered a company, Music Gremlin, that’s building a Wi-Fi-enabled music player. And at the D4 conference this morning, a new company, Zing, is rolling out a service that enables other companies (like its partners Sirius and Yahoo) to build their own complete music infrastructures–content to player–that work just fine without a PC connection. The Zing prototype shown at D4 had both Bluetooth and Wi-Fi radios built in. The radios are used to download music and to upload data about what you are listening to. If you have one of these players, you can do cool things, like see what your friends are listening to, then play samples of those tracks, or buy songs and albums directly from the player. If you try buy items when you’re not in range of a Wi-Fi access point, the product will queue up your requests and batch-process them when you do eventually connect.” Read more at reviews.cnet.com
Samsung SCHS310 reads your movements
“The Nintendo Wii isn’t the only motion sensing game in town. Sony has already announced that they will be integrating some form of the technology in their next-generation PlayStation 3 controllers, but even before they hit the shelves in November, you can enjoy motion sensing goodness in a cell phone. A video has recently been released of the Samsung SCH-S310 announced last year, showing how the phone reacts to your movements.The demonstration is fairly basic, as it only includes a simple dice application wherein the user gives the phone a good shake and the dice reacts accordingly. Samsung is claiming another “world’s first” for the S310, saying that this phone is the first to include “movement recognition.” They’re reporting that the handset can calculate spatial movement in 3 dimensions, as well as the speed of the movement.Imagine performing text entry with this thing, writing in the air, or the possible video game applications. Outside of the motion sensing, the Samsung SCH-S310 also features a 1.3 megapixel camera, GPS, and an integrated music player.” via mobilemag.com
Nokia turns cellphones into webservers
“Nokia has ported the Apache webserver to Symbian, in order to enable mobile phones to serve content on the World Wide Web. Many mobile phones today have more processing power than early Internet servers, suggesting that “there really is no reason anymore why webservers could not reside on mobile phones,” according to the company. The technique could also be used on Linux mobile phones.Nokia says it’s “Raccoon” project started out with the Unix version of Apache, and exploited Symbian’s POSIX layer in making the port. In addition to the basic Apache httpd daemon, Nokia ported mod_python, in order to enable dynamic pages generated from both Python scripts and PSP (python server pages). Other built-in modules include mod_alias, mod_auth, mod_autoindex, mod_dav, mod_dav_fs, mod_dir, mod_log_config, mod_mime, mod_rewrite, and mod_setenvif. Nokia says it installed its experimental port, initially, on a Nokia 6630, which it then accessed over a Bluetooth PAN (personal area network). This proved somewhat useful, in that it brought “the possibility of accessing functionality on the phone using a big screen and proper keyboard.” However, the project’s goal was to enable access to the phone of the cellular network. This proved challenging due to firewalls explicitly deployed by operators to prevent such access.Ultimately, Nokia says it was able to develop a gateway application, released under the open source Apache2 license, said to be capable of providing a webserver on a mobile phone with a URL accessible from any Internet browser. “In a sense, the mobile phone has now finally become a full member of the Internet,” Nokia says. ” Read more at linuxdevices.com