Day: November 27, 2006

“Great stuff, but rather obviously hugely dangerous for letting loose on the general populace, who wouldn’t know a system library or a file extension if it hit them in the face. Visions of vast numbers of ‘phone’ users messing things up in royal fashion and then phoning the networks… “Heeelllpppp!” In the face of this scenario, Symbian’s licensees quite sensibly opted to only let users see files in a very small part of the filing system, with all the rest simply ‘happening behind the scenes’. For example, in a modern S60 3rd Edition smartphone, the built-in ‘File manager’ utility only lets you see the sub-folders underneath c:\Data (i.e. on the internal disk). Interestingly, there’s much greater visibility of your expansion card, presumably because you’re probably going to be writing to this via a card reader and will expect things to stay where you put them – and of course, there are far less critical files to mess up on your card.But, for the likes of you and I, gentle AllAboutSymbian reader, there’s still an overwhelming desire to see what’s really happening under the hood – or at least see as much as possible, since with all Symbian OS 9-powered smartphones the super-critical c:\sys folder is hidden from just about anything and managed with an iron fist by the OS. Enter a handful of third-party free file manager utilities, among which Y-Browser is possibly the most useful, with recent updates (0.75 and 0.77) adding a wealth of functionality. If you like to fiddle, if you’re having a few problems with applications not seeing their document files, if you’re curious or if you’re simply stocking up on a utility that may get you out of trouble tomorrow, read on…Read more here:

“Verizon Wireless said on Monday it will start to sell a new LG Electronics Inc. smartphone, the latest handset with computer-like functions to join an increasingly crowded U.S. market.Dubbed the enV, the gadget is the ninth smartphone being offered by Verizon Wireless.This year’s holiday shopping season is the first during which Verizon Wireless and its rivals are banking on high-end handsets at lower prices to attract consumers to data services like e-mail, video and music.U.S. mobile operators are spending billions of dollars to upgrade their networks to deliver these data services but smartphones have not been a big hit so far with consumers.Verizon Wireless, the No. 2 U.S. mobile service, hopes a bigger variety of cheaper smartphones will attract mass demand, though some analysts questioned whether there were too many models in the market already.The unit of Verizon Communications and Vodafone said the enV will sell for $149 to customers who commit to a two-year contract. That is half the $300 that smartphones typically fetched until this year, with businesses accounting for the bulk of buyers.Verizon also sells Motorola Inc’s Q for $100. T-Mobile USA sells Research In Motion Ltd’s Pearl for $199 and Cingular offers Samsung Electronics Co.’s BlackJack for a similar price.”Many smartphone launches in the last four to five months have come at affordable prices for a change. This automatically translates into higher volumes,” said M:Metrics analyst John Jackson, who believes mass market demand may be a bigger step” via today.reuters.com

“The US Federal Communications Commission has approved a new Windows communicator O2 Apollo by Quanta Computer. The device is based on Qualcomm 6280 chipset, which ensures GSM/GPRS/EDGE and 3G networking. Besides O2 Apollo supports Bluetooth and Wi-Fi wireless technologies and external GPS devices.The technical specs of O2 Apollo: Operating system: Windows Mobile 5.0 Camera: 2-megapixel, CMOS Connectivity: WiFi, Bluetooth, USB, IrDA miniSD storage cards Dimensions: 58x102x18.5 mm Weight: 150 g Display: 2.7” touchscreen 240×320 pixels, 65K colors FM-radio” via mobile-review.com