Day: March 18, 2008

“The Widsets 2.0 beta site recently went live which means you can now download and test the latest version of the Widsets client. New features include better integration between Widsets and the rest of the device including the ability to initiate a phone call or open a browser window. Widsets is a way to get web content on your mobile via widgetisation. Read on for more.Widsets has been around since the summer of 2006 (but only really took off last year). It has continued to evolve at an impressive pace and the new version holds a great deal more functionality that the original version. The basic idea is presenting digestible web content optimised for consumption of a mobile device through a ‘dashboard / desktop’ and ‘widget / application’ interface. Widgets are arranged on the dashboard and each widget can be opened to view the contents. The basic Widgets are RSS feeds wrapped in an attractive package, but there are also a number of small games and utility widgets. New to this beta is the Push E-mail widget.” Read more here:

“The European Commission on Monday made mobile TV technology Digital Video Broadcasting for Handhelds, or DVB-H, the official EU standard, a move that is expected to push broadcasters, operators and handsetmakers to speed efforts to introduce mobile broadcasting across Europe. The commission said only a common European standard will create a pan-European mobile TV market, and it urged industry to quickly settle any outstanding issues over interoperability and intellectual property rights. “For mobile TV to take off in Europe, there must first be certainty about the technology,” EU Media and Information Society Commissioner Viviane Reding said. In legislative terms, making DVB-H an official standard is similar to the method the EU used in the early 1990s to set the GSM standard for mobile phones — an approach that eventually gave Europe a global lead in the cellphone market. In practical terms, EU governments can encourage the take-up of DVB-H by promoting the standard in attributing licenses. However, while DVB-H is now a standard, it is non-mandatory. Big EU governments such as Germany, Britain, Spain and the Netherlands argued that it should be left to the market to decide which technology emerges in the end. The Commission also asked EU governments to make spectrum available for mobile broadcasting as quickly as possible, including in the UHF band as it becomes available. The DVB-H standard is backed by handsetmakers Nokia, Motorola, Philips, Sagem, Sony, Ericsson and Samsung as well as operators Vodafone, O2 and T-Mobile. It is the most widely used standard for mobile TV in the EU. ” via hollywoodreporter.com

Nokia today unveiled the Nokia N82 in stylish black, bringing a blend of state-of-the-art imaging, integrated navigation and high-speed Internet connectivity to the Nseries range of converged devices. This jet black multimedia computer enables people to “geotag” the images they capture – allowing them to not only be saved by date, but by location as well. This adds to a line-up of compelling photography features, including a 5 megapixel camera, Carl Zeiss optics and a Xenon flash. Not only does the Nokia N82 take great pictures, array of advanced connectivity features makes it easy for consumers to share their discoveries, journeys and locations. The Nokia N82 in black is expected to start shipping within weeks, with an estimated retail price of approximately 400 euros, before taxes and subsidies. “The Nokia N82 is made for storytelling,” says Juha Kokkonen, Director for Nokia Nseries devices. “As one of Nokia’s leading-edge connected camera, the Nokia N82 in black captures people’s journeys and discoveries. With built-in A-GPS it even helps people to find new places by pairing ‘contextual’ information with a wide array of connectivity features such as Wi-Fi and HSDPA. We make it easy for consumers to quickly share those moments as they happen.” When it comes to camera capabilities, the gloss-black Nokia N82 is set to wow world travelers and photography enthusiasts alike. The 5 megapixel camera, powerful Xenon flash and Carl Zeiss optics, ultra-fast camera activation, autofocus with a dedicated assist lamp, fast reloading between shots and DVD-like quality video capture all ensure that special moments can be captured “picture perfect” – even in low light conditions. Taking advantage of its integrated A-GPS functionality and high resolution camera, the Nokia N82 automatically tags images with capture location metadata, making it possible to view the capture location on a map either on the Internet or on the device itself. When it comes to sharing, consumers can upload their pictures or videos directly from their Nokia N82 to services like Share on Ovi, Flickr or YouTube. By installing Nokia’s exclusive and free Sports Tracker application, consumers can share their whereabouts and travel route with others on the Sports Tracker website – including the capture locations of images. The Nokia Sports Tracker is a GPS based activity tracker that runs on Nokia smartphones. Information such as speed, distance and time are automatically stored in the application, and can be shared with others. Urbanistas explore the world To showcase this exciting application, several explorers took off across the globe, each with a GPS-enabled Nokia N82 as their travel companion. On www.nseries.com/urbanistadiaries, people around the world could follow these intrepid travelers, and share the experience in near real-time through images captured on each explorers’ device. The Sports Tracker widget tracked the explorers’ location and marked the spot where each image was taken on a constantly updated map. The widget has now been embedded in many blogs and social networking sites. So that everyone can track and share their own journeys, stories and pictures with friends – just like one of the explorers – the Sports Tracker mobile widget will soon be made available with many new and existing S60-based converged mobile devices. It is also possible to share and compare travel routes or workouts with friends or the Sports Tracker community. Others’ journeys can also be browsed by location, for example to find a more exciting travel route. The Nokia N82 is a true travel companion and supports microSD memory cards of up to 8GB which allow the device to hold the user’s choice of up to 3,600 high-resolution pictures, 5 hours of high quality video capture, up to 6,000 songs or all of the available regions for the Nokia Maps application.

“When device is closed, transparent touch sensitive panel is covering the whole display area and you’ve got your ordinary full multi-touchscreen iPhone.When you flip iPhone open, you have a normal phone display and another side of the trackpad becomes multi-touch-active. Through it you control the phone: If you want to dial a number, you can just draw it on a trackpad. Or the rotational dial may appear on display, and you rotate it by sliding finger on a track pad. In the open mode, the transparent trackpad can easily be made to display the standard T9 keypad and other symbols. That can be accomplished by making polarized number and symbol markings that can only be seen when the trackpad is open. Or they can be implemented as tiny LED’s. When needed, you can keep both sides of the cover/trackpad touch-active at the same time. Thus having “six degrees of freedom” for control, and enabling 3D gestures on the device. Standard multi-touch gestures along “XY” axis on one side of trackpad, adding “Z” axis for the touch events on the other.” Read more here:

“Microsoft has announced a Windows Mobile 6 version of its Flash-like, cross-platform multimedia plug-in. Silverlight 1.0 for Mobile will provide animation, vector graphics, and media playback, and let developers leverage existing media assets to bring rich multimedia experiences to mobile devices, the company said. First introduced last year for Windows and Macintosh desktops, Silverlight is described by Microsoft as a “cross-browser, cross-platform, and cross-device plug-in.” It supports WMV, WMA, and MP3 media content, and is similar in many ways to Adobe’s Flash and Flash Lite. Unlike Flash Lite, though, it has not been available on Windows Mobile devices previously. Correcting that omission, Microsoft says Silverlight will be available for phones as a 1.0 version in the second quarter of this year.Meanwhile, Microsoft has made a beta available of a new desktop version of Silverlight. Whereas version 1.0 was geared more toward video, Silverlight 2 targets the RIA (rich internet application) space. It includes the .NET Framework, can be controlled via XAML (extensible application markup language), and can be programmed via Microsoft’s Visual Studio and Expression Blend tools.Previously, Microsoft and Nokia announced that the Finnish mobile-phone giant will add Silverlight support to Symbian S60 smartphones, Series 40 devices, and Linux-based Nokia Internet tablets. More information on Silverlight, plus a download of the Silverlight 2 beta, is available from the Microsoft website, here. An interesting blog posting by Silverlight development team leader Scott Guthrie introducing Silverlight 2 is also available, here.” via windowsfordevices.com