Smartphones and Cell Phones

With Microsoft's rather anemic keynote at CES 2009, the show was up in the air for another company to step up to the plate and garner all the attention from the press. Thus, Palm was in a perfect position to steal the show and after following the various live feeds (Scoble's live video kyte feed was the best) I would have to say that Palm did just that. Palm should have had a live feed themselves since most people's live coverage kept dying out. I was quite nervous for Palm and was hoping they weren't going to come out and show a different color Treo Pro. They really needed to show something big or I think we would see Palm fade away into the history books of PDAs. As I watched the coverage I would have to say that Palm did a nice job with their announcements.

January 8, 2009 by Matthew Miller

13 Comments Vote

Streaming internet radio is very popular today with mobile clients and desktop clients like Pandora and Last.fm. At CES today, two more services announced expanded coverage, improved features, and availability. Slacker, Inc. announced Slacker Mobile for the BlackBerry so you no longer need to have a dedicated Slacker player to enjoy music on the go. FlyCast announced a client for the Android/T-Mobile G1 and desktop players for Windows PCs and Mac.

January 8, 2009 by Matthew Miller

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The Nokia E71 is a fantastic device (see my review) and I keep on going back to using it because it has a killer form factor and is solid as a rock. Nokia announced the E63 back in November for Europe and other countries. Today at CES 2009, Nokia announced that the E63 will be coming to the USA with support for 3G (on AT&T) for a low MSRP of US$279 as a SIM-unlocked device.

January 7, 2009 by Matthew Miller

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While I think the T-Mobile Shadow appealed to a number of people moving from a feature phone (at least that is the type of demographic I saw every time I went into the T-Mobile stores) I don't think it struck a strong chord with mobile phone enthusiasts. I personally found the T-Mobile Shadow to be one of my favorite non-touch screen smartphones (see my review and follow up thoughts). Today, HTC and T-Mobile announced the next generation Shadow that will be available in January or February.

January 7, 2009 by Matthew Miller

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Now that I have Nokia Email back up and running on my Nokia N85 I was looking at some of the new features, including subfolder support. I use Gmail as my primary email account(s) and was disappointed to see I apparently could not use IMAP subfolders with my Gmail labels. I just received an email from a member of the Nokia Email team that showed me how I could actually use Gmail labels as subfolders with Nokia Email.

January 6, 2009 by Matthew Miller

2 Comments Vote

Rogers was the first to get the RIM BlackBerry Curve 8900 (aka Javelin) and it looks like T-Mobile USA may be the first carrier in the U.S. to get this updated device. According to a flyer/ad posted on TmoNews the BlackBerry Curve 8900 will be launching on 11 February. This latest generation Curve is smaller than the Bold, but has many of the same specifications.

January 6, 2009 by Matthew Miller

1 Comment Vote

There are a couple of applications that I particularly enjoy using on my Windows Mobile devices that have actually been so compelling that they have kept me using Windows Mobile over other devices. Two of these applications are now being demoed for the iPhone and will be coming in the near future. Sling Media is showing off SlingPlayer Mobile for the iPhone at Macworld 2009 and Laridian posted a video of PocketBible for iPhone.

January 5, 2009 by Matthew Miller

2 Comments Vote

I believe fring was the first to bring Skype calling capability to the iPhone back in October 2008. Today, Truphone announced the upgraded version of Truphone that will support Skype calling and instant messaging functions. With Truphone you can also place Skype calls without a WiFi connection and be billed just for your cellular plan minutes thanks to Truphone Anywhere.

January 5, 2009 by Matthew Miller

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When I posted my HTC Rose/S740 review last month I had no idea that a US version of the device would be coming and was quite excited to get a press release announcing the HTC S743 with 850/1900 MHz HSDPA support. The HTC S743 is a slick non-touchscreen device with a 12-key keypad and full QWERTY keyboard.

January 5, 2009 by Matthew Miller

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The big news today regarding the Apple iPhone seems to be the launch of Soonr (PDF news release). Soonr is an iPhone application that lets you access and view documents stored in the cloud. You cannot edit or create documents on the iPhone since that functionality is not yet available, but you can share them with others and print to a remote printer from your iPhone. Evernote also recently launched their file syncing capability. Is one better than the other or are both services valuable for iPhone users?

January 5, 2009 by Matthew Miller

2 Comments Vote