Smartphones and Cell Phones

Apple showed us a new iTunes section this week where the most downloaded applications in the App Store were revealed. Pandora Radio was the top application of the year with over 2 million downloads as of yesterday. It is personally the most used application on my original iPhone because I rarely use it any more as a phone while it sits in a dock connected to my stereo receiver serving up Pandora music to my entire household. We used it all last weekend to stream Christmas tunes as we put up the tree and decorations. IMHO, Pandora deserves the top rating and is a fantastic application for the iPhone. VentureBeat has a good discussion on Pandora for the iPhone.

December 2, 2008 by Matthew Miller

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According to a Reuters report from Nokia World in Barcelona, Nokia is open to the idea of using Linux on their high end phones. A Linux Maemo distribution is used now on their N810 Internet Tablet and it is quite a powerful solution. I enjoy using the N810, except for the seemingly slow responsiveness in some applications. Currently, Nokia uses its S60 implementation on their high end phones.

December 2, 2008 by Matthew Miller

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In addition to the amazing new upcoming Nokia N97 Nokia announced some service upgrades at Nokia World 2008. In particular there are new versions of Nokia Maps and Nokia Messaging. Nokia Maps gives you new features like high resolution aerial images, 3D landmarks, ability to share your location, and the capability to preplan your route and have it sent to your device. The new Nokia Messaging client integrates email and IM (from Yahoo!, Windows Live, Google and AOL). These two updated services are now also brought into the Ovi brand as Maps on Ovi and Mail on Ovi.

December 1, 2008 by Matthew Miller

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Nokia World 2008 is taking place this week in Barcelona, Spain and the event kicked off with the keynote announcing the Nokia N97 multimedia computer. The Nokia N97 brings a QWERTY keyboard and touch screen to the Nseries or you could say it brings a phone and S60 to the Nokia Internet Tablet. The Nokia promotional materials state, "Desktop.Laptop.Pocket" as they bring you a device with a 3.5 inch touch screen display (640x360 pixels resolution) that slides up and at an angle (similar to the AT&T Tilt) to reveal a full 3-row QWERTY keyboard and directional pad. I was expecting to see S60 touch launch on a Nseries rather than the Nokia 5800 we saw last month.

December 1, 2008 by Matthew Miller

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I've now given you a Holiday Guide for smartphones and free cellphones so this Guide presents the best of the devices that are commonly called feature phones. With the power of today's feature phones, the line between a feature phone and smartphone is getting blurred so most people won't see much of a difference between the two categories of devices and I imagine there will soon be no distinction at all.

December 1, 2008 by Matthew Miller

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James had a chance to try the BlackBerry Storm and started off MobileTechRoundup show #155 with a few thoughts. Kevin is still enjoying his iPhone and told us about a new application he is using via WiFi on his device. I had a chance to chat with Ross Lamont, from Nokia, about the Nokia Legends campaign in one of our rare podcast interviews. Nokia just took a big step towards supporting all enterprise solutions with their announcement supporting Lotus Notes. Our freeware of the show requires two Macs on one network and after the show Kevin ended up buying another Mac too.

November 30, 2008 by Matthew Miller

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The TechCrunch post on Joost for the iPhone came across my Twitter feed so I quickly launched iTunes and found the free Joost application. The application started up and looked promising on my WiFi connection, but I found the same issues that TechCrunch did with the application unable to play movies.

November 28, 2008 by Matthew Miller

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It is not that often that I agree whole heartedly with David Pogue's reviews since he is a little too pro-Apple for me, but this time I can honestly say his review of the BlackBerry Storm is right on. The power of a BlackBerry is their QWERTY keyboard and RIM needs to forget about future Storm devices and stick with their niche of the market.

November 26, 2008 by Matthew Miller

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Today, Nokia launched its new viNe service for selected Nseries devices. I logged in (you need a Nokia.com account) and see that the Nokia E71 is also supported and since that is the device I have 3G on here in the U.S. I am going to try it out with that device. Nokia viNe is a way to capture and geotag your music, photos, and videos as you are out and about. You can control when this geotagging and capturing is taking place, but it appears that everything you capture and then upload is available for public viewing so take care when you are using the service.

November 25, 2008 by Matthew Miller

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There has been a few rants posted over the last week or so about the statement that was made on a Microsoft Windows Mobile blog pertaining to the apparent lack of support for existing devices to support the upcoming Internet Explorer Mobile 6 web browser. What can Microsoft do with Windows Mobile moving forward to compete with the new devices hitting the market?

November 25, 2008 by Matthew Miller

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