Latest Technology News

At a joint press conference at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona today, Verizon Wireless and Skype announced that Verizon's smartphone customers will be allowed to place and receive unlimited Skype-to-Skype voice calls. The voice-over-IP chat client is one of the world's most popular ways of connecting, especially for the purposes of international voice and video conferencing.

When the service opens in March, nine phones will support unlimited Skype-to-Skype voice calls, instant messaging, and international calls at Skype Out rates. These will include: BlackBerry Storm, Storm2, Curve 8330, 8530, 8830 World Edition and Tour 9630, Motorola Droid and Devour, and the HTC Droid Eris.

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Even though T-Mobile's HSPA+ deployment consists of only one city right now (Philadelphia), the mobile operator today unveiled its first piece of consumer equipment that will be able to handle the 21 Mbps HSPA+ network, and indeed the first HSPA+ modem available in the US, the WebConnect Rocket.

The Rocket is sort of a sequel to the WebConnect Jet 3G modem which launched last year. The main difference here is that T-Mobile was actually the last United States wireless carrier to offer a 3G USB modem, and it could be the first to offer a next-generation (some consider HSPA+ to be 3.5G or 3.75G) USB modem commercially.

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Today, South Korean consumer electronics maker LG debuted a full-touch featurephone called the Mini, which would have otherwise been unremarkable had it not been tied into a still-in-beta service called LG Air Sync which also was announced today.

LG Air Sync is a three-way sync service for feature phones (currently only works on the Mini) that syncs contacts, calendar data, memos, and photos and Web browser information with the user's PC and his related Air Sync Web account.

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To welcome the launch of the new multitouch Android 2.1 devices named Legend and Desire, HTC announced an upgrade to its trademark Sense user interface today.

The upgrade includes a new view called Leap which is essentially a zoomed-out version of the phone's home screens. With a pinch-to-zoom gesture, the view backs out and shows seven thumbnails, one for each home screen. This feature actually leaked out in a custom ROM for the HTC Hero in mid-January, so this should already be familiar to HTC Android fans.

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Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer closed this morning's preview of Windows Phone 7 Series at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona by saying he wanted to diffuse some of the buzz that would inevitably be generated. This after the company intimated to reporters during last January's CES that Windows Mobile 7 would be introduced this week, then later urging them to issue a correction on the name.

But he left developers in a bit of a quandary, many of whom are now thinking, what do we do now? The Windows Mobile 6 and 6.5 SDKs are still being actively distributed, even though WP7S will run applications through an entirely different model. In the end, the new system may end up being more about the Xbox, Bing, Zune, and Office brands than even Windows, which is represented now almost in name only. Windows Phone 7 Series is not, as Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie once suggested, Windows on a different scale.

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While Mobile World Congress is mostly about the most powerful handsets, the most dazzling mobile operating systems, and the next generations of wireless technology, it's fundamentally about communications.

And today, international mobile carrier Vodafone introduced what is a big advancement in the connection of developing nations, the first new mobile phone with a price tag of less than $15, the Vodafone 150.

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Today, a group of the most prominent wireless operators in the world announced its intent to form an "open app store," that is capable of vending applications to all mobile phone users.

Calling itself the "Wholesale Applications Community," the group is made up of 24 of the biggest mobile network operators including China Mobile, Deutsche Telekom, Vodafone, NTT DoCoMo, Telefonica, SK Telecom, Sprint, AT&T, Verizon Wireless, and hardware manufacturers LG, Samsung, and Sony Ericsson.

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Before today, if you had asked, which mobile phone company is the one that intends to split itself into two pieces, you might have gotten the answer: Motorola. Today, Nokia is the company taking two directions, both of which are a little startling, and both of which appear uncertain.

First, it's made a decision to merge its open source mobile Linux project, maemo, into Intel's Moblin project, with the result being MeeGo -- a product that, at least at first glance, bears more resemblance to parent Intel than parent Nokia. Second, Symbian proponents are still awaiting word about a future Nokia phone, the N87, believed to be the launch pad for the now-fully-open-source Symbian^3 operating system. But they're waiting in the backseat, it would appear, as Windows Phone 7 Series and MeeGo get the lion's share of attention, on this first day of Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.

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Earlier today, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer announced Windows Phone 7 Series at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain. The new operating system is a bold move for Microsoft, which is looking to reinvigorate its mobile strategy. But how bold is Windows Phone 7 Series in context of other mobile platforms? That's the question this post seeks to answer.

Because I'm miserably sick with the flu today, I'll limit this post to three areas: Windows Phone 7 Series as Microsoft's mobile Manhattan Project, mobile applications competition and garnering developer interest.

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A Google spokesperson confirmed to Betanews this afternoon that a second round of privacy changes, the nature of which was revealed last Saturday evening, is still being developed, and may yet go live "in the next couple of days."

Among those changes will be a more obvious way to turn Buzz off (no pun intended), a feature that remained obscure after the service's first round of privacy changes last Thursday. At that time, Google chose to un-hide an option that new customers may easily have ignored: to not only build a list of followers from existing Gmail contacts, but to publicize that list on the Buzz user's public profile. Depending on what other Google services the customer may have been using, that profile could possibly have been visible to anyone, including non-Buzz users.

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In today's viral, social media-driven world, it never seems to take long for things to get ugly. This is especially true for Google Buzz, which became a lightning rod for privacy-related criticisms almost as soon as it went live last week.

My advice to the critics: Don't get your panties in a knot.

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Without a doubt the biggest news from Mobile World Congress thus far, Microsoft unveiled Windows Phone 7 Series today. This is the big update to Microsoft's mobile environment which presents a more social, touchable, consumer-friendly user interface with new ways to interact with mobile data.

In short, the experience in Windows Phone 7 Series is almost nothing like the Windows Mobile experience, which was designed as a complement to the desktop PC.

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Eventually we will all be able to keep track of everything we do, like Nicholas Felton, the man who relentlessly chronicles the minutiae of his own behavior.

We're not even that far off right now. Today, it's downright easy to keep a comprehensive record of our spending with online banking, our complete phone and Internet records, and our exposure on the Web in general, so we can check our behavior. It's the sort of thing almost inherent in being a geek...checking logs, watching records, and tweaking for optimum performance.

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Since the launch of Google Buzz last Tuesday, we've been hearing more analyses from professionals and bloggers warning of a possible showdown of sorts between Google and Microsoft in the social space. Buzz is Google's social connection with its Gmail; but Microsoft already announced last year its own social connection with its mail platform: the forthcoming Social Connector plug-in for Outlook 2010, due for release with the rest of Microsoft Office 2010 this June. The latest release candidate for Office 2010 was distributed to private testers earlier this month.

Social Connector promises to transform Outlook 2010 into a live network teeming with contacts who share not just e-mail, but chats and texts through Windows Live and documents through SharePoint. Messages received from a "live" contact will be adorned with that person's availability, location, and a record of recent activities. Though LinkedIn has already signed on as Microsoft's first third-party partner, connectivity with Facebook -- probably distributed by Facebook, not Microsoft -- appears likely. So much of the same kind of functionality folks are seeing with Buzz, will likely appear in Outlook as well, although slanted more toward professional tasks rather than personal friends and acquaintances.

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Microsoft was under no obligation to build a ribbon component, similar to the one premiered in Office for Windows, for the Mac. That's especially true given the fact that the menu bar is such a prominent element of the Mac user experience. Ever since System 7, the menu bar -- which remains fixed to the top of the screen -- indicates which application is active. In Windows, applications have their own menu bars, if they have them at all; and starting with Office 2007, the ribbon replaced the menu bar.

In Windows, the replacement of the menu bar for Office apps was one of its design goals: a way to reduce screen clutter and minimize the steps or clicks required for a user to find a function. At least that's how Microsoft presented the original idea back at PDC in September 2005. In MacOS, you can't replace the menu bar, so a ribbon would have to find some way of complementing it, sharing the workload with it, in a way that makes sense to the user.

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