Archive for February, 2010

Walk 900 miles for Nokia’s N900

Today’s mobile phones are a far cry from what they once were, but in a very good way. No longer the ill-fitting, bulky and clunky chunks of plastic they used to be, mobile units now feature high-tech hardware integrated in ever-increasingly-seamless ways. Mobile phones are more versatile than ever nowadays, with mobile packages getting more flexible and functional with each release from top mobile manufacturers who know how to get the most out of the hardware and software packages they assemble for their discriminating, increasingly tech-savvy public. The trick, they find, is to put together a phone that can do it all and do it well – and that’s often harder than it sounds.
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Blackberry’s almost-perfect Storm

The mobile landscape has gotten more than a little competitive in recent years, what with mobile manufacturers unearthing new ways to integrate higher-tech hardware into their mobile units, thereby making them run faster and more smoothly with greater versatility without rendering them bulky and clunky chunks of plastic that have a hard time fitting in palms or pockets. Mobile phones can now do more things than ever before, and the challenge for mobile manufacturers and service providers is to put together a mobile package that manages to do a wide range of tasks without sacrificing quality and performance – avoiding the pitfall of making a jack of all trades but a master of none.
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New girls on the block!

There is a whole lot to love about mobile phones nowadays, approaching and even surpassing the love and wonder inspired by mobile phones when they were a brand-new concept. Mobile technology has improved and evolved consistently over the years, allowing mobile service providers and mobile content providers to craft and enact changes to the services and content offered, getting higher quality, smaller size and increased functionality and flexibility from every new release. Nowadays, ringtones, mobile music and mobile applications have taken the forefront of the mobile revolution, affording users more variety and entertainment than once thought would ever be possible.
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Glyder 2: More of the same good stuff

Mobile applications are among the best things to ever happen to mobile phones, and to mobile phone users. Whereas once upon a time the most entertainment one could get from a mobile phone – outside its actual call making and taking functions – was swapping multicolored housing plates, now mobile users have a multitude of things they can actually do with the actual phone. Software has grown ever smarter over the years, allowing mini-programs to be loaded into the smartphones to fulfill a variety of purposes, from organizing your week to checking the stock market to enjoying a quick race on an alien world.
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Mobile gaming enters a new Phaze

Mobile content has evolved considerably in the last few years, taking off into new directions and paths as fast as the evolution of the mobile phones themselves creates both the new paths and the new content possibilities. Technology has made it possible for calls to give way to voice mail and text messaging, for nearby calls to become international calls, and for monotones that approximated song melodies with beeps to become real tones that were actual, true clips from the songs themselves. Mobile content has recently undergone another phase of expansion with the mobile app, a small program run by a smartphone platform to accomplish various purposes, from organizing a day planner to fighting a fictional but deadly civil war between races of shape-shifting robots on an alien planet.
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RealNetworks to distribute Sprint ringtones and music

Since their inception, ringtones have emerged as true mobile commodities to be reckoned with. Among the first examples of popular, profitable mobile content and media, ringtones have moved forward inexorably since they first started being used, and are only now facing signs of profitability slowdown with the advent of rampant sideloading and an increasingly tech-savvy market base capable of creating their own ringtones. Nevertheless, tie-ups with the music industry and aggressive promotions have kept ringtones an indispensable commodity for mobile content providers who wish to provide users with plenty of musical options for announcing incoming calls and text messages.
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Mythic’s quality is real, not mythical in the least

Mobile technology has continued to advance in step with the times in recent years. Mobile manufacturers have managed to employ advancements in more ways than one, whether by making improvements to existing models and bringing them back from the pit of obscurity to shine like new once again, or by creating whole-cloth innovations that stand as heralds of a new technological age. Medicine, transportation, entertainment and communications have all benefited from these efforts, as new technological wonders make their presence felt more and more as time goes by. The pace of life does continue to speed up, but with it comes technology.
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N79: Solid to the Nth degree

Technology has worked wonders for our lives, especially in recent years. Whether it’s developing all-new innovations that set the trend for the future or adding simple improvements to older items, thereby rejuvenating and revolutionizing them in turn, technology has been put to great use for things as life-changing as medical research and transportation. Communications has also been a beneficiary of the ongoing improvement that has been afforded by growth and change, with mobile phones growing smaller and paradoxically more versatile seemingly with each passing month that brings new ideas from mobile manufacturers responding to new demands from the mobile consumer base, whose increasingly tech-savvy ways continue to develop in response to increasingly fast-paced lifestyles.
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[Tap Tap] Revenge is Sweet

With the advent of mobile applications, mobile gaming has emerged as the latest big trend to take the world by storm. Where once mobile content was limited to the actual text and multimedia messages that users sent and received, innovations added new and exciting types of content to be shared as well as sold. Ringtones and wallpaper quickly took over from there, evolving [with the mobile phones themselves] along their own developmental paths as ringtones shifted from beeps approximating a song melody to actual clips from songs and voice recordings and wallpaper grew in color quality, size and resolution. Now a proliferation of mobile applications has emerged as the harbinger of change, and it’s very entertaining change indeed.
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Who Plays The Watchmen?

It has been a big decade for technological advancements of all stripes. The last three years in particular have seen quite a bit of movement, in an interesting microcosm of the larger historical landscape – where the vastly greater number of technological advancements has taken place in the last century or two. Mobile phones are among the greater, more tangible and more accessible manifestations of this spate of advancements, and everyone and their mother can attest to how increasingly compact and streamlined hardware integration and increasingly versatile and flexible software capability have made everyone’s lives both more efficient and more enjoyable.
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The Palm Pre is back, with a Plus

The last few years have seen immense growth and intense competition in the mobile phone market. Mobile phones have passed countless hurdles since their inception, hurdles both technological and conceptual, and have done an amazing job of making the impossible possible over the years. Where once, ringtones that actually played the song they used to approximate seemed impossible to attain, as did the vision of playing video games on a cellular phone, nowadays both are common sights to see in the modern mobile landscape. Mobile phone manufacturers and service providers have worked overtime, and still do, to make new things happen even as they revisit older models and add new features to produce excellent new breeds that continue to serve their increasingly-versatile purposes well.
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HTC Touch HD2: Not just its father’s son

Mobile phones have become seemingly unstoppable in their continued evolution. Each new generation of mobiles brings something new to the table, whether it’s an old feature or idea executed better, or a wholly unprecedented innovation that revolutionizes the mobile landscape. Just as inevitably, the object of the latter soon becomes the object of the former, as we’ve seen in such mobile staples as ringtones, cameras, music players, operating systems and applications – all debuting at one point or another as brand-new additions to the features of the modern phone, and systematically outdone and upgraded over time. The potential of the cellular phone continues to be both unlocked and unleashed as the years go by.
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A Worm and Cozy App

It’s no great secret to any of us that mobile phones are avatars of technological advancement, handheld embodiments of science in action that boast of smoothly-integrated hardware and peripherals. They’re also revolutionary bearers of communication, making groundbreaking transmissions on a daily basis as news spreads around the world and information is shared in low- and high-profile circles. Mobile phones have become emotional links as well, connecting families and friends and kith and kin around the world on ordinary and special days alike. However, mobile phones have evolved to a point where they can fulfill all these roles and one other: bringer of the fun.
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Exposing LG’s eXpo

Mobile phones have truly hit their stride in recent years, with new forms and frames truly light-years away from their immense and hulking mobile-call-only predecessors. Today’s mobiles have emerged as comparatively miniscule units that are capable of myriad tasks, more than immediately imaginable, with a great degree of integrated hardware set to the latest technical specifications and software that maximizes and even expands the hardware’s capabilities. All this has transpired with great speed, much to the delight of mobile users everywhere who have become increasingly tech-savvy as a whole due to the various work-juggling and multi-tasking needs imposed by their ever-accelerating lifestyles.
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LG Tries for Elite Status

Similar to how media technology – and most modern technology in general – has undergone the bulk of its evolution in only the last few hundred years or so, mobile technology has undergone a growth spurt of sorts in its continued progress over the last couple of years. Indeed, while mobile phones have consistently changed and improved since their entry into the public eye – and hand and pocket – the last couple of years have been banner years for innovation, as mobile phones became “smart” with the introduction of new players in the mobile manufacturing and content provision and with various developments in more versatile operating systems and software and more well-integrated hardware.
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Domo Arigato, Mr. Auto…Ringtone

Mobile phone applications are the latest emergent trend that has set about to revolutionize the landscape of mobile phone use. Even as mobile phones have become more intricately developed and designed, each new phase of evolution has brought accompanying technological innovations that have snowballed into trends of their own – ringtones and applications being the most prevalent ones in recent years, with both the music industry and the software industry getting into the act and making their presence felt on mobile phones. There has been no shortage of trends blending both of those as well, with all manner of applications created to simplify and perform all sorts of ringtone-based functions for mobile users.
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Make a wish on Samsung’s Star

Today’s mobile phone market is a far cry from what it used to be. Not because it’s somehow decreased in complexity and intensity, no, but more because it’s actually increased exponentially in both those aspects. Manufacturers continue to adapt to the changing trends that define the mobile landscape, whether by integrating the latest innovations in hardware by incorporating new cameras and speakers into the mobile units or by moving ahead in the use of the newest software by pioneering new operating systems as platforms for the emergent multitude of mobile applications, which themselves have revolutionized the playing field in a whole new way.
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Samsung Scores with Corby

The mobile phone market has become a challenging place for even longtime mobile phone developers and manufacturers. To stay strong in the current mobile phone race, manufacturers have had to adapt to shifting and changing trends in user demand, and they have had to integrate the latest technology into each unit to maximize its selling power by providing top-of-the-line, cutting-edge technical specifications to satisfy their increasingly tech-savvy and multimedia-craving user bases. As such, each new generation of phones emerges sleeker and leaner but more powerful and more versatile, in keeping with the demands of the market. There have been hits, however, and there have been misses.
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Take Your Photoshop on the Road with your Android

Mobile phones have come a long way in the last few years, and each new generation seemingly features more innovation and integration than could ever have been thought possible. Once merely oversized units that afforded a user the ability to take and make voice calls on the road, the average mobile phone has undergone a transformation worthy of most Cybertronians and emerged a smaller, sleeker and more sophisticated pocket-sized package that nevertheless packs in more functionality than ever before with each new release. Phones such as the Motorola Droid run on powerful Android platforms and ever-increasingly-efficient operating systems, and have similarly powerful music players and high-resolution cameras integrated into their physical frames.
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Droid up your tones with Ringdroid

Music and mobiles have always mixed. This has been true ever since the current generation of mobile phones first appeared on the scene, with ringtones that transcended mere bell-based sound effects and beginning to approximate song melodies with their MIDI-style beeping. Of course, while popular for its time this was quickly deemed passé and made to evolve at roughly the same rate as the mobile phones themselves. This resulted in polytones, which overlaid multiple MIDI-style arrangements to produce a closer approximation of the original melody. Ringtones called “true tones” or “real tones” followed suit shortly, as phones had by that point evolved to the level of playing actual sound clips, usually in MP3 format.
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