Last year was eventful for the boys in Orange – it marked the first time that they managed to ship a new product based on a new operating system developed by their own.
Engadget Mobile now found the following invite in their mailbox:
I personally expect this to be little more than a “we best” event, with next to no real product introductions except for a new carrier partners. Anyone want to bet against me?
MetalFan is the right app for people who like it to hear hard and loud music. We at Tamoggemon Ltd are very proud to offer you this huge application. MetalFan includes a lot of bands and media contents (such as pictures, videos, docs and mp3). You’ll find a (neary) monthy growing choice of bands. Tamoggemon Ltd been in contact with a lot of bands to get permission to use official contents of bands.
In the app you’ll find bands playing Hard Rock, Heavy Metal, Death Metal, Black Metal, Thrash Metal, Folk Metal and Power Metal, such as Iced Earth, Cage, Blaze Bayley, Chaserock, Finntroll and a lot of more bands!
Don’t hesitate and try the trial version on your webOS phone, you’ll find MetalFan in the App Catalog! Soon we’ll publish the full version…
PackT can be considered the newest kid on the block of tech publishing – consider them the APress of “design-related technologies”. Their book on “User Programming for Busy Programmers” hit my desk. But can the 80-page booklet stack up?
William Rice starts out by looking at a few “common myths” of the trade. What is user training, what isn’t it? Who needs to be trained?
Afterward, the book takes a strictly wizard-like approach. A repeating template not dissimilar to the one found in use cases takes you step-to-step from nothing to running user demo, which can be deployed to third-party instructors.
Style-wise, PackT is different from other, more “established” publishers. Their visual presentation is more “to the bone”, and less playful – the whole book didn’t contain a single image. Nevertheless, it was well written and easy to understand.
In the end, I predict that PackT has a bright future ahead of it. This book fulfills its need – if you have just been enlisted to teach at an university or often write manuals and online help systems, you definitely can benefit from it. The price of 13$ for the paperback is ok…
The folks at Sprint’s are likely to gain a new problem in the near future – the FCC has just disclosed the box whose data is below:
Just in case: we’re looking at a CDMA Pixi WITH WiFi.
Given that Sprint has just released its version of the box, this box is intended either for non-US markets or for Verizon, who most likely aren’t too interested in the Pre anymore.
Either way, things could get interesting again soon…
It’s the beginning of the month – and its stats time. As usual, here are a few sales metrics for your personal enjoyment:
Frbiz
Frbiz describes itself as one of the largest Chinese B2B search platforms. Don’t ask me how they got their top-three data:
Number One: Nokia 5800XM, 1,780 yuan
…
Number Two: Nokia N78, 1,699 yuan
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Number Three: Nokia N95 8GB, 1,899 yuan
…
Krusell
Don’t ask me why, but Krusell’s latest report didn’t hit my inbox. Fortunately, symbian-freak got it – it reads as follows:
- (1) Apple iPhone 3G
- (-) Nokia 3720 Classic
- (8) Nokia 6303 Classic
- (-) Nokia E52
- (2) Nokia 5800 XpressMusic
- (-) HTC HD2
- (-) Nokia E71
- (-) Sony Ericsson Naite
- (6) Samsung B2100
- (5) Nokia 6700 Classic
Opinions, anyone?
One webOS-related question which keeps popping up over and over again is the one about the native SDK: why is all Pre development restricted to JavaScript?
I recently found the following answer on a mailing list – it was posted there by a former Palm insider:
Not having a binary interface means Palm has far more flexibility in changing the hardware… already that have two devices with different versions of the ARM core, which means code that was compiled to take advantage of the NEON instructions in the Cortex-A8 on the Pre would fail on the ARM11-based Pixi. It also means they can change a lot of the low-level interfaces and implementations without breaking app code, which is very likely. Maybe my webOS 2.0 they’ll have that level stable enough to support app services — it took Android until the 1.6 OS release to support native shared libraries.
From my personal point of view, the issue is different: for now, native development is restricted to some companies “in Palm’s inner circle”. Once their exclusivity has run out, other developers are let into the arena.
Keep in mind that Palm has had huge issues keeping developers in line after the Foleo and Cobalt debacles. Thus, and in order to retain at least a small core base, well – you get the idea.
P.S. Recompilation…what a horror, but its all smoke and mirrors. Anybody ever heard of FPU emulation or fat binaries?
So far, Palm’s Pre has not hit Eastern shores. In fact, it has not hit many shores at all – Pre availability can still be counted on your fingers.
Nevertheless, Palm seems to be committed to increase its reach slowly but surely – and the Czech Republic could be the next target. Dow Jones Newswires reports the following:
…
We’ll certainly include Palm Pre in our product offering but at the moment I can’t tell when exactly,” T-O2 spokesman Martin Zabka told Dow Jones Newswires, adding the Palm Pre’s launch will likely be during next year.
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Not much to add here…
Pareto’s law is one of the few “natural laws” which every reader of the Tamoggemon Content network should be familiar with – it says that 80% of every effort is caused by 20% of the beneficients. For example, 80% of the Coke bottles consumed in an OEBB ClubLounge are claimed by yours truly, his wife and a few other frequent travelers (20% of total population – 2) who abuse the system 
.
Onto more serious things: a recent Wall Street Journal report quoted AT&T’s CEO as follows:
With about 3% of smart-phone customers driving 40% of data traffic, AT&T is considering incentives to keep those subscribers from hampering the experience for everyone else, he said. “You can rest assured that we’re very sure we can address it in a way that’s consistent with net-neutrality and FCC regulations.”
So much for Pareto…
Samsung’s recent bada event caused quite a ruckus in the industry. We covered the nitty-gritty yesterday – and have just stumbled across further coverage.
The folks at Engadget mobile have posted videos, a transcript and loads of shots from the event.
Hit the link below to learn more:
http://www.engadget.com/2009/12/08/samsung-teases-bada-at-event-questions-still-outnumber-answers/
Palm’s web-based Ares development environment has raised quite a few eyebrows when announced – nobody really knows what the fuss is all about.
Chuq van Rospach has now started a small test run, which was filled up in literally hours.
Let’s see…
P.S. The statement read as follows:
You may have seen press reports recently about a new development environment called Ares.
I am happy to say we are now opening up Ares for testing by our developers. We are starting with a fairly small pool and will be growing it, so I can’t guarantee that everyone who wants to will get access to it immediately, but we’re now asking for volunteers willing to spend some time kicking the tires and finding (and reporting) bugs.
At this point, Ares is in alpha, but it is fairly advanced Alpha. I’m really impressed by Ares; it is a really nice environment to program in.
We’re asking for people willing to spend some and energy really trying to help us finish it and give it some polish. I don’t have enough spots for all of you (yet), but if you are interested in working with our Ares tools and giving us feedback, please drop me an email (pdn@palm.com) and let me know. I’ll add developers in a FIFO basis as I have spots available.
If you don’t hear back from me with access right away, please be patient. If I run out of seats in the program I’ll hold onto your requests and get you added to the program as soon as I can.
So far, very little is known about Samsung’s bada operating system. Will it be fully programmable? Will it be Java only? Will it support Flash?
PhoneScoop claims to have received some news from Samsung. First of all, the critter’s UI will be a Flash-based form of TouchWiz called TouchWiz 3.0 – but programming still takes place in C++.
When it comes to further features, most buzzwords are implemented:
…
Other capabilities include support for service-centric features such as location-based services, social networking, device sync, content management, and commerce services. Samsung also said that the platform will be highly customizable by network operators, so they can make it their own.…
Release info goes as follows:
… reiterated that the first handsets should hit the market in the first half of 2010. Samsung plans to use Bada on phones in markets worldwide, though it will launch across Europe first.
…
Further info, anyone?
Palm’s webOS is based heavily on all kinds of open-source technology: in fact, the Pre even ships with a PDF file detailing the various projects involved and their licenses. Unfortunately, it looks like the boys in Orange forgot about one crucial GPL-licensed bit of technology: the very PDF rendering engine which is used for displaying the aforementioned file (among others).
Yahoo Finance reports the following:
…
San Rafael-based Artifex Software Inc. said Friday it filed a suit in the U.S. District Court for northern California because Palm had integrated its muPDF program into Palm Pre devices since their launch in June.
Artifex said Palm documents indicate the company uses muPDF but said it has not obtained a commercial license from Artifex. MuPDF is freely available on the Internet but is restricted from being used in commercial products.
…
As of now, not much further information is available…
The folks at Gartner’s are not too popular among many mobile computing and Unix heads – they are said to be Microsoft-biased to a large extent. Nevertheless, they sometimes have interesting bits of research…such as the one below.
They have just released a top-ten list containing the top fields where consumer application growth will take place in 2010. It reads as follows:
While the keywords themselves are not too meaningful, having them in your pitch can definitely be heklful when going for venture capital. Further information can be had at the URL above…
A big thank-you to Resco’s Jan Slodicka for the tip!
Covering the Palm market is fun if for but one thing: some patterny keep coming back over and over again. THe prediction that “Palm will perish” is one of them – it has just reared its head again.
BusinessInsider has now declared Palm ‘one of ten brands which will disappear in 2010′. The reasoning reads as follows:
…
It competes with the two smart phone juggernauts the Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) iPhone and RIM (NASDAQ:RIMM) Blackberry. In an effort to push sales, Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) dropped the price on the Pre to $79.99. Palm needs a deal with both AT&T Wireless (NYSE:T) and Verizon to supplement the one it has with Sprint (NYSE:S). It is not clear that those partnerships will be formed. Pre sales have fallen off, if a number of Wall St. analysts are correct. Many analysts have sharply dropped their stock price targets to $10 based on concerns that Palm will significantly miss its earnings targets. The firm’s stock has decreased from over $18 earlier this year to $11.
…
Even though this can very likely be some kind of fight about ad space purchases, their prediction of a buyout by Samsung or LG nevertheless sounds interesting. Let’s see…
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