SevenClick! Mobile Technology Evangelists

This news has gone unnoticed but in really specialized blogs. Openwave’s mobile clients business has been acquired by Purple Labs. This includes Openwave’s browser and client messaging products including all code, patents, customer contracts and the engineering team.

Openwave was the leading mobile browser vendor few years ago. But his business has vanished as WAP has been fading away and mobile versions of desktop browsers (Webkit, Opera) has appeared on the scene. This explains the low price of the acquisition: just $30 million.

Purple Labs is a French company backed by European venture capital firms and is the only independent software vendor with a complete Linux solution for mass-market 3G phones. The deal will provide them not only the technical assets but an entry point to very important customers.

A very insightful analysis on this topic, as usual, on VisionMobile.

Via Moconews
Link VisionMobile

You are probably bored of your iPhone ringtones, everyone have the need of change its device ringtone. If you own an iPhone you are lucky, because now you can create your own ringtone even set video ringtones on your iPhone.

Read the rest of this entry »

The earthquake caused by Nokia on Symbian’s world a couple of days ago, has hidden another interesting movement of the Finnish company: the acquisition of Plazes.

Plazes is a Berlin-based company that offers a social network based on location. As they state in their blog, Plazes team will join the LBS team of Nokia based in Berlin, created from the acquisition of gate5 in 2006.

With this new deal, Nokia pushes its strategy on location based services and social networks. This is one of the hot topics today!

Via error500
Link blog.plazes.com

Nokia has released today this big news:

Nokia, Sony Ericsson, Motorola and NTT DOCOMO announced today their intent to unite Symbian OS(TM), S60, UIQ and MOAP(S) to create one open mobile software platform. Together with AT&T, LG Electronics, Samsung Electronics, STMicroelectronics, Texas Instruments and Vodafone they plan to establish the Symbian Foundation to extend the appeal of this unified software platform.

The Foundation will provide a unified platform with common UI framework. A full platform will be available for all Foundation members under a royalty-free license, from the Foundation’s first day of operations.

The Foundation will make selected components available as open source at launch. It will then work to establish the most complete mobile software offering available in open source. This will be made available over the next two years and is intended to be released under Eclipse Public License (EPL) 1.0.

“Establishing the Foundation is one of the biggest contributions to an open community ever made,” said Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo, CEO of Nokia.

The Foundation’s platform will build on the leading open mobile software platform, with more than 200 million phones, across 235 models.

This is one of the biggest announcements in mobile phones field in years, mobile leades to unify a software, mainly to beat the iphone´s career. I think. iPhone keeps your chin up. :D

Link Nokia Press Release

When some months ago Google released ‘My Location’ feature for Google Maps for Mobile a lot of buzz hit the blogosphere. Every tech-blogger wondered about how had Google managed to know the location of cellphones.

But now - just a couple of weeks ago - Google itself has put some light on the business with a post on the Official Google Mobile Blog. And not many people has talked about it. But it’s really good news.

Not only Google has unveiled how they really get to know location, but has announced they are going to give third party developers access to this information.

This will enable development of location-aware applications to every developer.

Now, ‘My Location’ is available in more than 200 countries and across many different platforms, including BlackBerry, Nokia Series 60, Apple iPhone/iPod Touch, Windows Mobile, and many Java phones. Gears for Windows Mobile and Android already contain location APIs.

The major drawback is accuracy, that is clearly insufficient for serious applications. And this issue won’t be solved - if possible - until Google has collected a huge amount of data from cellphones all over the world, which will be possible just when GPS chips were commonplace in every mid-range cellphone.

So, I’m not sure if this new service will have a real impact in deployment of production applications. But, definitely, it will help LBS applications to be mainstream and to boost innovation related to this technology.

Via OfficalGoogleMobileBlog

Today is the Firefox download day, it will probably break the most downloaded software record but, What about Firefox for mobile handsets?. There are not too much info but this video below shows how it will looks like in a concept video. It is very similar compared with iPhone´s Mobile Safari browser but of course it looks like better than Opera Mini.

Via Bitelia

It is time for Opera Mobile to bring us the opportunity to work on internet applications without internet connection thanks it will support Gears in its desktop and mobile browsers.

“Opera will have full support for Gears on mobile when they launch this year,” said Charles Wiles, Product Manager for mobile web apps at Google. “Opera Mobile 9.5 will be a great example of a high-quality browser on a mobile platform that supports Gears. This marks the coming of age of the browser as the platform for application development on mobile devices.”

“The forthcoming Opera Mobile 9.5 with Gears will usher in a new era for the Web on mobile devices,” said Jon von Tetzchner, CEO, Opera. “Together, these products will create new ways to bring applications to life on mobile devices. Developers will be able to use this along with Opera Dragonfly to develop and debug compelling applications for any connected environment.”

Great!

Link Opera Press release

Android live demo was presented yesterday on a HTC device, rumored HTC “Dream”, at the company’s I/O conference in San Francisco.

Check in the following video how android runs.

Google StreetView is awesome!

Google Maps looks great too.

That is great and i love the unlock screen, that is so fresh!, but, what about the multi-touch features?

Via EngadgetMobile
Link Screenshots

I love Japan, and i love how they use the technologies in day to day life earlier than in other countries, it is time now for paying your meal at McDonalds by mobile phone. It is easy and quick.

This payment method is based Felica RFID technology, installed in most modern Japanese phones to create the first program of this type, allowing customers using Kazasu Coupon (Contactless Coupon) to choose their meals, redeem coupons, and pay for purchases all with their mobile phones. Beginning with 175 stores and expanding gradually to its 3,800 nationwide stores by 2009.

How to use it. At first you must download the application to your mobile phone and choose the coupon you like. Then the coupon is redeemed by placing the phone near the RFID reader at the register, instantly adding the item to the order. At last, you must complete your order paying using NTT Docomo’s iD mobile wallet.

Check this video to see how it works.

Well, i am waiting for things like this here that make our life easier.

Via CScoutJapan

Will Apple include geo-tagging in upcoming iPhone 2.0 release?

This might be supposed looking at some information reported to AppleInsider from people of the handful of Apple’s partners that are testing a new beta, namely, build 5A292g.

The new geo-tagging features would apply to Google Maps and Camera applications and would prompt every time your location were to be used.

For a less annoying behaviour (I hate that kind of prompt messages!), a ‘Location Services’ switch would be added to General Settings in order to enable/disable Location Services.

Via AppleInsider