SevenClick! Mobile Technology Evangelists

Last friday Asus launched the new touchscreen phone called P552w. This device runs on Windows Mobile and includes a user interface called Gester, that enables users to perform a variety of navigational actions like selecting, zooming, scrolling and flipping.

Some of its features are:

• O.S.: Microsoft Windows® Mobile 6.1™ Professional.
  
• Applications: J2ME, Microsoft Office, MSN, Push Email, Google Maps, EziMusic and EziPhoto.
• Connectivity: HSDPA 3.6Mbps, UMTS 2100, EDGE/GPRS/GSM, WiFi 802.11b+g , Bluetooth 2.0+EDR, GPS.
  
• Screen: 2.8″ TFT, Touch Screen 65K color, QVGA 240×320 pixels.
• Multimedia slots: MicroSD with SDHC support, USB 1.1.
• Camera: 2.0 Mega pixel Fixed Focu.
  
• Battery time: 3h of 3G talktime (5h with 2G), 300h of 3G standby time (250h with 2G).

So we have one more touchscreen phone with Windows Mobile, this worl is growing up quicly!

Via Engadget Mobile

USB and RFID are now good friends in France, where the state’s railway company SNCF has developed a system based on both technologies to allow people to buy tickets without physical money.

It’s called Weneo ID Smart, and it looks like a common USB pendrive, but it includes a RFID system inside. The USB plug is for connecting it to a computer and charge it with money. Then the RFID part will let us buy railway tickets with the previously charged money, just putting our device close to the RFID reader in the train station, forgetting about standing up at long queues.

Weneo ID Smart is not just “like a pendrive”, in fact it is. It has a 4GB memory for personal and private data, only accesible using the USB plug. To make this more secure, this data will be encrypted. On the other hand, RFID readers will only have access to the data that is related to the ticketing system, and not the pendrive data.

1000 devices will start to be tested in autumn. These are great news according to new systems of paying transport tickets, like paying tube tickets with mobile phones in London, like we already posted.

Via Xataka

Photostream is a new open source sample application for Android. This application is a browser and viewer of pictures for Flickr. To use it from your phone, you need a user name from Flickr, but the application offers a default user name if you just want to try it.

As it is an open source application you can browse the SVN repository, that has been included in the apps-for-android project. If you check the code you will be able to see some examples of developing different features like:

• Activity aliases
• Adding custom shortcuts to Home
• Adding a new wallpaper chooser to the system
• Custom layouts
• Custom XML attributes
• Use of themes
• Use of styles
• Use of text colors
• Use of <include>
• Use of bitmap and layer drawables from XML
• Use of HttpClient
• Proper interaction between background threads and the UI thread
• Efficient display rotation (using the new onRetainNonConfigurationInstance() API)
• Animations and layout animations
• Cropping an image
• Image manipulation

For instance, you can learn how Photostream can add a new shortcut type in Home, to create a shortcut to any Flickr account. The shortcut shows a custom icon, downloaded from the Flickr user profile.

So these are great news if you are a Flickr/Android lover cause you will be able to access Flickr from your Android phone or learn about its development.

Via Android Developers Blog

Can you imagine that your phone could track your life, saving some of your visual and audio memories, and then showing them to you in a way that you can navigate through them easily?

This is a reality for NSeries users with the Nokia Vine mobile application. Nokia viNe works with the GPS, camera and media player, recording your location and movements and geo-tagging your photos and video, and the songs you listen to.

You can upload this captured information to the Nokia viNe website and access to them either on a timeline or on a Map. You can display your journeys online,  the web plots your route alongside your media, and also share them, filtering by user, place or time. There is also an online widget which you can place on your blog or Facebook page, allowing others to see what you’ve been up to.

This is a perfect tool for travellers, which help them to remember almost exactly how were their trips.

Vía Darlamack.

Two days ago Google launched its new web browser, called Google Chrome. Quickly lots of people downloaded it to have a try and see how it worked. After some testing time I can say that it does run fast. With high probability, the reason is the new browser engine it uses, launching each website and tab like a new process and in a smart and easy way.

But after testing it I thought “Ok but, will Google provide a Chrome version for mobile devices?”. And surprisingly I got an answer from Sergey Brin, Google co-founder, who talked about this in an interview at the Chrome launch event. In the event he said that Chrome will make its way to Android, the company’s mobile phone operating system and software suite.

Brin also said that both Android and Chrome have been developed separately but that now the two projects are public and nearing their first final releases, it’s probably that Android’s browser “is going to pick up a lot of the Chrome stack”, pointing to JavaScript improvements as one area. Chrome and Android’s current browser both already employ WebKit, an open-source project for the process of interpreting the HTML code that makes up a Web page and rendering it on a screen, what makes them get closer.

With this on-working state browser and the current mobile browsers, we start to have the chance to choose a web browser for our mobile device, although in some cases it depends on the O.S. our device has. Below you can find a little table with the current mobile web browsers, the O.S. they support and the development state.

I wish all these browsers were cross platform and then we could forget about our device O.S. and choose the one we like most even if we change our phone.

Via MobileCrunch

It can sounds funny, a mobile phone inside a handmade teddy bear, but it is real and it is more useful than it seems.

At the Good Design Award Expo 2008, Willcom displayed this prototype of Teddy Bear Phone.Running on the Willcom PHS network, the phone can be used by young children in hospital to contact their parents or grandparents quickly and easily at any time.

Functionality is very simply, pressing any of its extremities its make a call, can each be set to call a different phone numbers. Now children can easily call home to talk to mom and dad.

Japanese protect their children like no other,so it will be surely a great success.

Cute ^-^

Via DigInfo

This is maybe the best attempt from Nokia to beat RIM BlackBerry devices. It’s a mobile phone oriented for people who often use e-mail services. Because of that it includes a QWERTY keyboard to make this easier.

This device has some problems if you use BlackBerry e-mail service or Exchange server. Despite this, it will be a good device for everyone, thinking on this kind of user oriented devices.

Let’s talk now about some of its features:

• Design:
  It’s really compact (114 x 57 x 10 mm) to have a QWERTY keyboard, Nokia has adjusted the size of the device. It weights 127g, what added to its reduced size looks to be a compact and resistant phone.
  In the backside metal part has a useful grid that will prevent it from falls. Besides, just to say that it really has a “Blackberry” style, as we can see in the picture.



• Screen:
  The screen has 2.36 inchs and can display 16 millions of colours. This size looks right compared to the size of the device. It has a 320×240 pixels resolution what it’s nice, although in some applications like e-mail, a better resolution would help to access more information of each message, as Xatakamovil has previously posted.



• Keyboard:
  It has QWERTY system. Its compact size makes this device a little bit more “portable”, so that it’s not as big as its competitors (what can be a drawback for people with big hands…). It includes direct access keys on the top, which link to Home, Diary, Contacts and e-mail.

• Connectivity: it can connect via 3G with a 3.6 mbps HSDPA connection or via WiFi 802.11g. It also includes infrared system and Bluetooth 2.0 with these profiles: DUN, OPP, FTP, HFP, GOEP, HSP, BIP, RSAP, GAVDP, AVRCP, A2DP.

• Camera: it has a 3.2 megapixels (2.048 x 1.536) camera, with flash, autofocus and digital zoom.



• Battery: great news at this point, let’s the numbers talk. Up to 10 hours of speaking time, 20 days of non-use time and 18 hours of music playing time.

• Start screen: this is totally customizable. Actually you can configure 2 different start screens and swich them whenever you want. Eachone allows you to customize the direct access icons and even the information you want to be displayed on the screen like e-mails, WiFi networks…

• E-mail: it has a POP3 or IMAP oriented e-mail service that works perfect. It also supports Nokia Intellisync Wireless Email and Nokia Mobile VPN.

• Maps: it has a GPS receptor so with this Nokia phone you can navigate using Nokia Maps 2.0 and even search for restaurants or shops.

• Memory: it supports microSD cards up to 8GB size, and it has an internal dynamic memory of 110MB.

• Connectors: it has a micro-USB 2.0 port to connect your phone to the computer, and also an AV Nokia 2.5mm connector. The disadvantage of this port is that it’s not compatible with standard earphones, so that they are 3.5mm sized.

• Music: we can charge music files from the microSD card or from the computer via an USB cable. We can have the media player background working.

• Conclusion: good design, small size, powerfull applications… looks a great device, we are waiting it comes to our hands to play with it and give you more info and our non-technical opinion.

Pictures Engadgetmobile
Via Xatakamovil

If you want to take pics to things close to you without blurriness with your iPhone , here you have a non quite easy but useful mod to close-focus your iPhone 3G. People from Eastrain teach how to make it real in only 4 steps. Check it out :D

Read the rest of this entry »

We talked about Janus some time ago. Now, thanks to Simon Judge’s blog we get noticed that it has gone open source.

As is stated in project’s web page, “Janus Symbian Engine is a local http server (for Flash Lite) for Smartphones (S60), which allows developers to create engaging Flash Lite applications. It allows you to extend Flash Lite functionalities using simple local http calls”.

This approach tries to fill the gap between a rich and easy to code application framework that does not offer enough native functionality (Flash Lite) and a hard to code but rich in native APIs like Symbian S60.

I’ve heard about something similar talking about Symbian and J2ME, instead of Flash Lite… Some other people has worked with Python for S60… Anything to avoid coding Symbian.

My thought is that, while this kind of approaches may be valid for a concrete project, it can’t be taking into consideration as application platform architecture for production. The way to go is including rich APIs that provide access to native phone functionality in such platforms like JME and Flash Lite.

Via MobilePhoneDev
Link janus

Kinoma Play is the first true media browser for mobile devices under Windows Mobile. So it’s not just a browser, cause it allows you to browse media contents, search and playback. So with Kinoma Play, you can manage media files, share media through services or browse Internet, among other features.

One of these features is that you can listen to the radio on Live365.com cause both have teamed with each other. Another feature is the easy to use and beauty interface, which is inspired in a digital television. It also shows a list of videos from YouTube, and even have a good customer support. If you want to know more about what Kinoma Play can do, you can read what they posted yesterday in their blog, explaining its 101 features of the browser.

Let’s talk know about who launched this browser: Kinoma .They have launched two other products which you could be intersted on:

• Kinoma Player 4EX: it’s a media player for Palm OS. It allows you to find and play video, audio and pictures on your phone and over the internet.
• Kinoma Producer: this is a desktop application for Windows XP/Vista and Mac OS X, that allows to transfer media content to your Windows Mobile/Palm smartphone, Palm PDA, Sony PlayStation Portable or Apple iPod.

So Kinoma bring us good news related to media and mobile devices.

Via CellPhone Beat