Tuesday, March 8, 2011

MobileCrunch

MobileCrunch

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New Mobile Tech To Identify Origin Of Fruit

Posted: 08 Mar 2011 04:44 AM PST

Did you ever ask yourself where the fruit you are about to buy in the supermarket comes from? If yes a new "fruit identification system", developed by NEC, might be the right solution for you. The technology allows you to identify the origin of a given fruit by taking a picture of it with your phone's camera. Read the rest on CrunchGear.


Prototype 64GB And White iPhones Surface In Hong Kong

Posted: 07 Mar 2011 06:40 PM PST


It looks like although Apple couldn’t make these special iPhones a market reality for a number of reasons, they did make at least a few, for testing purposes and the like, and they (or devilish good imitations) have turned up in Hong Kong. A 64GB version of the iPhone would have simply been too expensive: flash memory hasn’t really gone down enough in price, though that may change for the iPhone 5, which may include cost-saving measures as well as cost-increasing ones. As for the white iPhone, well, that’s a whole ‘nother story, ain’t it?

[via MICgadget and Electronista]

Handset Hackers Get Google’s Music Syncing Service For Android To Work A Bit Early

Posted: 07 Mar 2011 03:39 PM PST

Sometimes you just gotta do things because you can, you know? It’s the sign of being a true gadget geek. Lets say you stumble across the Music application that comes built into the Motorola Xoom and other Honeycomb Android tablets — you’ve just gotta install that on an Android phone to see what happens, right?

Turns out, it does some pretty cool stuff. XDA-Dev member WhiteWidows found an APK for Honeycomb’s Music app, Frankensteined it onto his rooted phone in place of the default app, and then popped into the settings menu. In there, he found a new option: Sync Music.

He tapped the box, and let it do its thing overnight. Morning came, and sure enough: all of his tunes had been synced to some mysterious server in the cloud, and could be played back without issue. Even with a brand new, fresh SD card in the slot, his tunes played back no problem.

Not bad for a service that hasn’t even been officially announced, right?

T-Mobile To Sell Optimus 2X As “G2x”?

Posted: 07 Mar 2011 02:47 PM PST


It appears that T-Mobile may be bringing LG’s powerhouse Optimus 2X handset to the states as part of the “G” series of flagship Android devices. The G2x, as the Optimus 2X would be called, would join the G2 and LG G-Slate as part of the “Google experience” device line started by the G1.

No word on pricing or availability. We’ll keep an eye out, though.

Microsoft Seeding Windows Phone 7 On Nokia With A Billion Dollars Up Front

Posted: 07 Mar 2011 02:21 PM PST

The strategic partnership between Microsoft and Nokia, announced in February, was regarded as auspicious by some and desperate by others, yet some specifics of the agreement were largely a mystery until today. Most notably, Microsoft was rumored to have led the partnership with hundreds of millions of dollars, outbidding Google (!) to woo the once-magnificent Finnish giant. Considering Google’s sights are increasingly set on the low-cost phone market, it’s interesting that they didn’t just write a blank check. Or maybe Nokia didn’t want to appear to be flattened underneath the Android machine. Either way, Microsoft won out in the end, and the settlement paid has been reported by Bloomberg to be over a billion dollars.

Considering the sums involved in control of even a small segment of the mobile world, a billion doesn’t even seem like much. But it is, of course, a billion dollars. The question is: even at that price, did Nokia sell itself short?

Nokia still has an impressive amount of brand strength, though nonstarters MeeGo and Symbian 3 have made that remaining brand an exceedingly precious resource. To be sure, as was discussed after the partnership was announced, a complete outsourcing of the OS to Microsoft sacrifices some of their brand, but in the end Nokia needed a competitive product, something they haven’t had for years. Strange, then, that they went to Microsoft, whose own mobile brand has been practically effaced from the earth, instead of the all-conquering Android. I’m sure they had their reasons. A billion of them, actually.

The upfront price being paid by Microsoft is an investment by a still-rich company that could pay itself off fairly quickly. A billion dollars is a lot of money, but it’s defraying the cost of R&D at Nokia, who then will pay Microsoft a license fee for every copy of Windows Phone 7 they ship. The agreement, according to the source (who cautions that it is not finalized), runs for five years.

Think about it. A billion dollars for a five-year partnership with Nokia? I think Microsoft is taking Nokia to school here.

Yet it’s a good thing for both, since by hitching their ships together, only one has to turn around to make it worth it for the other. On the other hand, the investment is lopsided in that if Nokia keeps going down, it’s still a coup for Microsoft, who will at the very least have shipped a few million more WP7 handsets than they would have otherwise. Microsoft loves to spend money on presence like that, and this billion-dollar purchase, while bigger than others it has made, is just the latest in a long line of similar moves.

There are some other provisions, less clear from this source, suggesting Microsoft is acquiring a number of patents and using some Nokia services in WP7. I’m afraid with Bing, Live, and Ovi, there might be too many cooks in the kitchen, but they’ve got time to work that out.

I’m hopeful, personally — not to say optimistic. Nokia just has so much inertia, and their mobile vision has always been so much different from Microsoft’s (both from WinMo and WP7), that I fear the product created will be a sort of worst-of-both-worlds monster. But with the wolves shooed from the door by this cash infusion and a little fire in the veins courtesy of executive mea culpas, they might just make something exciting happen. And if it doesn’t work out, hey, I can think of worse ways to spend a billion dollars.

Leaked RIM Roadmap Mentions BlackBerry OS 7

Posted: 07 Mar 2011 12:04 PM PST

Scanning from left to right on this leaked roadmap, things may seem a bit… unexciting, at first. The Flickr product is reaching the end of its life? Meh. TicketMaster 2.0? Mega meh.

But then you get down to the end of the right side, and it’s just chillin’ there all by its lonesome: “BB 7 SN Core Integration (OS 7.0)”

So, what the heck is that? To be honest, your guess is as good as ours. It’s obviously something to do with BlackBerry OS 7.0 (given that it, you know, says “OS 7.0″) — but to assume that this would be the actual launch of OS 7.0, as some sites are running with, seems a bit.. daft. That talk of “Core Integration” is just vague enough to leave us hanging — is it an internal target window where all devices being worked on internally should be running 7.0? Might this be when they begin sending out minor patches to prep devices for the migration to 7.0? It is, unfortunately, a bit of a mystery.

Hell, pretty much all of OS 7.0 is a bit of a mystery at this point. Outside of the fact that RIM was (at least up until recently) considering it a “stepping stone” to QNX (the platform that runs on the BlackBerry Playbook) rather than a complete jump, there’s really not much known.

[Leaked roadmap via N4BB]

Google Maps For Android Now Redirects You Around Traffic Automatically

Posted: 07 Mar 2011 11:27 AM PST

Google Maps for Android is almost certainly one of the greatest applications released in the past few years. It was already a pretty decent application — then Google went and added the free turn-by-turn Navigation feature, and it entered a whole new plane. Pretty much overnight, it went from being a nice little addition on Android handsets to be a market disrupting must-have. Neither the software competitors nor the hardware GPS guys really seem to know what to do next.

Adding insult to injury, the Navigation feature is technically still in Beta, and they just keep making it better. Today’s addition? Automatic direction adjustments aimed at routing you around traffic. Google pulls down real-time and historical traffic data, compares it to your current route, and calculates whether things like backroads and side streets will get you from A to B faster than camping out on the freeway might. You don’t even have to press a button.

Android users, your maps app should automatically start taking advantage of the new routing mechanisms. iPhone users (including yours truly) get to sit around and be jealous.

Rumor: New iPhone To Have Aluminum Back

Posted: 07 Mar 2011 07:56 AM PST

A long chain of rumor and innuendo point us to this mock-up of a potential iPhone 5 design with a metal back. Why a metal back? Maybe because the original glass was scratching too easily? Who knows, but that’s basically what this rumor is suggesting. It also seems to suggest that the antenna will no longer be external, thereby improving or preventing the Death Grip.

We’re so far from the actual iPhone 5 launch, at least in CE weeks, that we might as well be speculating about life on distant planets. However, we’re fairly certain the A5 chip will show up in the new iPhone and a design refresh mirroring the changes expressed in the new iPad are in order. Does that mean Apple will go totally metal? It’s anyone’s guess.
via Macrumors


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