TamsPPC – the Windows Phone Blog

MobiHand has just informed me of an important change in company policy which will allow their developers to compete more effectively in ultra-low-price markets. Their move comes at a crucial time as credit crunch and iPhone push application prices down – enjoy:

We are happy to announce a change of price limits intended to allow you greater pricing flexibility.

The current $3.95 minimum product price in the MobiHand Catalog is changed to a minimum selling price of $0.99 in MobiHand network stores and $2.95 in developer shopping carts.

Please do not set any product price less than $0.99 for sale in any MobiHand store.

If you use a MobiHand shopping cart in your website or application, please do not offer any price or discount that results in a net selling price in the shopping cart that is less than $2.95. If you need to sell any product for less than this amount, please contact us to arrange a modified shopping cart fee that allows us to meet your needs without incurring losses on individual transactions.

Even though I am not too motivated to lower my products prices as of this writing, the added flexibility definitely is nice to have. Congratulations to MobiHand…

I honestly wonder who still gives a darn about Verizon’s upcoming Touch Diamond now that the Touch Diamond 2 has been announced along with WM 6.5 upgrade and crappy default UI.

Nevertheless, the Boy Genius got some further information on the box’s specs. They are as follows:

* CPU: Qualcomm 7500A
* Speed: 528 MHz
* RAM size: 128MB
* Flash size: 256MB
* Display resolution: 480×640
* 3.2 megapixel camera with autofocus

Further information can be had here:
http://www.boygeniusreport.com/2009/03/07/verizon-wireless-htc-touch-diamond-gets-pictured/

So far, the Meizu M8 has not hit any analyst outside of the Chinese hemisphere…large news services like Engadget have covered the device frequently, but were not given a sample from the manufacturer itself.

However, an independent retailer stepped up to provide a sample…which got pretty favorable ratings:

…
At first glance, the build quality of the phone is actually pretty decent — it’s mostly plastic, but everything seems to snap together firmly. The battery (which is removable, naturally) is quite large, though we haven’t had a chance to test its life in any significant way. Of course, the real showpiece here is the software — which admittedly owes its entire existence to the iPhone. We’ve found that it’s quite snappy, and the styling and functionality of the UI is really kind of impressive (though this did spend a long time in the oven).
…

I personally feel that Meizu is on the best way to become the next GSPDA: this company had great Palm OS phones, but completely failed at letting prospective customers know of their existence. They managed to stick around for a few years, but failed miserably in the end…

Hit the link below for further shots:
http://www.engadget.com/2009/03/27/meizu-m8-unboxing-and-hands-on/

So far, Windows Mobile developers didn’t have to bother too much about getting their applications through a certification process…this particular and very annoying bit of work was – so far – limited to Symbian applications targeting S60.

As Sony Ericsson used to be an UIQ licensee, their latest move leaves me extremely perplexed and surprised…they have just unveiled a signing program specifically for XPERIA X1 panels.

The process involves a set of criteria and two test houses, and will cost a three to four-figure dollar amount per year (depending on the number of panels involved). Fortunately, unsigned panels will be penalized with exclusion from Sony Ericsson’s marketing venues.

From my personal point of view, this borders on total idiocy: SE has struggled to get developers interested in panels in the past. Introducing signage is very unlikely to affect this situation in a positive matter…which means that XPERIA X1 users should look forward to even less plug-ins in the future.

Further information can be had here:
http://developer.sonyericsson.com/site/global/techsupport/mobile2market/p_mobile2market.jsp

Dear Readers,
the box on the left side speaks a clear language: HP Austria finally managed to deliver our long-promised iPaq samples.

I am currently playing around with both Voice and Data Messenger, and expect the first parts of the review (unboxing) to go live before the maintenance downtime.

Stay tuned!

This is NOT an April Fool’s joke!
Dear Readers,
Our recent growth has caused major issues for our host Brainsware: there are now so many of you that our server architrcture needs to be changed in order to allow us to serve all of you as good as we aspire to do.

In order to do this, a maintenance downtime will take place on the 1st of April, from 22h to 23h local time. This translates to 13h00 in San Francisco or 16h in New York. During this time span, the following web sites may not be accessible:

• TamsPalm – the Palm OS / Web OS blog
• TamsPPC – the PocketPC blog
• TamsS60 – the S60 blog
• TamsWMS – the Windows Mobile Smartphone blog
• TamsIJungle – the iPhone / iPod touch blog
• TamsBlackBerry – the BlackBerry blog
• TamsPalm Germany

Afterwards, the Tamoggemon Content team will be honoured to welcome you again on our news services!

All the best
Tam Hanna for the Tamoggemon Content Team

I have no idea why handset designers keep playing around with their handset’s keyboards…the latest victim is a device designed by Samsung for Verizon (who will peddle it as Alias2):

The image above hits us via PhoneArena, with Engadget Mobile claiming that the keys are “identified” via an underlying E-Ink display.

As of now, no tests have been performed to determine the usability of this new input method. While I personally fear that the usability will be bad due to sub-par materials (this is said to be a cheap handset), I dare to say that this is the first keyboard idea which has impressed me.

Future devices using this technology could allow customers to dynamically adapt the keyboard layout of their devices, for example by replacing unpopular special characters with others he needs more often (I’d love to ditch some weird chars on my XPERIA’s keyboard for < and >, for example).

What do you think?

The folks at Opera’s have just released a flurry of information on the next version of Opera Mobile:

The Opera Mobile 9.7 Beta will include the following great features:

Improved rendering engine
Opera Mobile 9.7 Beta uses the Presto 2.2 rendering engine, which will also be used in the Opera 10 desktop browser. Presto 2.2 offers faster page loading, and we’re excited to use this state-of-the-art rendering engine and be at the forefront of standards support with 100/100 on Acid 3.

Opera Turbo
Finally we can show you Opera Turbo on mobile! Opera Turbo accelerates the browsing experience by reducing bandwidth consumption up to 80%. Many of you will be familiar with Opera’s compression technology from using Opera Mini, and with Opera Mobile 9.7 you’ll get the best of both worlds – a full-fledged browser with extra Turbo capabilities. It’s not the full version of Opera Turbo yet (yes, that’s a Beta feature in a Beta release), but we couldn’t wait to show you this cool feature.

Improved Widget Manager
Opera Widgets are small, handy Web applications that run locally on your mobile phone. Our new Widget Manager has improved usability and design, and runs independently from the browser.

Gears
Gears is a Google open source project that enables more powerful web applications, by adding new features to your web browser. Read more about Gears on Opera Labs.

OpenGL ES
Hardware acceleration with OpenGL ES support, ensuring smoother scrolling, panning and a more fluid user interface.

Also, we’ve tried to iron out some of the major issues with the 9.51 Beta, among other things:

• Installation on storage card is now possible, and the Beta happily coexists with preinstalled versions of Opera Mobile.
• Better IME support (although a lot of non-standard 3rd party IME applications still make this a difficult task).
• Better performance and feedback when clicking links.

Finally, a small video was posted showing the speed advantages of Opera(30 seconds) and Opera Turbo(10 seconds) over IE(2.5 minutes)

Even though Krusell does not have the strong online presence of other case manufacturers, they can easily be considered one of the largest case makers currently on the market.

As their products are mainly sold in brick-and-mortar stores, I am a fan of their monthly sales stats as they provide an insight into what “normal customers” (aka folks who don’t read pages such as this one ) buy.

Enjoy:

• 1. (1) Samsung SGH-i900/i910 Omnia
• 2. (7) Nokia 3109
• 3. (3) Nokia 6300
• 4. (2) HTC Touch HD
• 5. (8) Nokia E71
• 6. (4) Nokia E51
• 7. (10) Nokia 3120
• 8. (8) Nokia 5800
• 9. (5) Blackberry Storm
• 10. (-) Samsung M8800
   () = Last month’s position.

The top selling list for March reflects the growing trend where we see an increased demand for a well designed protection for smart phones, says Ulf Sandberg CEO at Krusell. The Omnia as well as Touch HD and the E-series from Nokia are good examples of precious devices that the user is anxious to protect, and to do it with style. The consumers are becoming more demanding and they don’t except solutions that doesn’t combine protection, user-friendliness and good design.
 
The Swedish manufacturer of carrying cases for portable electronics, Krusell, releases its “Top 10″-list for March 2009. The list is based on number of pieces of model specific mobile and smart phone cases ordered from Krusell during March 2009. Krusell’s list is unique due to the fact that it reflects the sales of phones on six continents and in more than 50 countries around the globe.

The BBC reports that the rumored plans for a next mandatory price cut will be decided upon in a full session of the EU Parliament April 24th the latest. Should the legislation pass, roaming mobile phone users can look forward to the following benefits:

by July 2009
Roaming costs, outgoing call: 43 cents/minute
Data: 1Euro/MB

by July 2010
Roaming costs, outgoing call: 39 cents/minute
Data: 0.80 Euro/MB

by July 2011
Roaming costs, outgoing call: 35 cents/minute
Data: 0.50 Euro/MB

Furthermore, SMS costs will be capped at just 11 cents for a single SMS transmitted all over Europe. Call billing will be per second, with an initial 30sec charge permitted.

Image: Wikimedia Commons / Lars Aronsson

The images below hit us via WMPowerUser, who post them without further commentary:

As I currently have no further information myself, I have to pass. Comments always requested though…
Image dump 1
Image dump 2

The folks at RedFly’s have just updated their drivers to add lossy compression and better support for TouchFLO 3D:

Change List – 3/19/09
It is important to note that this version of the REDFLY driver (01.04.00.147) has significant changes from the last beta build (01.04.00.147) and it is necessary to update both the phone and the REDFLY to insure proper compatibility.

The primary changes in this build are:

• A new compression mechanism has been implemented and it is found in a new tab in the REDFLY settings called Compression. This compression is turned off by default, but if you primarily connect via Bluetooth, we recommend turning this on. To do this, check the box that says Enable lossy compression. This will slightly reduce the image clarity on your REDFLY while significantly improving the performance speed of the data transferring between your phone and the REDFLY.
• Several improvements for the Touch Pro, Diamond, and Fuze phones have been implemented which significantly improve the interaction with TouchFLO as well as the phone dialer. If you normally have TouchFLO turned off, the longer delay to load the screen has been eliminated and assorted issues with Font size changing on the phone have been corrected. The larger-sized tool and menu bars however have not changed, and will most likely be released as they are now. We continue to work with HTC on this issue and perhaps a solution will become available in the future.
• The Epix camera no longer hangs when launched (in a REDFLY session)

As of now, the driver is still in beta stage. It can be downloaded at the URL below:
http://www.celiocorp.com/install/beta/

The folks at AdMob’s have just released this month’s Mobile Metrics report, which can be downloaded here (PDF file). Surprisingly, the Samsung BlackJack II was the most popular device, with other WMS devices in hot pursuit:

Looking at platform market share, we see a slight stagnation:

Unfortunately, Microsoft’s strategy of free OS upgrades didn’t quite work out. As of this writing, Windows Mobile 6.0 takes the lion’s cut, with both WM 5.0 and WM 6.1 having less than 25 percent market share:

P.S. Surprisingly, none of the listed countries had any WM devices in the top-20…

The Wall Street Journal reports that China has censored various US video sharing sites including our video host blip.tv and Google’s YouTube. The reason for the ban is short and sweet:

…
The latest YouTube ban coincides with the March 20 release by the Tibetan Government-in-Exile of a video allegedly showing Chinese forces beating Tibetans during protests that occurred in March 2008.

The video was also posted on Blip.tv, a U.S. video-sharing site that was also blocked Tuesday in China. The site urged the Chinese government to “embrace the openness of the Internet.
…

As the Tamoggemon Content Network is to remain free of political statements due to corporate policy, this post ends here.

Image: Wikimedia Commons, lightboxing by Tam Hanna

The Mozilla foundation recently managed to hire Palm’s Ben Combee, who is an absolute expert on all things related to mobile. One of the first eekers he tackled was a memory allocation problem which caused the last version of Fennec to render checkerboards instead of web sites on most handhelds:

Simply put, we were running out of memory. The frustrating part though, was that we weren’t running out of real memory. We were being constrained by an artificial limit of 32Mb (including the binary) that Windows CE places on each process. That is why otherwise extremely capable phones like the HTC Touch Pro with 288Mb of RAM were showing a beautiful checkerboard pattern. I’m still not entirely sure why this didn’t show up on our development devices before the release. I suspect it has something to do with the fact that we’re using unlocked HTC Touch Pros for development, while most of the testers seeing the problem were using handsets from Sprint, Verzion or AT&T.

Digging further, the reason people saw a checkerboard pattern, but otherwise usable UI is due in part to the way Fennec works. In Fennec, the user actually interacts with an html canvas element. We render the page off screen and then paint the image onto the canvas. In this particular case, it seems as though we were successfully rendering pages but failing to allocate enough memory to do the final paint onto Fennec’s canvas. We were handling this low memory “gracefully” and continuing to run.

Further information can be had here:
http://blog.mozilla.com/blassey/2009/03/23/memory-dragon-slain/

P.S. No new release has been made available as of this writing…