TamsPPC – the Windows Phone Blog

In what can best be considered a confirmation that Windows Mobile 7 will be optimized for capacitive touchscreens only, the Russian department of HTC has posted and quickly retracted the tweet below:

Engadget contributes the following translation:

For Diamond 2 firmware is not planned. Of the existing communicators on the market, only the HD2 firmware to get WM7.

This tells us two things: first of all, owners of a Touch Pro 2, Diamond 2 and Snap will be left in the rain. Secondarily, there seems to be not too much of a future for the WMS…

Finding out about the direction which Windows Mobile 6.5 will take is easy – loads of leaked ROMs have hit sites like xda-developers over the last months. Rumors of a special “WM 6.5 for finger” have been around some time – but have not been confirmed officially so far.

However, the shot below is almost better than an official confirmation:

As of now, Microsoft has not removed the relevant passage – it can be seen below:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd721906.aspx#CreatingWidgetMenus

Network issues have plagued carriers all over the world. After AT&T made headlines, the issue is now more or less universal.

An FT.com interview now quoted a O2 head as follows:

…

The head of O2 has apologised to customers who could not make phone calls because the mobile operator’s London network was overwhelmed by bandwidth-hungry smartphones.

…

O 2 ran into difficulties in the capital during the second half of 2009 as customers with smartphones such as Apple’s iPhone ramped up use of applications that repeatedly pull data off the internet at short intervals.

…

Even though the iPhone definitely is a bandwidth hog, reports of O2 bandwidth issues were covered by industry journals like Mobile ever since 2008.

IMHO, the iPhone is not to blame – instead, blame the overselling of mobile broadband. Today, many households are sold mobile bandwidth rather than wired service and a WiFi router without actually needing it.

This causes large-style network loads (think Windows updates) which are completely unneeded – and much more significant than one or two iPhones.

IMHO, the iPhone is used as a scapegoat here – what do you think?

Image: Wikimedia Commons / HMRC

It doesn’t take more than a few brain cells to predict that Microsoft will eventually merge its Windows Mobile, Zune and other teams into one gang in order to fight the ever-raising competition. Steve Ballmer has even acknowledged this in the past…

The latest proof comes in the form of the job ad below, which reads as follows:

Xbox LIVE involves a lot more than building software. It’s about changing the way people have fun, interact and live. Help us create and deliver the most advanced online entertainment service on the planet. At Xbox LIVE, we’re accelerating the trend towards connected, social interactive entertainment by designing incredibly rich, multi-platform game and community experiences. We’re connecting players via the LIVE services on new devices beyond the console. We need a Principle Program Manager who can help drive the platform and bring Xbox LIVE enabled games to Windows Mobile. This person will focus specifically on what makes gaming experiences “LIVE Enabled” through aspects such as avatar integration, social interactions, and multi-screen experiences.

…

Any takers?

Whether you like it or not: China is a huge market for cell phones. Unfortunately, getting statistics on the market is somewhat difficult – which is why having China Mobile talk on 3G handset sales is especially interesting.

Marbridge Daily claims the following distribution:

…
8% of procured handsets run Windows Mobile, 16% use the Symbian mobile OS, and 4% use Apple’s iPhone OS, while the rest operate either BREW or the manufacturer’s self-owned OS.
…

So much for the death of Symbian and the dominance of iPhone / BlackBerry…

Image: Wikimedia commons / Edzhgz

Usually, it takes a few weeks until a newly-announced device starts to get cheaper. LG’s eXpo seems to be in low demand – Amazon has just started the rebate fights:

In case you feel like one, feel free to hit the link below:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B002ZNJO34

Looks like the ebook game has just started off for good – Amazon reports that it sold more Kindle books than hardcopy books on the 24th of December.

The release goes as follows:

Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN) today announced that Kindle has become the most gifted item in Amazon’s history. On Christmas Day, for the first time ever, customers purchased more Kindle books than physical books. The Kindle Store now includes over 390,000 books and the largest selection of the most popular books people want to read, including New York Times Bestsellers and New Releases.

…

Not much to add here…

As the web gets more and more interactive (AJAX, anyone?), having a fast JavaScript engine is one of the key elements in delivering a good web experience. On the desktop, browser makers work hard on optimizing their JavaScript engines due to public scrutiny – in mobile, this effect has not taken place so far.

Our friends at NS Basic Corp’s have performed a little benchmark of the various browsers, and ended up with the results outlined below – faster means higher score:

Anybody of you surprised by any of the results?

Microsoft’s MyPhone has a variety of features. Don’t ask me why, but CBS focused on the “lost phone recovery features”.

An AT&T Pure was connected to MyPhone, and was then left on a cab. Even though the GPS failed to lock for some reason or another, displaying a message with the phone’s owner did the trick – the phone got back to its rightful owner with some help from a friendly individual.

Even though this is likely a staged test, the full video is below:

Watch CBS News Videos Online

As our smartphones got faster and faster CPU’s, their capabilities as emulators became bigger and bigger. Nintendo’s Gameboy fell first – and it looks like it’s now the original PlayStation’s turn.

Developer ludovic has just released an update for his Playstation emulator for Windows Mobile – FpseCE v0.10 adds the following features:

FPSEce v0.10 – Dec. 23, 2009
• Completely rewritten core and interface!
• Faster!
• Supports many new games
• Supports g-sensor on Toshiba TG01, more to come
• Touchscreen analogstick emulation
• New on-screen multi-touch button-assignment
• Supports some bluetooth-gamepads (i.e. BGP 100)

Further information can be had at the developer’s web site:
http://fpsece.net/

When it comes to smartphone battery life, the key method for increasing battery life is disabling unneeded functions like GPS, WiFi or Bluetooth. But the question remains: does turning off feature X really pay off, or is it better to leave it on for greater convenience?

The folks at AllAboutSymbian’s used Nokia’s freely available Energy Profiler to find out which feature drains how much power – they compared the amount of power needed before and after turning on the feature, and then posted the resulting charts.

Even though the figures were obtained on a Nokia N96 and thus can’t be interpolated to other devices (for example, larger screens tend to drain more power), they are nevertheless interesting – get the full load at the URL below:
http://www.allaboutsymbian.com/features/item/How_to_Know_how_…

It’s the end of the year. This means next to no news, and loads of top-XYZ lists.

While we usually ignore these beautiful critters on the Tamoggemon Content network, Gizmodo’s most-useless gadgets of the decade list struck my interest.

While most of the victims are weird, largely useless gadgets, the following boxen also made it on the list:

• Sony Clié PEG-NZ90 (IMHO undeserved)
• Nokia N-Gage (all incarnations)
• AppleTV (oh, the horror)
• Motorola Q9m (not sure about the Verizon UI)
• Omnia II (IMHO undeserved)

Feel that the ratings are justified? Let us know in the comments!

WiMAX has been a topic for some time – HTC’s first-ever WiMax box hit the road over a year ago in Russia.

BrightHand reports the following:

Sprint and LG’s phone division have invited journalists to an event at the CES tradeshow next month, where the two will apparently announce a smartphone running Microsoft’s Windows Mobile OS that can connect to WiMAX networks.

This isn’t directly spelled out in the invitation, but it does say the event will be “showcasing Sprint’s 4G leadership.” Unlike all of its competitors, this carrier is using WiMAX as its 4G standard.

In addition, Steve Ballmer, the CEO of Microsoft, will be speaking at this event.

…

From my point of view, there’s little to add to the report above – looks like the WiMax games will start in the US soon…

Don’t ask me why, but it looks like politicians in the US seem to have a collective alcohol problem, which gets magnified in the Winter due to the availability of various warm hard liquors.

Nope, I am not sarcastic – after the idiocy in Maine, we now have somebody wanting to force retailers to print SAR labels as big as device prices onto the device labels.

SFGate claims the following:

…

San Francisco would become the first city in the country to require that cell phone retailers label the devices with the level of radiation they emit under a controversial proposal being discussed at the Department of the Environment and endorsed by Mayor Gavin Newsom.

…

Anyone of you want t bet that we will see something dumber in a few days?

Market research firms like AC Nielsen make their money by providing survey data to paying customers. However, these must be attracted – in order to do that, they sometimes give the press free sample data. The latest such sample concerned the most-used phones in the USA. This data is not sale-, but rather usage-based.

The results will be surprising for most of us – RIM and Apple are the only smartphone makers whose products made it into the top-10:

via NielsenWire