"It's yet another in a long series of diversions in an attempt to avoid responsibility." - Chris Knight
Archive for the ‘Wireless’ Category
AT&T Adds Napster For Wireless Customers
October 22nd, 2007 by iDunzo
AT&T said this morning that it will soon make available a music service from Napster, allowing its wireless customers to download more than five million full-track songs on their mobile devices.
AT&T customers will have a choice of downloading five tracks a month for $7.49 with the Napster Mobile Five-Track Pack plan or purchasing songs for $2 each without the plan.
Napster Mobile will come with a feature that sends a music track to a mobile device wirelessly and at the same time makes a duplicate copy available for download to a PC.
AT&T claims it is the only wireless carrier in the United States that will let customers buy full-track songs wirelessly from both Napster, a mainstream nationwide provider of digital music, and eMusic, the largest retailer of independent music.
The carrier was the first to offer the iPhone, which has a built-in iPod for listening to music and watching video. iPhone customers can purchase music from Apple’s iTunes store.
As a comparison, songs on iTunes cost 99 cents each. Apple last week slashed prices on copy-protection-free songs from $1.29 to 99 cents.
Posted in Music + Software + Technology + Wireless | 
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French Law Means Unlocked Apple iPhones
October 17th, 2007 by iDunzo
The price is unconfirmed, but Orange, the exclusive carrier of the iPhone in France, will have to offer an unlocked version of Apple’s device to comply with French law.
According to Orange’s French website, the company is obligated to sell an unlocked version of any handset which is also sold as part of a subscription package.
The International Herald Tribune reports on the law “passed in 1998 barring network operators from locking new devices to a network for more than six months”.
It’s unlikely that even Apple will be able to squirm out of this, so expect a libere iPhone sometime next year.
It looks like France could become the hub for GodPhone exports (expensive, $560 exports, but exports nonetheless.)
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Apple iPhone Delayed in Canada
October 14th, 2007 by iDunzo
In the U.S., the iPhone trademark is owned by Cisco. Apple chose to work out a deal with them and avoided legal torpedoes.
Apple did manage to get the trademark elsewhere, with filings in Singapore and Australia bearing fruit.
In Canada, however, the mark has long been owned by Comwave, a telecoms company in Ontario.
Apple tried and failed to register the name there—but Comwave, unlike Cisco, won’t play ball on sharing the name.
“The force they put into marketing would quickly make the brand Apple’s and not ours. Co-existence is not possible.”
-Yuval Barzakay – Comwave president
Source: Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.
Yuval Barzakay added that it would effectively be hijacked by any such agreement:
What he’s saying, of course, is that is that everything has its price, but only if you want to buy it and he’s right.
Can you see Apple renaming the iPhone, or missing out on a market the size of California?
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Mozilla Is Promising To ‘Rock’ The Mobile Web
October 10th, 2007 by iDunzo
Giving the mobile Web browser competition a shot in the arm, Mozilla’s Mike Schroepfer said in a blog post that Mozilla has big plans for the mobile Web.
Yes, a mobile version of Firefox is in the works, and should be ready next year.
The post showed up in Schroepfer’s blog yesterday and outlined all of Mozilla’s mobile plans, including updates on its technology, hiring, products, and partners.
According to Schroepfer, there’s a lot in store.
From his blog post:
Up until very recently device limitations required writing new mobile browsers from the ground up. Being able to leverage all the investments in the Mozilla platform across both desktops and devices is the right approach. There is far from a dominant player in this marketplace and even the best mobile browsers today have compromises in user experience, performance, and compatibility. There is still *plenty* of room for innovation.
I agree, there is still lots of room for improvement.
Just yesterday Opera, Freescale and NEC announced their own plans to improve the mobile browsing and mobile video experience.
Mozilla is promising a better experience, too. It has hired two new developers to head its mobile services operations and plans to offer a mobile version of Firefox that is as close to the desktop version as possible.
Schroepfer said mobile Firefox will be able to run Firefox extensions on mobile devices and allow others to build rich applications via XUL.
Part of the reason Mozilla held off on entering the market was that mobile devices didn’t have the right memory or CPU specs to make Mozilla happy.
Now that many phones — and smartphones in particular — are shipping with more memory and faster processors, Mozilla thinks now is the time.
The iPhone’s Safari browser really raised the bar when it comes to the mobile browsing experience.
The Nokia browser, which is based on Safari also performs well. Google is working on a mobile browser. Microsoft already has a mobile version of Internet Explorer. Opera is stepping up the competition.
Mozilla will be a little late to the game, but late is better than never.
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TIFF Exploit Cracks Open iPhone and iPod Touch
October 10th, 2007 by iDunzo
Want to beta test a new iPhone and Apple iPod jailbreak?
You’d have to be crazy or rich to risk sacrificing your iPhone to this cause, but if you’re up for it, you can get in on the deal at channel #betatest on irc.toc2rta.com.
If those directions need further explanation, it’s a fair indication this is an experiment you should skip.
Engadget’s Ryan Block used the proposed mechanism in the wee hours of this morning and reports success.
The upgraded iPhone’s file system was unmasked last week, giving users read-write access to handsets running 1.1.1, but little in the way of usable beef.
The hack under testing, however, combines this with a second exploit based on a well-understood vulnerability in TIFF files, a popular graphics format.
It’ll be easy for Apple to crush this one in a future update, but it’s progress.
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An iPhone For Hackers: The OpenMoko ‘LPhone’
July 12th, 2007 by iDunzo
You would have to be deaf to ignore the screaming about the Apple iPhone that’s been filling the air for the past few weeks.
It’s a slick piece of hardware, sure but the amount of vendor lock-in that you have to accept to use it has alienated many people.
Meanwhile, back at the ranch, another company has been quietly gearing up to offer a completely different kind of phone.
That’s right, a mobile phone that’s as open to hardware and software hackery as the iPhone is closed.
It’s called the OpenMoko.
OpenMoko, a phone platform – devices and SDK, both – that is built on GNU / Linux software and is open all the way across the board.
The device is built from the ground up to be modified by its user base: Both the device itself and the software you load into it are fully documented. They want you to crack it open and have a good time with it and yes, you can even replace the battery unlike with the iPhone.
The device itself comes loaded with:
- a 640 x 480 touch screen
- 256MB of on-board flash memory
- WiFi
- a MicroSD card interface
- USB 1.1 connectivity
- integrated AGPS
- Bluetooth 2.0
And of course, there is quite a bit more to come with people hacking away at it. This phone has the potential to become any number of other things.
The basic, non-developer version of the phone is $300; the developer versions add another $150 to $200 on top of that depending on what versions you get – not a bad deal considering the thousands you’d normally have to spend to develop for any phone platform.
One of the key selling points for the iPhone is the user experience – how other phones or devices might do the same things, but they don’t do them quite like this, or all in one place.
In the same way, the OpenMoko is selling an experience, but one aimed at a totally different kind of audience – the hardware hacker and tech lover.
It’s akin to one of those electronics or chemistry hobby kits that you used to buy for the kids at Radio Shack – instead of building a transistor radio, though, you’re starting with a multifunction device which can be expanded out into any number of other things.
The question, though, is whether that’s a large enough market to be sustainable: They have to sell enough units to justify their manufacturing costs.
Also, how useful is the OpenMoko as a phone, especially in the United States? That part’s a big unknown until people actually take it out into the field.
The phone uses 2.5Ghz GSM, CSD and GPRS, so it’ll talk to most networks but many carriers get antsy when you try to bring in a phone they didn’t sell you and may charge you an activation fee.
And unless the OpenMoko is something the cell providers start selling in conjunction with their plans, layfolks are scarcely likely to even know about it.
Few people want to go through the hassle of dropping $300 for a phone they’ve never heard of with no guarantee it’ll even work on their network, for reasons that are wholly abstract.
Would I get one? If I hadn’t already just bought a phone, probably.
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