Thursday, June 5th, 2003
Sneek peak of Treo 600
Treopolis (german site) spotted the new treo 600 on a recent press release photo.
Are J2ME plug-ins possible?
Russell beattie complains that j2me isn’t based on a plug-in architecture. He writes about the lack of updates for current j2me devices and that many modern smartphone-os (like ppcpe, palm os and symbian) would be perfectly capable of this, but i think he misses an important point: Most people don’t use smartphones and most likely never will.
J2me is a technology focused on a wide range of cellphones, and above all (and in contrary to pcs, pdas and smartphones) cell phones are simple consumer products. Most people don’t care about firmware updates or system software, they just want their poly-ringers and some neat color games purchasable ota. They don’t need a smartphone for that, a simple consumer phone in the sub-300-euro-class fits as well, and phones in that category don’t use a flexible os or powerful hardware. Updating the j2me virtual machine on such a device is pretty much out of question at the moment. Therefore you have to establish a "frozen" platform and focus on major updates over relatively long time periods (perhaps every new phone generation) as sun did with the midp 2.0 specification.
If you want to target an as large as possible target group with your software you have to deal with that and be grateful that sun layed out the necessary infrastructure to deliver and sell software to cell phone users.
However, as a 7650 owner i agree that it’s a shame that there’s no possibility to upgrade your j2me version on a real smartphone like nokias series 60 devices.
Update: though i don’t agree with the j2me plug in idea russell got a lot of good points on suns treatment of midp 2.0 and personal java. I vote russells blog best read of the day.
Wednesday, June 4th, 2003
More info on Palm-Handspring merger
Brighthand got an excellent article on the merger that covers some yet unadressed issues (e.g. that palm won’t drop the treo productline, but add it to its existing zire and tungsten line). They also have a nice background article on the history of palm and handspring and their relation.
Nokia launches 7250i
The original 7250 is just taking off here in austria and there’s already a revised version? Pissing off early adopters isn’t that smart, is it? I mean, they are willing to spend way too much money on new toys and help to bring new devices to public attention better than any marketing campaign. There should at least be an upgrade-possibility.
Pics of fake iPhone ad
Pics of the fake iphone ad mentioned before have appeared on the mac rumors forum. The mock-up heavily resembles the sony ericsson t610 (i made the comparison pic above to illustrate that; pic of iphone design concept was taken from the mac rumors forum). It doesn’t look bad, but i like the design of the t610 better. That wheel is way too big and whoever made this up apparently forgot to add appropriate softkey buttons.
Palm acquires Handspring!
After reading the news @infosync i couldn’t believe it, but after visiting palms website all doubts were gone: palm announced the acquisition of handspring! I’m a bit shocked and don’t really know what to say, but i suppose eventually i’m glad that handsprings technologies found a new home, handsprings future looked anything but bright recently. However, i’m a bit confused what that means in regards to the treo 600. Will palm pull the plug? Or was it just a hoax (afaik it’s still not officially confirmed)?
Tuesday, June 3rd, 2003
Rumors of iPhone
I believe it’s a hoax (and macrumors posted it as a ‘page 2′ rumor), but i’m just too fascinated of the possibility of this being true:
"A Macintouch reader claims to have seen an advertisement for an Apple/Sony-Ericcson phone in a "new" Mac Magazine called "iCreate" in the U.K.".
Should be easy to proove, i wonder that nobody got a scan online, yet. Sure, steve jobs recently said "We didn’t think we’d do well in the cell phone business.", but that doesn’t necessarily mean that apple won’t design a phone for another manufacturer.
Update: the ad appears to be a concept design by the magazine. How cruel.
New Handspring Treo shown
Pic got details of the new handspring treo 600, featuring palm os 5, an arm processor, camera, sd-slot and a thumbboard. No pics available yet.
New Apple software benefits (smart)phone users
Apple today announced new versions of quicktime and isync.
Quicktime was updated to version 6.3 and now supports playback of 3gpp files, a common video format used by camphones like the nokia 3650 and nokia 7650.
With isyncs update to version 1.1 it now supports over 20 different phone models by the big players in the phone business, namely sony ericsson, motorola, nokia and siemens. The new supported phone line-up is impressive, but there are still huge gaps: many popular models by nokia are still missing, currently only nokias series 60 devices (3650, 7650) are supported. Furthermore, there’s no support to sync the calendar with series 60 phones yet (though it’s announced to be coming soon).
It’s funny to see how well apple cooperates with other mobile device manufacturers while microsoft can’t even come up with decent sync-software for their own ppc- and smartphone-devices, let aside that they would never go for the consumer benefit of directly integrating support for concurring mobile operating systems.
I now want a mac more than ever, if only apple could add spdif to its powerbooks anytime soon…
Monday, June 2nd, 2003
Multimedia jukeboxes
Gizmodo reports of a new multimedia jukebox by archos capable of playing videofiles. Another multimedia jukebox by arc is featured at i4u. Though it looks like we won’t see a video ipod anytime soon i’m glad there are other manufacturers willing to fill the gap. I just hope that hard disks will make it to pdas soon.