Day: February 21, 2006

AT&T Inc. and Yahoo Inc. are launching a service that lets people use Cingular mobile phones to get access to their photos, e-mail, instant messaging and address books on their Yahoo accounts, AT&T said on Tuesday.The AT&T Yahoo Go Mobile service is part of the Yahoo Go brand, the Internet media company’s push to make its services available to users on a variety of devices from mobile phones to televisions.”It’s the first kind of baby steps toward this whole concept of an anytime-anywhere device,” said Matt Davis, director of consumer multiplay services at IDC, a market research firm in Framingham, Massachusetts. The phone also includes an MP3 music player and a digital voice recorder.Go Mobile, which will be available on the Nokia 6682 mobile phone, will be sold online, in AT&T’s 13-state service area and at some Cingular Wireless stores in Austin, Texas; Columbus, Ohio; and Los Angeles. Cingular, the nation’s largest wireless company, is jointly owned by AT&T and BellSouth Corp..The phone costs $199.99 after a $50 mail-in rebate from Nokia with a two-year subscription to a Cingular wireless service plan. AT&T also recommends that customers subscribe to its wireless data service. The unlimited monthly service costs about $19.99 a month, an AT&T spokesman said. via news.yahoo.com

According to market sources, Sony plans to release a version of its PSP (PlayStation Portable) using NAND flash from Samsung Electronics in the second half of this year. The PSP will feature 8GB of NAND flash, the sources stated.Although recent reports stated that Sony would opt not to use NAND flash in the next version of its PSP, and would instead use a microdrive, the sources indicated that Sony was stalling to negotiate better pricing from Samsung.When rumors circulated on February 16 that negotiations had broken down between Sony and Samsung, spot prices for 1Gbit and 2Gbit NAND flash dropped 5.3% and 3% in one day, according to the Chinese-language Economic Daily News (EDN).Deutsche Bank was also cited by the report as commenting that the failure of Samsung and Sony to reach a supply agreement will suppress NAND flash prices further and push oversupply to 10% this year.According to data from DRAMeXchange, 8Gbit spot prices have fallen from US$39 to US$34 since Chinese New Year, while prices for 4Gbit parts have fallen from US$23.36 to US$16.60 From digitimes.com via engadget.com

What’s new in iLauncher 2.3? * Captions Support * D-Pad navigation support * Look and Feel Customization * New Menu Replacement * iLauncher Settings Enhancements * Context Menu Enhancements * New True VGA hack option This option is intended for VGA devices only! * Additional Meters Path Selection * Command-line parameter support * Installer Changes * Fullscreen Mode Changes * Bug fixes and other enhancements Read more here:

British Sky Broadcasting (Sky) and Symbian announced that BSkyB selected Symbian OS for Sky by mobile, the interactive application which puts the UK’s leading digital TV service into the hands of millions of mobile phone users. Symbian develops Symbian OS, the market-leading open mobile operating system for advanced mobile phones, also known as smartphones, which is licensed to the world’s leading handset manufacturers. Sky by mobile, offers Sky digital and Sky Bet customers an value-added way to access Sky on the move at no extra cost. Once downloaded from Sky by mobile onto an appropriate 2.5G or 3G Symbian OS phone, users are presented with a viewing guide with the same look and feel as the Sky Guide, Sky’s electronic programme guide. The Symbian OS application offers a range of TV content, including sports, entertainment, news and weather and provides access to a wide range of interactive services including personalised news, sports headlines and ‘on the fly’ betting for Sky Bet account holders. In order to handle this large volume of real-time multimedia content in an effective way the application was developed using native C++ on Symbian OS to ensure the best user experience possible without compromising quality. Symbian’s market leading position underpinned Sky’s decision to select Symbian OS as the platform on which to develop its Sky by mobile application. As of Q3 2005, 13 handset manufacturers had shipped 48 million Symbian OS phones to over 250 major networks worldwide. Gartner forecasts that by the end of 2006 smartphone sales will reach 87m with Symbian OS owning 83% of the market share at 72 million. Sky by mobile is free to Sky digital customers in the UK and Republic of Ireland who subscribe to two or more premium channels or who have a registered Sky Bet account. via phonemag.com

The new Minimo is here. That would be the latest version of the Mozilla open source browser for handhelds. It’s Version 013, and it works on smartphones and PDS that are running Windows Mobile.Building on the success of its larger-screen cousins, it offers tabs for multiple open pages and a left-side screen bar with direct links to Google, RSS sites, and other popular Web destinations. A new interface completes the facelift, which is available for free download at the Mozilla website.Some industry observers have commented that the offering won’t make much of an impact in terms of dollars and cents because the number of people running devices powered by Windows Mobile is still rather small. Given the marketing muscle of Microsoft, however, that figure seems likely to rise. The Minimo update is, however, the next step in graduation from PC Web access to full-scale mobile Web access. Check it here: via mobilemag.com