Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer unveiled Windows Phone 7 at the Mobile World Congress 2010 at Barcelona some hours ago. While we are not likely to see any devices running the new OS until much later in the year, our brief look at the presentation told us quite a few things about the new phone OS. These were the seven we thought were the most notable:
Posted by Varun Aggarwal
Gmail app for mobile phones has been there for a while and to be honest, it was pretty useful too. But as they say, all good things come to an end! Trying to offer more features in its Gmail mobile app, Google started offering push e-mail. The new service offers offline e-mail access but only to a limited number of mails-irrespective of how many mails you retrieved from the server. It still does not allow to send attachments and enables downloading only a few types of files from the e-mails to the phone. E-mail alert is offered but only a vibration alert–no sound! I guess Google doesn’t like to make too much of noise these days. Continue reading »
Posted by Morpheus
Nokia’s top Marketing officials recently gave the crown for today’s most successful phone to Nokia E71. Being an early user of the device, I felt that this might mean more apps available for the device. Usually you get an endless number of apps for most Nokia phones, but apprarently this particular handset, because of its uncommon screen size, is not supported by most apps. However, getting this positive sign from the company, I went to Nokia’s Web site to check out the apps available for E71.
On the Nokia E71 page of the Web site, all the apps available are still the same ones that came preinstalled with the phone, that too in the same version. While, I have already discussed my misadventure while trying to upgrade this device in an earlier post, I realised that perhaps Nokia has diverted all its attention to the N series as far developing apps is concerned. Continue reading »
Posted by Nimish Dubey
Nokia has been advertising its recent enterprise device the Nokia E71 as one that is suitable for both work and play. A jack of all trades of sorts. While there can be no doubting the quality of the device purely in enterprise terms, the claim that it is good for work as well as play really does not wash. The device is magnificent when it comes to handling e-mail, viewing and editing longish documents (I still wish it had a larger screen) and offers decent GPS and a not-too-bad camera (rumours of the purple haze notwithstanding). So when it comes to work, it scores. But play? Ah, that’s another story. Continue reading »
Posted by Morpheus
Any new electronic device is extremely exciting as long as you have more to explore in it. Once you’ve extensively explored all the features of a device, you often crave for more. A firmware upgrade can sound like a savior in such a situation. But, what do you do when after hours of struggle to upgrade the device, you’re unable to see any visible change!
When I bought my E71, about 2 months ago, I was pretty excited to explore all its features. But soon enough I was craving for more and unlike other phones from Nokia, this device had very few free apps available. Last week, I heard about a new upgrade for the device and got really excited about it. However, the entire upgrade process was nothing less than an adventure. Continue reading »
I wrote a piece in The Hindustan Times, Delhi’s No. 1 daily newspaper and one of the leading ones in the country. The title of the same was ‘Making Money in a Mobile 2.0 World.’ You can read the online version here, or continue reading the text of the piece in this post itself.
For nearly a decade now, the mobile has been promising to deliver much more than just voice and text messaging – only to have its true potential always being two years away. So while the operators have been having it good with over three billion subscribers globally, democratisation of this platform has not been possible in the true sense allowing other application and service providers to make inroads and make money. But this may finally be changing. Welcome to the Mobile 2.0 world, offering commercial opportunities in a way even the old desktop Internet could not.
Why is this sounding possible? To put it simply, the dots are getting connected to make a pretty picture for all involved. This is how: Continue reading »
They say men don’t stop to ask for directions. Or was it women who do that? Either way, neither may need to anymore in India. Yahoo! India has introduced driving directions and community search on its existing Yahoo! India Maps. What this means in theory is you could be driving in a country of poor road signs and no longer land up in Ranthambhore when you are headed to Bharatpur.
A feature available for many years in developed countries, you could call this somewhat revolutionary in India. The service enable users to search for directions between 179 cities, 4767 towns and 226114 villages – as well as search for about three million points of interest marked by Internet users from around the web. Continue reading »
CNN IBN, a leading news channel in India and pioneer of Citizen Journalism in the country, has gone a step further now: Anyone can now send in videos and images taken from their mobile phone to their Citizen Journalism account on the channel’s website IBNlive.com over MMS without the need for a PC. The enabling partner for the same is a start-up Mobshare.in, a mobile social network.
The service will go live in 15-20 days, confirmed Mobshare’s COO Sony Joy in an exclusive chat with TechGazing. All one needs is a GPRS connection to send videos directly to one’s account on IBNlive. There is also a feature to send an alert to one’s friends over SMS, with a link which can be clicked on for viewing on the recipient’s mobile itself says Sony. All this makes sharing very easy, especially for those who do not have access to a PC. Continue Reading
Your mobile network offers you internet access, and your handset enables you to connect. Why are you still a reluctant user? Too complex to use and you don’t know how much it will cost?
If these are the reasons, join the over three billion mobile users globally who feel similarly – the ones who don’t have an iPhone on the AT&T network in the USA. These players have shown the way to success in the Mobile 2.0 world feels Steve Boom, Yahoo’s Senior Vice President for broadband and mobile, who I interacted with in Macau at the GSMA’s Mobile Asia Congress.
Steve made some thought provoking remarks on how use of net on mobiles can go up, benefiting operators, application providers like Yahoo and consumers. His take: For the last nine years, he has been feeling the mobile internet boom is always two years away. And the reason for these unkept promises? We have not been able to develop a holistic user model which takes care of the following: Continue Reading
Your camera enabled smartphone can mean one gadget less to fidget with – you can do away with the webcam if you decide to use WWIGO from Motvik. The product is certainly on the upswing, going by what Motvik’s co-founder M.Thiyagarajan had to say in an exclusive chat with TechGazing. What he has not shared are how they plan to generate revenues. Excerpts:
How would you describe your product?
WWIGO (pronounced ‘vigo’) is our flagship product and stands for ‘Webcam Where I Go’ and also describes the nature of the service. It is a software application residing both on the PC and the phone that transforms a cameraphone into a webcam for use with applications such as Skype and YouTube. Our target user is anyone with a smart camera phone but currently the product is available with Nokia phones only. Continue Reading
One of the biggest advantages offered by BlackBerry devices was the fact that they gave users a superb emailing experience. A particular strong point was push mail – the feature that sent a mail to a mobile device the moment it arrived in the user’s inbox. So popular was this service that a number of cellular service providers (Airtel, Hutch, etc.) even offered it for non-BlackBerry devices. If push mail had a catch, it was its price. One had to shell out a monthly rental to one’s service provider to avail of it. Read on to know more about alternate options, all free
The next buzz in town may well be about mobile phones as your medium to deliver advertising. This may mean another complexity to a media planner’s spreadsheets but, if it takes off, it could well address a lot of needs for advertisers. Read on…
