What are the real changes you can expect in the Wi-Fi exerperience for the next 3-5 years?
My story on 8 ways Wi-Fi will be different is online.
I focused on likely developments related to silicon, to implementations of some IEEE standards in progress, and to some initiatives by the Wi-Fi Alliance.
I didn't include the two IEEE Gigabit Wi-Fi projects because I don't think they'll bear commercial fruit in that time frame. Read more
Computerworld freelancer David Haskin puts aside his antique Motorola Q phone, takes up the new Motorola Droid, and on a three-day roadtrip falls in love, geekwise.
"On the whole, it is as carefully designed, useful and fun to use as an iPhone. At last."
Setup for Google-based email and PIM data was "brain-dead simple." But " sideloading music to it from my Mac was an annoying process." Read more
After just a week on sale, and something like 100,000+ units sold, the Motorola Droid smartphone on Verizon now accounts for almost 25% of U.S. mobile browser traffic for Android-based devices.
That's the estimate by Web analytics site, Clicky, based on their analysis of mobile traffic on 150,000 Websites. Read more
A worm worms its way into some iPhones that have been jailbroken -- self-vandalized to run unauthorized software. But no worries, as they say in Austrialia, where the worm, called Ikee, was written by an out-of-work programmer who admitted he was a "little niave" about the resulting global digistorm. Read more
Verizon yesterday got kicked around the Internet for allegedly planning to charge business users of Motorola's Droid smartphone extra to access Exchange email behind the corporate firewall.
The only problem with that meme is that it's not true. Read more
[This is a slightly modified version of a news story appearing elsewhere on this Website]
The world got an apparently unplanned preview of the Android-based Droid phone when Motorola briefly posted online the official Web pages describing, and showing, the new 3G smartphone in depth.
The impression is that of an Android iPhone with a slider keyboard. Read more
[This is slightly modified version of a news story posted elsewhere on NetworkWorld.com]
RIM is expanding its effort to redefine the Web browsing experience for BlackBerry users. In a recent job posting on LinkedIn, RIM an expert C++ programmer firmly grounded in the open source Webkit browser engine. Read more
[This is a version of the news story posted elsewhere on our site.]
After waiting for 51 hours for T-Mobile and Microsoft/Danger to bring clarity, Sidekick users at 8:15 pm EDT Monday were treated to 254 words that boiled down to “we’re doing the best we can, and we’re willing to pay you $100 to be happy about it.”
It’s not going over well. Read more
T-Mobile's Sidekick users, consumers and business folks, are frothing at the mouth over the apparent permanent loss of contacts, calendaring, phone numbers, photos and other data from their mobile device. Read more
In a striking admission, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer told an audience of venture capitalists that Microsoft had "screwed up" with the Windows Mobile operating system. And that the group responsible for the OS had been restructured recently to address those shortcomings. Read more
Apple announced today that 2 billion software downloads have taken place in 12 months via it's App Store, the online catalog for iPhone and iPod touch software.
It reminds me of the old McDonald's marketing campaign, using the store signs to proclaim "over 1 billion [or whatever] sold!" Eerily, the McApple's press release echoes the current ad theme -- "I'm lovin' it"-- in the fast food chain's TV ads, with this quote attributed to Steve Jobs: "our users are clearly loving it.” Read more
If you read only yesterday's "exclusive" story on The Street.com website, based on anonymous sources, you know what happened -- Verizon has "snubbed" Palm, by deciding not to offer the Palm Pre smartphone in January 2010 as it had previously announced.
And that's how most everyone else in the news business is reporting what The Street.com "reported."
The only problem with this clarity is that, as the story itself notes, a Palm statement points out that the company never at any point said the Pre was going to be offered on the Verizon network. Read more
Palm is cancelling its reliance on Windows Mobile, which it adopted some years ago in an effort to expand the market for its handheld devices. Windows Mobile has powered the Treo line of Palm handhelds.
Instead, the device maker is raising the stakes on its future but focusing soley and entirely on the webOS operating system introduced earlier this year on the Palm Pre and most recently with the Palm Pixi. Read more
The newest version of the Android software development kit is now available.
Android 1.6 adds new telephony APIs for CDMA networks, additional screen resolutions including QVGA and WVGA, and a new virtual private network (VPN) control panel with support for a range of VPN types.
A list of highlights is posted on the Android site for developers. Read more
[This is a version of a breaking news story posted elsewhere on our site]
The new Apple iPod Touch uses a Wi-Fi chip that can support the just-approved high-throughput 802.11n standard, though Apple apparently has not switched on the cranked-up wireless link.
If it does, the iPod touch (which is almost identical to the iPhone but lacks the 3G cellular radio) could support a 50Mbps data rate, more than twice that of the current 802.11ag radios currently used by the product family. Read more
Earlier today the IEEE finally approved the 802.11n standard. The Wi-Fi Alliance will update its Wi-Fi testing/certification program by September 30 to reflect a few optional additions made to the standard since draft 2.0 was approved in early 2007.
The Alliance has been astoundingly successful in creating a new brand, Wi-Fi, and making it the widely-used shorthand for wireless connectivity based on the IEEE 802.11 standards. Read more
Earlier this week Microsoft unveiled some new code, and a new approach, that lets basic feature phones -- with limited RAM and processing power -- use a much wider array of mobile apps. Read more
I don't know about others, but I'm intrigued that Nokia is going into the netbook business. "Even if" the upcoming Booklet 3G will be running a yet-to-be-named Windows OS. Though my money is on Windows 7. (Nokia surprised a lot of people by recently announcing an alliance with Microsoft, otherwise known as Mordor.) Read more
John Gruber has stuck his neck out again at his Daring Fireball blog, this time with a post offering advice to Google and especially to Android device makers on how challenge successfully the iPhone.
The key point, he says: build a better phone. Read more
The Palm Pre shares with Palm some data from your smartphone: GPS location, applications, application crash data and so on.
Get out your tin foil hats.
The details of the data sharing were uncovered by a mobile programmer, Joey Hess, who posted about it on his blog. It's a straightforward account of poking around in the Pre's webOS and discovering what it was periodically sending up to Palm. Read more
Cox is a senior editor at Network World.
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