This week in wireless:
Our test of WLAN site survey tools assesses 8 products for positioning your access points for optimal coverage and capacity. Craig Mathias ran our Clear Choice Test, focusing on prediction tools that simulate the RF environment and analytical tools that assess real-world RF data. Both can have a place in the enterprise, Mathias says.
Computerworld guest opinionator Paul Lamb sees exciting things emerging when “Social media takes to the streets." You know this is important because he’s come up with a new acronym: SoMo for social mobile media. Much of the new advances is related to GPS technology, which is emerging as an enabler of brand new applications. Using coordinates, software makes location a dynamic relationship between people, who might or might not know each other. He’s got summaries and links to some intriguing SoMo applications. The disturbing aspects: SoMo affinity to be exploited by mobs, governments, and of course advertisers.
Yoni Heisler’s iOnApple post about how the iPhone is luring away BlackBerry users has sparked a storm of opinions. He cited a couple of analyses that suggest BlackBerry may not be as addictive today as it used to be, with current users willing to consider other options.
Something more with your nifty new smartphone: mobile spam. Cloudmark has released its MobileAuthority software to carriers to identify and disable spam messages in real time. The company cited its own market research to back up its claim that two out of every three mobile users in the U.K. have already experienced unwanted messages.
T-Mobile will release in August it’s second Android-based smartphone, HTC’s myTouch 3G, for the carrier’s UMTS and Wi-Fi networks.
The dismemberment of Nortel continued this week.The bankrupt network equipment vendor accepted a $500 million bid for its CDMA and LTE equipment business from Nokia Siemens Networks. The move will give a boost to the European-based infrastructure vendor in its battle for marketshare with front-runners Ericsson and Huawei, and give it a much-needed foothold in the U.S. market. Check out Tim Greene’s FAQ on the state of Nortel.
Intel and Nokia got cozy, teaming up to jointly create new mobile chipset architecture and new mobile device platforms to run them. Intel lags far behind ARM in the mobile chip market: ARM chips run most of the world’s smartphones today. The other big opportunity is for portable Internet or Web tablets or netbooks. The two vendors said they’ll work together on several open source mobile Linux projects.
You now can tie your enterprise BlackBerry smartphones into corporate PBXs and let them shift voice calls between cellular and Wi-Fi connections, with new code from Agito Networks. Agito’s router appliance and new BlackBerry client will now support the most popular recent BlackBerry devices.
Joanie Wexler did some comparative research on how Wi-Fi vendors price their wireless hardware and software. Guess what? It’s really, really confusing. Find out what varies and how.
Sprint preaches the Palm Pre to enterprise IT. The carrier reveals Palm is preparing a battery of new software features to make the Pre more secure and manageable for enterprise users.
Except for the beneficial effect on its stock price, Palm will have to wait another quarter to see how and whether the Pre boosts revenues and profits. Palm announced Q-4 and year-end financial results this week. Bad news: its loss widened…a lot. Good news: not as much as had been feared.
Cox is a senior editor at Network World.
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