Aw, our little pseudo-smartphone is growing up. Gartner Research has been sufficiently wowed by the latest iPhone SDK and enterprise e-mail promises that as soon as the new software hits, they’re bumping the device up to “appliance-level support status”. Just get some copy and paste action, and we might be able to keep a straight face when calling the iPhone a smartphone.
Monthly Archive for March, 2008
ABI is tossing out a forecast that by 2012, one in three phones sold will be smartphones. Right now it’s closer to one in ten, so it’s not that crazy to imagine market penetration tripling over the next four years. Getting the right OSes down to mid-range handsets is one issue that carriers face, but the revenues to be gained from advanced data services are just juicy enough to necessitate the push. And as for the iPhone?
The report finds that the iPhone effect is truly filtering through the handset market as other OEMs strive to remain competitive. Features that look set to proliferate and become central to enhancing user interface experiences include touchscreens, touchpads, and accelerometers facilitating tilt and shock sensing, as well as haptics providing tactile feedback.
Unwiredview is reporting on a new patent filed by Apple for what looks like the iPhone 2.0: an iPhone-looking device with a transparent, touch-sensitive panel covering the whole display area. You can flip that panel open, making it a clamshell format, and the inside of the panel will change to the regular phone keypad. Apparently some folks just need their clamshell phones, so Apple is obliging. These pics have been made up by the Unwiredview guys (they’re talented, eh?), and the actual Apple drawings are after the jump.
HTC has filed a patent for a new type of slider phone that allows users to choose between keypad entry and full keyboard entry a-la-Helio-Ocean by sliding the screen at a funny angle. These mock-ups by UnwiredView give us an idea of what the final product might look like. Interesting idea, but it seems silly to make the screen so small when the keyboard already sets the footprint size. We’ll have to wait to see the final product, I guess, but you can see the sketches they submitted for the patent behind the jump.
Varioptic has teamed up with Seiko to begin mass producing liquid lenses for cameraphones, beginning Q3 of this year. Their first two models will be the Arctic 314 and Arctic 416, which are both 5 mega pixels in 0.33-inch and 0.25-inch modules, respectively. The two perks of these liquid-filled lenses are that they have a faster response time, lending themselves to improved video capture, and the draw less battery power, which is worth a thousand words.
Vox Mobile splits their offerings into three broad categories: Mobile Technology Management, Wireless Expense Management, and Professional Services. The first gets, configures, and deploys mobile devices — including, of course, the BlackBerry. The second fine tunes an existing setup, by managing bandwidth and other areas to reduce costs and increase service. Vox states that many businesses are overpaying in this area by as much 30%. Finally, their Professional Services offers to support and implement server platforms, including BES. Kind of a one-stop shop for enterprises. Their offerings at WES should be well worth checking out.
The folks at Tech2 posted about a white paper published on BlackBerry security, namely what is lawfully interceptible, and how to avoid hacking. Part of the paper is based on a prototype trojan that could be delivered to a BlackBerry on BES and leave the company’s server unguarded. It was developed by an information security company, who released the information to RIM before taking it public. The trojan, called BBProxy, works by allowing a hacker to essentially piggyback on any connections made to BES. Once installed on a BlackBerry, the hacker can connect to it via computer and have complete access to everything the BlackBerry connects to. The article does include some simple steps administrators can take to prevent it from working, but fair warning: it is heavy on IT-speak. Earlier security reports acknowledged the threat of Trojans on BlackBerry, but we’ve yet to see an instance in the wild…
WICKSoft announced yesterday that they now support Novell Teaming + Conferencing in their mobile document access (MDA) software. Teaming + Conferencing is a new enterprise level social networking tool which allows groups of users around the globe to quickly and easily share documents, calendars, files, and discussion forums, and as we all know, enterprise social networking is getting awfully popular. WICKSoft Mobile Documents already gives access to Word, Excel, PDF, PowerPoint, and many other document types.
It was rumored in early February that T-Mobile would be releasing the Wi-Fi equipped, Hotspot@Home compatible 8820 on March 5th. They obviously missed that date, putting an ominous looking TBD as the availability date. Thankfully, Engadget noticed that they’ve apparently settled on a March 24th release.
The team at SearchMobileComputer had a chance to sit down and talk with Mike Lazaridis, founder and co-CEO of RIM. Lazaridis talked about the recent outages, pointing out that, while the outages are lamentable, the company still has a 99.85% uptime and is gunning for four straight nines. The company came under a little fire for not getting word out as to the reason for the outage, but he dismissed this by saying that they were vastly more concerned with getting the systems back up ASAP than with reporting the cause. The article goes on to talk about Lazaridis’ thoughts on the iPhone, the advantages of RIM’s business model and their staying power in the industry.