Posts Tagged ‘iPhone’

Voice over Internet Protocol service provider Vonage on Monday announced that it has launched its first mobile apps for the iPhone, iPod Touch, and BlackBerry devices.

Dubbed Vonage Mobile, the company’s free VoIP app enables users to place international calls from their mobile devices. iPod Touch owners can do so by placing calls through Wi-Fi. BlackBerry owners will transmit calls over the cellular network only. iPhone owners will be able to place calls from Wi-Fi or through AT&T’s network.

According to Vonage, its app will help users save up to 50 percent on international calling charges levied by carriers. After downloading the app, users need to enter an international number. They can also select a call recipient from their existing iPhone or BlackBerry contacts list. Those who receive calls will see the user’s cell phone number on their caller IDs. Charges will be taken against the user’s credit card, which they need to input when they first start using the app.

For now, Vonage is offering per-minute rates. The company said in a statement that by the end of the year, it will offer the Vonage World plan to users. Vonage World for home users currently allows them to make calls to more than 60 countries for $24.99 per month.

Vonage’s app launch comes on the heels of controversy over whether Google’s similar Voice app should have been denied access to Apple’s App Store. The debate still rages on.

Vonage’s new mobile app is available now in Apple’s App Store and Research In Motion’s BlackBerry App World. Both versions are free.

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http://news.cnet.com/8301-13506_3-10367280-17.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-20

Three weeks ago, I got a call on a friend’s iPhone while in the middle of a desert; cell phone coverage had come to Burning Man. By contrast, several calls I made last night to my parents from my San Francisco apartment were dropped and a subsequent connection became garbled.

That happens daily when I try to converse on my first-generation iPhone in my apartment and in certain other neighborhoods. I’ve come to anticipate that if I can even make a call it’s likely to be short-lived or poor quality.

Frustrated by the numerous interrupted calls, I decided to try to find out why my iPhone service is so poor that it’s easier to have a Web video conference over AIM with my boyfriend because neither of us can use our iPhones (his is 3G) reliably inside either of our homes.

This is not a new problem. AT&T was criticized when traffic from attendees at the South By Southwest conference in Austin, Texas, overwhelmed the network earlier this year. And there were widespread complaints about dropped calls and spotty service after the launch of the iPhone 3G a year ago.

I wondered why, a year later, the service still seemed unreliable. I called AT&T (on my reliable landline at work) to find out. AT&T spokesman Mark Siegel blamed the problem on the increasing amount of data traffic iPhone users are creating, which CNET News and others wrote about earlier this month.

“We lead the industry in smart phones,” he said. “As a result, we are having to stay ahead of what is incredible and increasing demand for wireless data services.”

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The long awaited flood of Google Android devices is about to hit the market, which should help bring more cool applications to new Android phones.

Motorola will be the next big manufacturer to announce its Android phone. The company plans to formally unveil it at an event on Thursday in San Francisco. Motorola has already been reaching out to developers to get them on board to create new applications that it hopes will drive demand for the new phones.

Mobile applications for smartphones are hot. The fact that Apple’s App Store has had more than one billion downloads after only being around for a year means that smartphone users are hungry for applications that make their phones more useful and fun. But developers, whether they are large or small, have limited resources and time, and they must choose which platforms to develop applications for first.

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On August 11, Randi Levin, the chief information officer of the city of Los Angeles, stood before City Council members at a hearing of the information technology committee and made her case for why the nation’s second-largest city should adopt Google Apps.

“The ability to get whatever information the city needs, whenever they need it, on whatever device they need it on will fundamentally change the way the city works and enhance productivity greatly,” she said. “In a fiscal crisis it is difficult to find technology solutions that will save money without requiring a significant capital outlay to achieve those objectives.”

Security concerns have kept many government agencies and large corporations away from Google Apps. That is starting to change. A number of small U.S. cities are using the suite and there are Google Apps pilots in more than a dozen federal agencies. If Los Angeles signs on, it would join the District of Columbia as one of the largest government adoptions.

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CNETNews Los Angeles gets its Google Apps groove http://bit.ly/4ptPH3

When you want to listen to music from your computer or your friends’ collections on your iPhone, Simplify Music is one solution. On Wednesday, Simplify Media introduced a similar iPhone application called Simplify Photo, which provides the same service for pictures rather than songs.

After logging in, Simplify Photo for iPhone ($0.99) talks to the Simplify Media application on your desktop (download for Windows | Mac | Ubuntu). So long as you have the newest version installed (2.5), and the photo-sharing element selected (configure in the Options menu), you’ll be able to view the photos in your network. Networked images can include pictures from your multiple computers, and those that friend son your Simlify network have given permission to see.

The initial syncing will take a few minutes. After that, you’ll see a list of shared computers. Tap to see options and tap again to view photos by timeline, places (geotagged images show on a Google map), folders, events, albums, and faces, when available. You can also search for a specific photo in a search field.

Simplify Photo’s media is view-only for now; though ideally the app would also open up iPhone photos for computer viewing and friends. You can swipe through images in the viewer or can play a slideshow. As a perk, you can also save the picture locally to the iPhone. Unfortunately, and unlike the desktop viewer, Simplify Photo doesn’t yet rotate images by 90 degrees. The interface could also use some prettying up.

However, Simplify Photo is functional for existing Simplify Media users looking to view friends’ pictures, or their own, remotely.

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http://download.cnet.com/8301-2007_4-10312526-12.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-20

Microsoft’s efforts to regain lost ground in the mobile phone business will see the company offering two different versions of its operating system next year.

The company will continue to broadly sell Windows Mobile 6.5 to a large variety of handset makers, while working more closely with several handset makers to sell phones built on a new version of Windows Mobile that has been several years in the making, according to a source familiar with the company’s plans.

While Windows Mobile 6.5 is a fairly interim update to the mobile operating system that Microsoft has been selling, Microsoft has also been working on more radical efforts to overhaul the operating system. Both its plans for Windows Mobile 7 and its long-running “Pink” project aim to match the kinds of experiences seen on the iPhone and Android, using more advanced voice and touch interfaces and higher-end hardware.

Microsoft demonstrated Windows Mobile 6.5 at the GSMA Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. That interim update to Windows Mobile will start arriving on phones this fall, while a more radical overhaul of Redmond’s cell phone OS is due next year.

(Credit: Marguerite Reardon/CNET News)

A Digitimes report this week called the effort a “dual-platform” strategy, although I’m not sure I’d use that term to describe two versions of Windows Mobile being sold at the same time.

What is clear is that Microsoft needs to do something serious if it hopes to live up to its mobile ambitions. For years now, the company has made rather modest updates to the Windows Mobile operating system, which dates back to the days of code powered PDAs and other organizers that were neither phones nor, in some cases, even connected to the Internet.

In that same time, Palm has gone back to the drawing board and reinvented itself with the WebOS-based Pre, while the iPhone and Android have entered the market and even Research In Motion has arguably done more to capture consumer interest than has Microsoft.

Internally, Redmond has shifted a number of its people into the mobile unit. In addition to former server executive Andy Lees, who now runs the phone business, former Mac Business unit chief Roz Ho has been leading a top secret “premium mobile experiences” team responsible for some of the “Pink” work. The company purchased Danger, known for creating the teen-centered T-Mobile Sidekick, and Ho heads that unit as well.

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CNETNews Microsoft’s plan to get back in the phone game http://bit.ly/iAn8H

‘m on my third iPhone (having upgraded twice), and I’ve also owned an iPod Touch. I loved them all dearly, largely because they never exploded into flames, burning me and my family alive. Just saying.

But it seems that other people might not have been so lucky. Numerous reports say the European Commission is now looking into accounts of exploding iPhones and iPod Touches–and Apple is cooperating, according to The New York Times.

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CNETNews EU’s exploding-iPhone investigation heats up http://bit.ly/nWf06