Opera Mobile 9.5 Beta — July 15th!

If you’re like me, you don’t favor hate the standard Pocket Internet Explorer that comes pre-loaded onto your Windows Mobile 6 device, so you search for alternatives. Opera has been around forever in the mobile browsing industry with small Java versions for most Java enabled handsets and stronger, more intensive and feature based versions for Windows Mobile phones. At long last, here comes version 9.5!

While some early versions of phones, such as the HTC Diamond are already coming shipped with Opera 9.5, the release has not been made official. For those wondering why, Opera explains it all:

Some versions of Opera Mobile 9.5 are already shipping on great phones like the HTC Touch Diamond, and some of you have asked why we wouldn’t be able to release it publically yet. As you probably know, releasing a version that works on a large variety of phones is more complex than making it work on one specific phone. You should also expect a few differences between the versions that are pre-installed on phones and the public version of Opera Mobile 9.5.

Mark your calendars folks, it’s just over two weeks away!

[Via Opera Blog]

Hello Rhapsody, Says Verizon.

I’m sure you’ve been out of your house and had a song stuck in your head that you just had to listen to. If not, you’re an alien and I’m calling the FBI. For humans who also happen to be Verizon customers, get ready to rejoice: today, Verizon Wireless announced that it will be introducing Rhapsody’s subscription based music service on their network. This brings you unlimited mobile music downloads for $15 bucks a month - not bad!

Rhapsody appears to be following the footsteps of its siblings, Napster and iTunes. But breathe a sigh of relief, because they’ve taken off that ever so annoying DRM (Digital Rights Management) protection so you now have control over the music you buy.. unlike the past.

If you have however bought a song on VCAST before, you also received a copy of the MP3 track for your PC. Now, that copy will be unprotected… no DRM! While songs that are downloaded through this new service will still come with DRM protection, you need to connect it to your PC with Rhapsody installed to get the non-DRM’d MP3 for your PC. Mac users? Sorry, this won’t work for you yet.

This service will only work with the LG Chocolate 3 (available in July), LG Decoy and LG Dare; Motorola W755; Samsung U550, Samsung Glyde and Samsung Juke. However, if you’re using the Motorola RIZR Z6tv, Motorola RAZR2 V9m or LG VX8700 you’ll need to pop on in to your local Verizon store and get an upgrade of your phone’s software.

[Via Verizon Wireless]

iPhone Remote Control for iTunes

Apple seems to be proving themselves as perpetual innovators… and successful ones at that. In the readme of an upcoming iTunes update released only to developers, the following lines were found:

Use iTunes 7.7 to sync music, video, and more with iPhone 3G, and download applications from the iTunes Store exclusively designed for iPhone and iPod touch with software version 2.0 or later. Also use the new Remote application for iPhone or iPod touch to control iTunes playback from anywhere in your home — a free download from the App Store.

And you thought nobody would ever read the fineprint… HA!

We see what you’re doing there Apple. Anybody will be able to download an application to their iPhone via the application store, for free, and sync it via Wi-Fi to the iTunes on their computer. WIth that connection established, you’ll be able to use your iPhone as a remote control for your iTunes from anywhere in your house!

That’s pretty sweet if we may say so ourselves. While the initial iPhone 3G announcement didn’t seem too mind blowing, these little details that seem to be trickling out 1 by 1 are pretty intriguing - we admit.

[Via MacRumors]

BlackOutBerry: RIM Service Outage Midnight Friday

Mark your calendars BlackBerry faithful. From midnight on Friday, June 27th to 8AM on the 28th your trusty BlackBerry may not be, “unable to send or receive messages, use the BlackBerry Internet Service web site or perform activities such as creating new accounts, accessing your Internet mailbox, integrating 3rd party email accounts or viewing email attachments.”

Don’t say we didn’t warn you!

In reality, BlackBerry folks should be very happy. The planned “outage” is due to an upgrade from version 2.4 to 2.5 of the BlackBerry Internet Service Pack.

This means no more ridiculously ugly and basic emails! Version 2.5 supports reading of HTML emails complete with images, tables, hyperlinks, paragraph formatting, font formatting and a bunch more. It also improves download and editing of attachments with various file types.

A small sacrifice to make for a pretty cool update!

[Via BlackBerry, DataOutages]

Best iPhone Applications, More Store Info

We’re getting some details, slowly but surely, about the composition of the iPhone App store including some of the top applications identified by Apple and some of the limits/restrictions that come with the territory. First - the exciting part - the applications:

Last week, Apple actually held an awards ceremony where they announced the top applications in various categories. For current iPhone owners and iPhone 3G hopefuls, you’ll want to jot these down and/or bookmark this page so when the iPhone app store launches, you can check these promising applications out first.

Best iPhone Game: Enigmo

In this puzzle game, the purpose is to get the water droplet into the bucket. Using the laws of physics with various tools, trinkets and objects put into motion and placed on each stage, you can get the drop in the bucket!

Here is the live announcement of Enigmo, featuring a demo of the game:

You’ll also see the caveman car racing game called cromag rally in the above video.

Best iPhone Health & Fitness App: MIM 1.0 from MIMVista

The mobile space promises to offer doctors and the healthcare field more immediate access to information that can help them save time… and in turn - lives. MIM 1.0 is a great example of this as it allows doctors to view MRI and CAT scan images directly on the iPhone. They can also manipulate the images for different views and data mining.

MIM 1.0 was demoed at Apple’s WWDC and we’ve got a sample video below. Another application, Modality, is shown first but the entire clip is under 3 minutes so be patient!

Best iPhone Social Networking App: Twiterrific 1.0 from the Iconfactory

Twitter is an uncommonly simple social networking application that allows “friends” to contact eachother through short notes of a little over 100 characters. Twiterrific takes Twitter and makes it available on your iPhone in a clean and concise application.

Twitter is so simple to begin with that, in reality, this doesn’t seem like any huge breakthrough. There is a free version that has ads embedded and a paid version that removes all the ads. Here is one person’s review of the app from a few months back:

Best iPhone Entertainment App: AOL Radio 1.0 from AOL

You can listen to 200 AOL radio stations and/or 150 CBS Radio Stations from around the United States with AOL Radio 1.0 from AOL. Even cooler, you can look at local radio stations based on your current location. But, that doesn’t mean you can’t listen to a station in San Diego if you’re sitting in New York City.

Here is a pretty stupid commercial for AOL Radio that isn’t iPhone specific. We figured we’d help you waste your time:

Best iPhone Productivity App: OmniFocus by the Omni Group

OmniFocus is a task management system that helps you organize your priorities, from business to personal and entertainment. It integrates with the desktop version and adds mobile features such as geo-picture tagging and location based services.

The following commercial is a branding commercial for the OmniGroup and really has nothing to do with OmniFocus. But, its freaking hilarious and we recommend you watch:

Best iPhone Optimized Web App: Remember The Milk for iPhone

This is a mobile version of “Remember the Milk” that is optimized for the iPhone and iPod touch. You can add tasks and lists such as grocery shopping lists - hence “Remember the Milk”- and be notified when you are nearby a task, share tasks with others, etc…

iPhone Application Limits

An interesting development in the iPhone Application world are apparent restrictions on the size and price for each application. Applications will be limited to 2GB each and the maximum price is $20. The size restriction isn’t surprising - if you get the 8GB iPhone 3G model, you’d be taking up 1/4th of the entire phone storage with a single application. But limiting the applications to $20 each seems somewhat odd.

When considering the scale of an application that would work in the medical industry for example, the $20 application price limit might turn off companies from developing fully integrated solutions that worth much more and cost much more to develop.

You could relate this to concept of the Research & Development of drugs for pharmaceutical companies. Would they want to put in the millions of dollars in R&D costs if when their drug is complete and proves effective, they could only sell prescriptions for $20 a pop? What if that $20 per prescription would prevent them from recovering the costs of developing the drug to begin with? Well, they would probably have known this before they started working on the drug, and thus never begun work on the drug to begin with. And if thats the case, the price maximum is stifling progress and development anyways.

Why not let the market determine what the fair price of a product is? If it’s overpriced and over $20 - people won’t buy it. If it’s over $20 and worth every penny, then people will buy it and the company deserves every penny they get for it.

We’ll see how long that holds up. It’s perceivable that medical software companies would bundle iPhone, Android and Windows Mobile versions of their products into larger packages, avoiding the application price maximum by selling the product as a bundle through different chanels.

We’ll see how it plays out… don’t forget that the application store will probably launch on July 11th, 2008 when the iPhone 3G is first made available for sale!

[Via MocoNews,

Firefox Mobile Browser: Video Demo

Mobile web browsing is still in its infancy and one thing that could be improve the experience immediately is more robust web browsers. Everyone knows Firefox is hard at work building a solution, but it isn’t until now that we’ve gotten a sneak peak at how the browser might work.

In this video, Aza Raskin (Head of User Experience at Mozilla Labs) Demos a current working model of Firefox’s mobile browser. Our opinion? Pretty freaking amazing.

It knocks the socks off anything currently out there. They integrate tabbed browsing and navigation while solving the limitations of screen real estate and the mobile experience. It looks good in video, but the screens it will take place on reality (mobile phones) will likely be much smaller. That’s the ultimate test and it appears there are still some hurdles to jump. Fat fingered folks need big buttons!

We’d also like to point out that he starts out by saying he’d like to show you, “a possible direction for Firefox on mobile,” and finished up with, “this isn’t necessarily the exact way we’re going to go with mobile. It might look entirely different.”

That makes us think, “it’s only going to get better.” And that… that, my friend is a beautiful thing.

Here’s what a few other folks are saying about Firefox Mobile:

Microsoft Launches a… BlackBerry App?

As we all know, Microsoft’s Windows Mobile and BlackBerry are fierce competitors in the smart phone OS market. But then why was Microsoft’s best ever application, the recently released “TellMe”, launched for BlackBerry and not Windows Mobile? Because BlackBerry’s are better and even Macrohard knows it…

Just kidding. There is actually a more logical response. Microsoft purchase a company called TellMe which was midway into development of the application already. A Windows Mobile version of the app is surely forthcoming.

Okay, logistics aside, this little application is pretty kickbutt. Use your BlackBerry to navigate to http://m.tellme.com and download the little App. You’ll be able to speak locations into your phone such as, “Coffee” and it will show you the closest coffee shops or “Nordstrom’s” and it will show you the closest Nordstrom’s.

This is a pretty handy tool that we’ll look for Windows Mobile to take full advantage of in their next release… which might not be for ages unfortunately. Hey Mr. CEO Mike McCue… could we get an Android version please? Thank you!

GPS for Rednecks, Courtesty of Nokia

For the directionally challenged, GPS Navigation Systems can be as coveted as cell phones. And with the proliferation of Mobile technology, where your cell phone is your GPS, there is rarely an excuse to ask, “Where the hell am I and how did I end up here?” Or is there… ?

gps for rednecks

Try out a little experiment. Get lost, purposefully, in the middle of some rural area. Ask for directions somewhere (anywhere) and you’ll likely get a response that sounds something like this:

“Alright yur gunna wunna go straight to the top of that there hill and turn right. Stay straight until you pass two red barns on the left and then yur gunna see Johnsonville pond right thur on yur right. Take a left right there and go straight until you see the biggest oak tree you ever did see and you’ll be about one acre away from the market.”

Thats right folks…

It may sound strange but in some places street signs and road names are not the currency of driving (or walking, or horseback) directions. Apparently, Nokia feels their pain. Dr. Kari Pulli of the Nokia Research Center explains:

“The instructions are based totally on real world pictures, not on synthetic maps,” he says. “We started developing the landmark mode when we realized that people read maps in different ways depending on things such as cultural background and gender.”

For the politically correct interpretation of this article, you can check Venture Beat, where we initially discovered Nokia’s new culture friendly mapping system.

With all due respect, the technology DOES have some great potential depending on how it is developed. In actuality, it sounds like a technology that would work incredibly well on the Android platform. The technology was originally suggested by a Nokia research group in India where landmark based directional advice is more commonly sought.

In any case, this is definitely something to watch as the technology has a lot more potential than providing dumbed down directions to country bumpkins, as we initially suggest. Sorry… we couldn’t resist!