Leaked internal documents reveal that Dell’s upcoming five inch tablet device is likely to be called the Streak and will include a content partnership with Amazon for e-books, music and video. Still no word yet on how close the device is to launch or how much it is going to cost. [Engadget]
Microsoft’s Courier digital journal - Still at concept stage but looks like it has potential. Part 2 over at Endadget.
Although patent litigation is not new in the technology world, these suits, specifically around mobile, point to the drastically changing mobile landscape. Lawyers I spoke with explained that mobile technology was still in its infancy and these large computing companies were trying to stake their claim to the future of computing.
It’s been a tough year for Palm, who issued a profit warning yesterday with an explanatory memo to staff from chief executive Jon Rubinstein. It’s sad to see the company struggling as they’ve put a lot of thoughtful effort into the design of their webOS and latest handsets. As John Gruber mentioned in his recent Macworld talk, the smartphone industry needs competitors of Palm’s calibre to keep pressure on the bigger players to continue to innovate.
It seems that Palm are not sure exactly where they went wrong, and it’s not hard to feel a bit sorry for them as their latest smartphones are really quite compelling. The Guardian have come up with a decoded version of the CEO’s staff memo which is not too generous to Palm but much more entertaining than the carefully worded original.
Team,
Hey guys! Whatever I say, don’t forget we’re in this together.
This morning we announced preliminary results for our 2010 third quarter. Since the quarter has not yet closed, it is too soon to offer exact numbers, but we stated that we expect to report revenues for Q3 between $300 and $320 million.
We’re not selling as many phones as we thought we would: sales were flat despite the fact that we started selling handsets with Verizon - America’s second-biggest phone network (with 91m users) - in January.
We were expecting sales to go up. They didn’t. This could be awkward.
We also announced that we expect our revenue for this fiscal year to fall below the guidance we gave to Wall Street, which ranged from $1.6 to $1.8 billion.
Given how sales have gone over so far, we’d probably need to double our sales in the next three months to satisfy our original targets. Let’s be honest, that’s not happening, is it?
Full version of the commented memo over at The Guardian.
Latest figures from Dutch app store analytics firm Distimo show that Apple’s App Store continues to grow impressively, with the Android Market now the second fastest growing application repository. New and noteworthy in the report:
In Google Android Market, 65% of the publishers are located in the United States, 12% in the United Kingdom, 20% in Europe (Austria, France, Germany, Italy, Netherlands and Spain) and 3% in Japan.
Publishers located in Europe price their applications highest with an average of $4.42, which is 49% higher than publishers located in the United States. The United Kingdom comes second with an average of $3.31.
Applications in Apple App Store, Google Android Market and Nokia Ovi Store are priced at around $3.50. Windows Marketplace for Mobile and BlackBerry App World are more expensive, averaging $6.99 and $8.26 respectively.
Because of Microsoft’s market validation guidelines and additional fees for distributing applications in more than one country, the number of applications available in some countries is only a small percentage (<5%) of applications available worldwide.
A preview of Wired Magazine’s Reader Software gives an insight into how magazine’s will be consumed in a digital format on mobile devices.
The mobile platform is on the rise, and with Microsoft’s announcement of their new mobile OS earlier this week it looks like it’s going to become an even more competetive market in 2010.
We’ve put together a quick visual overview of the various players in the mobile OS game. Each operating system is shown side-by-side with an indication of how software and hardware relates to each platform.
Larger versions of the chart available here.
HTC Desire unveiled at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. Spec’s are pretty much identical to the Nexus One, which HTC manufactures for Google but features an optical touch sensor surrounded by a click-button in-place of the Nexus One stye trackball. The Desire is also missing the noise canceling second microphone seen on the Nexus One. Running Android 2.1 with HTC’s sense interface it be broadly available in Europe and Asia some time in the first quarter of 2010 with wider release dates yet to be announced.
HTC Legend. Very similar spec’s to the Nexus One - 3.2-inch AMOLED screen enclosed in an aluminium case running Android 2.1 with the HTC Sense user interface. 5.0-megapixel camera with autofocus and flash, 600 MHz processor and 512MB ROM (with microSD card slot) and 384MB of RAM. Available late March or early April in Europe with international release dates still to be confirmed.
Microsoft’s latest mobile OS. Windows Phone 7 Series, just unveiled at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. Includes Xbox LIVE games and the Zune music plus significant social media integration. This is the features demo from Microsoft.
