MOBODOJO » Mobile News

Truphone Ends International SIM Problems?

Tyler Regas — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 05:05:56 +0000

A company called Truphone has come along and stated that its going to remove the issues involved with mobile phone usage and international travel. Right now, anyone who travels around the world and makes phone calls from wherever they go has to juggle a panoply of SIM cards to get the best local rates they can. For a few, they even have to keep a few different handsets in the air at the same time. Truphone aims to stop the blatant SIM abuse by offering a single SIM solution for all international calling, while at the same time promising to keep rates super cheap. How? Well, that’s the rub. Truphone is what amounts to Skype for handsets. In order to take advantage of the inexpensive calls you need to be within range of a wi-fi hotspot (please correct me if I’m reading this wrong). For regular calls, you still use your old SIM on your old service, so you may still have to do the SIM Shimmy. One cool thing is that the service appears to allow you to establish local numbers in areas you populate, though its not clear if they bridge network to hotspot, an approach that would allow cheap calls to you from anywhere.

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Palm “Nova” Update

Tyler Regas — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 18:56:58 +0000

First, you need to give this Business Week piece a read. If you can’t take the time, I’ll sum it up. Palm hit up some investors who called Jon Rubenstein of Apple’s iMac success fame and tapped him to lead up the ailing companies circustent revival comback. That comeback effort is culminating at CES 2009 in Las Vegas and, according to sources, it will involve Nova, Palm’s Linux-based update to its legendary mobile OS, and an unspecified piece of hardware. If they plan on continuing to lose customers, they’ll just announce a Palm “Nova” version of their Treo Pro, which currently runs WinMo. If, however, they are really interested in making a splash, they’ll have to come up with something breathtaking, which they can. Witness their Tungsten T3 PDA which took the concept of the slider to a whole new level. I’m going to guess it will be something along these lines.

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Sprint Prepping Android Attack?

Tyler Regas — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 18:03:13 +0000

In a brief and nearly fruitless interview with Bloomberg News, Sprint had very little in the way of hope to offer its subscribership that they would be able to get a sweet new handset anytime soon. For my personal accounts, I’m a Sprint subscriber, and I’m amazed at how willingly they seem to sit on their thumbs when they have such a large subscriber base to cater to. If I were Dan Hesse, CEO of Sprint and star of the neo noir Sprint commercials, I would be pushing a lot harder to retain subscribers.

Then again, Sprint is just about on board with the Palm Treo Pro, the WinMo only device. Around the corner at CES 2009 in Las Vegas, Palm is going to reveal what will likely be a new OS and a new handset ($5 says its an iClone). Its altogether possible that Sprint has ended up waiting for Palm to save themselves with whatever hot-ness comes out of the Palm enclave and hoping that it will be wicked enough to spin up some migrations.

Anecdotally, I’ve been hearing from some of mty Apple iPhone friends that they are seriously aiming to jump ship because Apple’s not addressing certain shotcomings of the iPhone. What handset are they looking to jump to? The RIM Blackberry Bold. Wow.

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PromoAppCode Adds Missing AppStore Functionality

Tyler Regas — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 22:22:09 +0000

I’m not an iPhone owner yet, but I will be soon. Regardless, even I am eager to test out this new concept a few guys came up with to fill in the gaps Apple has left open. Witness TickleSpace with their oddly if accurately named PromoCodeApp website which marries consumers with developers and gives them both tools to track all kinds of potential information regarding the AppStore and issued promotional codes. Only time can tell if its a worthy idea.

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Axiotron Offering ModService

Tyler Regas — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 01:28:15 +0000

You bought that MacBook but what you really wanted was a tablet. Feh at Apple, though, since they don’t make one. Axiotron, however, does make them but they sell them already made into tablets… at least until now, that is. Thanks to Axiotron’s ModService you can now get your exisitng MacBook converted into a ModBook for about US$1,300. Unfortunately, there’s no indication of how long it takes, though my guess is that they swap your hard drive from the system you send in a slide it into an already configured ModBook. Hell, that’s what I’d do. Then again, they do mention that you take it to a locally sourced, authorized ModService provider.

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IBM Starting To Offer Lotus iNotes Ultra

Tyler Regas — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 05:32:08 +0000

IBM has been quite busy, but not with the Apple iPhone SDK as was suggested earlier this year. No, they’ve been working with Apple’s WebKit and developing a web version of access for their approximately 140 million Lotus Notes users worldwide. That’s right. Its called iNotes Ultra and its a secure web application designed specifically for the iPhone. What’s even nicer is that its free. More accurately (and I’m guessing here) its probably a free Domino server extension which administrators can install to offer users access to their accounts. Its also apparently quite secure, since its not an application and it doesn’t store data directly on the device.

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A Comprehensive List of NetBooks

Tyler Regas — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 01:25:31 +0000

OMG! I knew there were a lot of netbooks out there and more are seemingly being added every day, but I had no idea there were as many as Liliputing, a boutique website dedicated to the little compys, has in its database of systems. Keep in mind that not all of these (read: most) are available in the US. There are, however, plenty of importers out there who will ship systems to you. Some will even load a US operating system on it for you. Of course, Liliputing also has a whole load of systems they are vending via Amazon, which is carrying a surprising number of systems from HP, Acer, ASUS, and Sylvania. Wow.

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NW Compares The G1 With The iPhone 3G

Tyler Regas — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 02:56:06 +0000

NetworkWorld has compiled a comparison between the new T-Mobile G1 Android-powered phone and Apple’s powerhouse iPhone 3G. The slideshow runs through the various aspects of both carriers and software and makes its own determinations. Neither seems to to win, but each has its own strengths and weaknesses. Take a look for yourself and make up your own mind.

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Iambic Vets Agendus For Blackberry

Tyler Regas — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 13:20:39 +0000

Iambic has just announced that it has released version 1.0 of Agendus for Blackberry. Agendus is one of the most popular replacement calendar programs for Palm OS-based devices, and is also available for Windows Mobile devices and Windows systems. The software is available now and is priced at US$19.95.

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Lotus Makes iNotes for iPhone Official

Tyler Regas — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 14:44:12 +0000

Its no real surprise. I broke this story last year when I got early word that Lotus was getting advance access to the then unreleased iPhone SDK. IBM has simply felt it was ready to make Lotus Notes for the Apple iPhone, dubbed iNotes, official. The claim on the site, however, is that even the screenshots are pre-release and don’t necessarily reflect final product functionality. One thing you can count on is that Lotus Notes usage and Domino server traffic will likely jump significantly after it get released.