Windows Mobile phone from Sony Ericsson announced

Microsoft have announced that Sony Ericsson will be using Windows Mobile in their new phone, the XPERIA™ X1.

The phone has:

• XPERIA™ panel interface
• Arc slider design
• 3.2 Megapixel camera
• Video call
• Integrated camera
• Web, RSS feeds, Blogging
• Bluetooth
• Qwerty Keyboard
• 4-way key
• Optical joystick
• 3G
• Push email
• Video Clips
• Handwriting Recognition
• Wi-Fi
• aGPS

For more details of the functionality of this phone see the Xperia X1 Home Page.

Mobile Security Seminar, Feb 27th London

Building a Security Infrastructure with Microsoft Forefront
presented by Ronald Beekelaar

Want to learn more about the future of Windows Mobile? Want to get greater management control of your Windows Mobile devices? This event will share with you Microsoft's roadmap for Windows Mobile as well as comprehensive insight into Microsoft System Center Mobile Device Manager 2008, a security and device management solution that provides greater reliability, lower-cost manageability, and more secure access to your corporate network. As well as the opportunity to talk directly with Microsoft's experts you'll also hear from a customer who has deployed Windows Mobile and how our partners can help you make the most of this latest technology.

http://go.microsoft.com/?linkid=8151759

Date: 27 February 2008
Location: London

IPhone Emulator

Whilst testing the Aficionado.mobi site against an Iphone, we realised that it was not properly detecting that the IPhone was a smaller mobile device and it was showing the full screen version as above. I digged out the logs and saw that it was reporting as:

Mozilla/5.0 (iPod; U; CPU like Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/420.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.0 Mobile/4A93 Safari/419.3

I looked at the HawHaw site and saw that there was a new version available that supported IPhone so I installed this on the site.

Also whilst looking at this I spotted that there's a couple of emulators for the Windows Mobile and Mac platforms.

• IPhone Emulator for Windows Mobile
• IPhone Emulator for Mac

Windows Mobile Exams

Changes to enrolment requirements for the Mobile Competency within the Microsoft Partner Programme come into effect on 1 January 2008. Partners will be required to employ or contract with at least two individuals, each of whom must pass at least one of the following Microsoft certification exams.

• Microsoft Exam 70-500: Windows Mobile 5.0, Implementing and Managing
• Microsoft Exam 70-540: Windows Mobile Application Development.

Data-Driven Block Ciphers for Fast Telecommunication Systems

Data-Driven Block Ciphers for Fast Telecommunication Systems


This new book can be pre-ordered from Amazon, it's authors are from St. Petersburg Institute for Informatics and Automation of the Russian Academy of Sciences SPIIRAS and are holders of several dozen patents in encryption technology. The book looks at how Data Driven Operations DDO can provide fast encryption without incurring excessive hardware costs in modern telecommunication networks.

International Conference on Wireless, Mobile and Multimedia Networks

11 - 12 January 2008, The InterContinental Hotel, The Grand, Mumbai, India.

The conference will provide you with the very latest updates on thedevelopment of future communication systems, and offer real-lifesolutions to apply to your own businesses and projects.

Keynote Speakers:

• Mr Jagdish Mitra, Chief Executive Officer, CanvasM Technologies, India
• Prof Joe McGeehan, Professor of Communications, University of Bristol, and Managing Director, Toshiba Research Europe Laboratory, UK
• Prof Bahram Honary, Lancaster University, UK
• Dr Asho Jhunjhunwala, IIT Chennai, India
• Prof Garik Markarian, Lancaster University, UK
• Mr BN Pal, Managing Director, Motorola Software, Japan
• Mr Jean Pierre, President, UMTS Forum, France
• Prof Hikmet Sari, Chief Scientist, Sequans Communications, France
• Dr Kumar Sivrajan, Director, Tejas Networks, Bangalore, India
• Mr Mohan Tambe, Managing Director, Innomedia Technologies, Bangalore

Sessions Include:

• Wireless Communications
• Ad Hoc and Sensor Networks
• Mobile Networks
• Next Generation Networks
• Signal Processing for Wireless Networks
• Broadband Access Technologies
• Multimedia Techniques and Services
• EU Project: Net on Demand

For more details visit http://conferences.theiet.org/wireless/register.htm.

Microsoft Mobile Device Manager 2008

Mobile Device Manager 2008 is a solution that gives organizations enhanced on-device security and over-the-air policy enforcement. It allows IT professionals to more easily manage phones within the organization, and gives mobile employees access to confidential information on corporate networks with firewalls.

http://go.microsoft.com/?linkid=7708997

Jason Langridge aka. Mr Mobile, is delivering two events in February on this new product - Jason really is knowledgeable in the mobile area, so it's worth going along to hear him speak:

19 February 2008, Manchester: Windows Mobile and System Center Device Manager

26 February 2008, London: Windows Mobile and System Center Device Manager

Pipes on the go

Yahoo! Pipes is a technology for creating Mashups from RSS feeds and other sources mixing and filtering them to provide extra info, analysis or functionality. Now the clever bods at Yahoo have made it available for people on their iphones.

http://blog.pipes.yahoo.com/2007/10/23/iphonepipesyahoocom-access-your-mashup-while-mobile/

Best Platform for Mobile Development

Vivek Jishtu provides a review of 8 different platforms for client side mobile development. He looks at SDKs, languages, cost and ease of use from the perspective of a hobbiest programmer.

http://vivekjishtu.blogspot.com/2007/09/best-platform-for-mobile-development.html

The Crate

A few years back I started work on a Beowulf cluster in a 19in rack, it followed the usual Beowulf principles of using standard PC hardware components but it did have a few speciallist items such as carrying handles, rack mounting strips front and back, hand cut front panels and PSU splitters that allow 2 motherboards to be run from one power supply. It's also got about 800GB of disk storage controlled off of a IDE raid controller, I've yet to check the performance of that. It's likely that new Sata controllers would work better for the cabling and performance. The motherboards are vertically mounted to allow air to flow between them and if I ever get around to it there will be fan trays in the bottom blowing upwards between the boards. The Gigabit network should be plenty though.

It's still sitting unfinished in the corner of my lounge and I've got to move house next week so it's due for some urgent work to make it portable without bits falling off.

However, a couple of chaps at a university have completed something quite similar and christened it Microwulf. Theirs is a bit smaller than mine and in some ways not as elegant, however it does actually work so I support they deserve a pat on the back.

Mosh by Nokia

Forum Nokia is currently trialing MOSH (“MObilize and SHare”). Regardless of your mobile device’s manufacturer or make, MOSH enables you to create, collect and share your content and applications in a community setting. Create, upload, collect and share applications (like games, software mashups, videos, blogs, music and photos) all from your mobile.

http://mosh.nokia.com/

Open Source Goes Mobile workshop

Forum Nokia, is hosting the Open Source Goes Mobile workshop at the Nokia offices in San Francisco, Calif., on Thursday, August 9, 2007. This half-day event will instruct you on how to port your existing open source applications to the Nokia S60 smartphone platform using the Open C SDK. Speakers will include experts from the Nokia S60, Forum Nokia and Symbian OS teams. The recently-released Open C plug-in provides familiar, standard C function libraries on the S60 platform, enhancing developer productivity and reducing the time it takes to bring an application to market. With Open C, developers can reuse existing code and focus on maximizing the unique mobility aspects of their applications. Prizes will be given out during the event, including Nokia S60 3rd Edition smartphones.

Microsoft Developer News

Dev Toolbar
There's an update to Microsoft's IE Developer Toolbar, handy tool for analysis your webpages in IE.

• Explore and modify the document object model (DOM) of a Web page.
• Locate and select specific elements on a Web page through a variety of techniques.
• Selectively disable Internet Explorer settings.
• View HTML object class names, ID's, and details such as link paths, tab index values, and access keys.
• Outline tables, table cells, images, or selected tags.
• Validate HTML, CSS, WAI, and RSS web feed links.
• Display image dimensions, file sizes, path information, and alternate (ALT) text.
• Immediately resize the browser window to a new resolution.
• Selectively clear the browser cache and saved cookies. Choose from all objects or those associated with a given domain.
• Display a fully featured design ruler to help accurately align and measure objects on your pages.
• Find the style rules used to set specific style values on an element.
• View the formatted and syntax colored source of HTML and CSS.

Download Developer Toolbar

MEDC 2007 Europe
MEDC 2007 Europe will be a concentrated TWO-DAY DEEP DIVE of technical training dedicated to mobile and embedded technologies. This annual event is tailored for developers, IT professionals, and business professionals who are looking to innovate and scale their mobile or embedded development investments, applications, and solutions.

25 - 26 June 2007, Berlin: Microsoft Mobile & Embedded DevCon (MEDC) 2007 (££).

Ubuntu Mobile

The Ubuntu Developer Summit in Seville discussed the first release of a mobile edition of Ubunto ,to work on the new low power Intel platform. The edition will be in October with Ubuntu 7.10

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/6634195.stm
http://www.ubuntu.com/

Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'Humanity to others', or 'I am what I am because of who we all are'. The Ubuntu distribution brings the spirit of Ubuntu to the software world.

Device Emulator v2.0

Microsoft have released a new version of their Device Emulator for development on portable devices using Windows Mobile. This version supports Vista and the new Device Centre functionality.



What others are saying about this new version:
Anand Balachandran Blogs about Device Development
Jason Langridge's WebLog - MR Mobile!
Akhune's WebLog

Google Maps - My Maps

There's been an interesting enhancement to Google Maps. They've added the ability to build your own map and also share maps with others and with Google Earth users
http://maps.google.com/help/maps/userguide/index.html

Blogger Mobile

For US Bloggers there's a new Mobile Service from Google's Blogger.

Without needing any computer, a user can simple send pictures to blogger with a caption and they will be posted on a brand new blog. People with existing blogs can have their pictures delivered there instead. Potential uses could include amateur journalism, holiday reporting or just sharing your views of the world.

http://help.blogger.com/bin/answer.py?answer=42448

For us in the UK we will have to wait till this is supported and in the meantime those with txt to email gateways can use the Mail to Blogger functionality to post text based blogs. Blogger also had an audio blog function but this has been discontinued, Gabcast and Hibcast are commercial services that replace that functionality.

Windows Mobile 6

Stuart J. Johnston talks about Windows Mobile 6, the .Net Compact Framework and how this is helping Microsoft boost their status in the mobile market place and how they can compete against rival platforms such as the blackberry.

http://reddevnews.com/news/devnews/article.aspx?editorialsid=187

Web 2.0 on Mobiles

Spencer Kelly from the BBC's Click show discusses how Web 2.0 is being brought to Mobiles for example Vodafone will be allowing customers to access their MySpace pages and upload videos to YouTube.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/click_online/6389469.stm

Vodafone has already been providing users with picture sharing via their Vodafone live! studio product and video from Sky.

Link Rel=Alternative Media=Handheld

A tip, I gleaned via the Google Webmaster help pages.

You may request that a redirect for the user to an alternate page for handheld media.
In the section of HTML add a link

<link rel="alternate" media="handheld" href="alternate_page.htm" />

The alternate page can then be adjusted for use on mobiles.

A similar link can be done to have an alternative stylesheet for mobile pages.

More details on the Link element at That Standards Guy

This technique can also be used to help make your pages more accessible to your users.