Nadajmo se da ce taj "prvi korak" najavljen za kongres u Barseloni biti WM 6.5.

Dosta stvari cekamo koje bi mogle biti na tom kongresu 

Firefox Mobile coming to the Touch Pro next week?

WMExperts reports that Mozilla is close to releasing a first public release of the Fennec, the Firefox Mobile browser, on the Windows Mobile platform.

According the the notes from their weekly meeting, the release is just awaiting the code being signed of by one or two members of the team.

We are targeting a Milestone release for the first week of February, targeting the HTC touch pro.
We are two patches away from the meta goal of building from trunk. The tools changes have review from dougt, and are waiting for review from ted, who has promised review by the end of the week. NSPR changes are waiting for review from Nelson, who asked for and received a patch against NSPR trunk

Its likely the release will be far from bug-free and polished, but progress seems to be occurring apace, and we will hopefully soon have another contender in the now crowded Windows Mobile browser space.

Read more at the Mozilla wiki here.

Izvor

Can't wait.

Vertu Signature S Design Hands on



What, you didn’t see this coming? While the global economy is suffering, Vertu keeps on launching their high-end mobile phones to the world’s richest customers. While they used to be featureless handsets, they’ve now become current, and what used to be expensive, is still… expensive. Let’s look at the brand new Vertu Signature we just got in our office. It’s the stainless steel model, and is made of sapphire crystal, fine leather, and of course, stainless steel. Its got 3G (only the 850MHz and 2100MHz WCDMA band), Wi-Fi, and an OLED display. Definitely some things that keep these devices in play, tech-wise at least. Since Vertu is an off-shoot of Nokia, all up-to-date Vertus run a customized version of the Series 40 OS (we have heard Vertu is working on a PDA, but nothing has materialized yet). Still, at a retail price of $12,500, who’s going to buy this? The old answer used to be someone who can appreciate the finer things in life, just as someone would spend $80,000 on a watch, they’d have no problem dropping $12,000 on a phone. Right? Well, times have changed. This isn’t 2004 when people were rockin’ RAZRs as the new hot thing and had a pretty limited selection of smartphones. If you think about it the world is pretty topsy turvy. There’s BlackBerrys with cameras, Apple makes a cell phone, HTC makes Android devices, and Sony Ericsson makes a Windows Mobile phone. So where is the market for this Signature? We’d say its smaller than ever thanks to the popularity of smartphones that actually work and then obviously the economy. There’s no doubt this is Vertu’s finest model, it sure as heck feels like it. We’re just not so sure people are that interested in this day and age. Unless we’re talking about that Vertu Ascent Ti Ferrari Nero, then well, that’s another story…

Click on over to our Vertu Signature S Design hands on gallery!

izvor

Bugs In Firmware Are Here To Stay - Can Companies Deal With It?

The CEO of Research in Motion, Jim Balsillie, has admitted to the Washington Post that the recent release of the Blackberry Storm was buggy, and they knew it. Pushed out to make sure it was in the shops for Black Friday – one of America's biggest day for consumer electronics sales – after the planned shipping date in October was missed. And he ominously warned that shipping with imperfect software was the future of electronics. He's right – and let me explain why.

New devices being launched with firmware that isn't quite right and is hopefully fixed with some post-release updates? Doesn't that sound familiar to Symbian users? Indeed it is, and while I think the phrasing of Balsillie was a touch melodramatic, it is certainly true.

The days of a perfect operating system at launch are long gone – even Palm, when they released their first organsier had to ship it with a patch in software, back in 1996.

Why is this? It's to do with complexity. The modern mobile Operating System is huge, and measured in tens of Megabytes. That's a far cry from ten years ago when the rock solid reputations of Palm OS and Psion's SIBO (a forerunner to Symbian OS) were made. They had very little external devices to cope with beyond a serial port and user input either by the screen or the keyboard. Now you have multiple ways of connecting your smartphone to other computers and networks – Bluetooth, sometimes infrared, GSM, GPRS, EDGE, 3G, Wi-Fi, NFC... That adds a lot of complexity to the inputs that any OS processes have to handle.

Bundled applications are perceived as part of the OS, and rightly so. If the Contacts app doesn't work, how well a call sounds doesn't matter, because you can't get to Auntie Jean's phone number to call her. That means that as well as the OS, all the applications need testing to ensure they don't do anything silly, that they act as the user should reasonably expect, and don't interfere with other programs or tasks.



That's a big task. With around 50 applications, just sorting out the interactions between any pair of programs is potentially 2 to the power of 49, which is a rather large 562 billion combinations. Now test all that again, but with the MP3 player running in the background.

There's no way to brute force check that a smartphone will work, the maths is just too much. Start adding in unpredictable users, varying conditions for connectivity, the physical changes weather can bring on an icy day compared to the summer sun.... A certain amount of conjecture has to be employed, along with programs designed to catch errors and be graceful about them.

I'm not giving anyone a free pass because the task is complicated (all the worthwhile ones usually are), but to give you some idea of the scale and complexity involved. Now think about how few failures there are relative to the complexity of your smartphone and you'll begin to see that they are actually incredibly stable.

Smartphones will be released with problems in the firmware – the problem comes with human nature, and two areas can have a dramatic effect on the perception of a device. Stable phone, but the real world gets in the way. Deadlines have to be met for marketing, sales teams and the press wanting early review units. If there is a “date of no return”, such as RIM experienced with Black Friday, then it's going to go out whatever the condition, and the team will have to work on the problem while the device is in the stores and end-users' hands.

How much will RIM lose in bad press over the Storm? And how much would they have lost if they had missed the sales of Black Friday and taken a PR hit in not having the device out? That's not an engineering call, that's a management call, and one that every company has to face up to.

What the company does when bugs are found 'in the wild' is the area where things need to change. Rather than hide everything behind a wall of silence, before, at some almost random point in time, providing a new version with no indication of what has changed, there needs to be a little bit more honesty and openness.

We can see what the bugs are – we have the phone and the bugs are in front of us. What we want to know is that (a) you know about them and (b) when we are likely to see a fix for them. Yes it will mean admitting you are not perfect, but as the Open Source world has shown, being open about bugs builds more trust than hiding them away. When a new firmware is released, supply a changelog publicly, rather than having one leaked by the feeding frenzy of hacker web sites.

And make sure that people know about the updates and can get them. While there is a business reality of each network getting a custom build of the firmware of Nokia devices, it makes it a pain to update the devices with recent firmwares because the network has to control the roll-out. This is one area that Apple have got it right – they control the roll-out of the firmwares across all devices worldwide and everyone gets them at the same time.

The situation has certainly improved over the last few years, with over the air firmware updates being the big breakthrough. But there are still many issues, including presentation, implementation and the perception of updates being technically hard to do. The innovation and process needs to improve, to be more user friendly, and perhaps a touch of education as well couldn't hurt.

Firmwares will be released with errors – that's not a slur on a company. It's what they do after the release that's important.

izvor

iSuppli: BlackBerry Storm costs $4 more than its purchase price to build



In a fiscal climate where profit margin reigns intensely supreme, we've got yet another dollop of bad news to heap upon the parfait of pain that is the $199 (after $50 mail in rebate) BlackBerry Storm. Research firm, iSuppli, estimates that the cost for the components and assembly of RIM's BlackBerry Storm are just shy of $203 -- an estimate that does not include software development and uh, bug fixing costs or those attributed to patent licensing, physical distribution, marketing or anything else in the product lifecycle. The most costly component is the $35 Qualcomm MSM7600 processor that gives the Storm its dual GSM / CDMA personality. Now, $203 isn't that big of a spread compared to the per unit cost of a $175 8GB iPhone 3G, $169 BlackBerry Bold, or $144 T-Mobile G1. However, the lost profits add up quickly when you've moved over a million units globally.

P.S. We're not implying that RIM is losing money here (the price is obviously carrier subsidized), only that the Storm is likely less profitable than its peers.

izvor

Seemingly real Windows Mobile 6.5 screenshots trickle out of leaky internet faucet



A fine fellow over at the xda dev forum has posted some screenshots of what is purportedly Windows Mobile 6.5 -- and well... they look plausibly real. They're pretty Zune-ish (though maybe slightly less so than the last ones we saw), and also pretty good looking. There's still no info on when we can expect 6.5, though rumors have it that it'll be at MWC. Check some more photos (including the honeycomb app launcher and IE mobile) after the break. Hey peacock, how're you doing?



izvor

Exploding cellphone kills Chinese man



Here's the thing about batteries: they store energy. Lots of it. Channeled correctly, that energy does really awesome things for us -- but channeled chaotically, and... well, you know where this is going, don't you? A man shopping in a Lenovo store in mainland China has been killed after the phone in his chest pocket exploded, severing arteries and leading to massive blood loss. The make and model of the phone and battery have yet to be identified, but seeing how this is the seventh high-profile case of an exploding phone in China in the last six years, it really gives you pause before installing that shady off-brand juice, doesn't it?

izvor

Samsung to present the world’s first 12MP phone at MWC 2009

Samsung was the first manufacturer to release an 8MP camera phone (the Innov8, outed one month before Sony Ericsson’s C905), and it looks like it will also be the first to announce and launch a 12MP handset.

Telecoms Korea says that, according to another Korean publication, the world’s first 12 Megapixel camera phone will be unveiled by Samsung at MWC 2009, thus in about two weeks from now.

Details about the phone are basically inexistent, but it’s said that Samsung plans to begin mass production before the end of February, with the intention to release it in Europe first.



It will be interesting to see if the handset has a touchscreen or a regular display, as well as if it’s a smartphone or just a “dumb phone”.

Previous reports said that Samsung also wants to produce an 8MP phone with 3x optical zoom. So we might see that at MWC 2009 too, alongside the 12MP handset.

izvor