Posts Tagged ‘Bluetooth’
Potential tag team with Google and T-Mobile – UPDATED
It is almost fun wandering through the Web bumping into bloggers who want to be known as pundits. Or even analysts. Hilarious – excepting their incompetence and lack of understanding of how the business world generally functions – couldn’t be further from their guesses at the future, a twittery fear of any corporation larger than a corner ice cream stand.
That is why my initial post referenced Om Malik’s post. Which he ended with email messages to personal contacts at Google and HTC. I’m certain there will be for-real updates at his business site.
Today’s update is from Reuters and ZDNet. Not much of any punditry there, either:
Google Inc plans to sell its own cellphone direct to consumers as soon as next year, bypassing wireless operators in a rare strategic move.
Called the Nexus One and made by smartphone maker HTC, the phone will run on the search giant’s Android operating system — around which Motorola and other cellphone makers have built devices — and will be sold online, the WSJ cited persons familiar with the matter as saying.
Cellular service will have to be bought separately, it added.
Yes, most of the article was offering analysis derived from info reported in the Wall Street Journal – and so credited. So much for Rupert Murdoch’s plan for a paywall.
The “Google phone,” HTC’s Nexus One, was approved this morning by the U.S. Federal Communications Commission as model number PB99100.
The trio of filings confirm a few technical details, such as microSD expansion, 802.11b/g Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 2.1 + EDR.
The report also raises new questions about the device’s potential carrier landing spot, with support for quad-band GSM/GPRS/EDGE with UMTS/HSUPA on 850/1700/1900 frequencies.
Translation: Hello T-Mobile, and perhaps AT&T, too.
UPDATE: Latest news from Reuters says the phone hits the stores in January with two versions: one to be sold with contract by T-Mobile and another to be sold unlocked.
iPhones and the ‘augmented’ stadium
Researchers are creating software that links fans’ smartphones into a network so they can easily share messages, images and video.
The software could prove a boon for seated events when friends are not able to sit together but want to chat about the on-field action.
It could also help them include fans and friends who did not manage to get tickets to a match…
“We are not trying to take away from the quality of the football match, we are trying to augment it,” said Dr Matthew Chalmers, a reader in computer science at the University of Glasgow and principal investigator on the “smart stadium” project.
The researchers are working with the Tartan Army – fans who travel round the world following local Scottish football teams and the national side. Some Tartan Army fans have been given Apple iPhones fitted with prototypes of the software Dr Chalmers and his co-workers are developing…
For instance, he said, key members of supporter groups cannot sometimes travel to a match but want to keep up with what happens before, during and after…
The researchers also plan to use the Bluetooth short-range wireless technology built into most smartphones as a messaging system so those attending a match can keep in touch or share media.
He added that the researchers plan to release the software as a free mobile application so that anyone can use it.
Interesting they decided to drop Windows Mobile and switched to the iPhone early on.
Though it’s being developed for fans of [proper] football in the UK, I can see American sports fans – especially baseball and [American] football – enjoying the capabilities of a software and hardware combo like this. Even golf would work – fans wouldn’t have to whisper, they could text their comments.
Cripes – I’d load it onto my laptop Mac in the living room and use it to follow along a match from the Prem or the SPL. I’d love it.
Flashing cellphone dress. Uh-huh.
Daylife/Getty Images used by permission
Former Wimbledon champion Maria Sharapova presented a prototype dress to reporters that is designed to light up when the wearer’s mobile telephone rings.
British fashion student Georgie Davis dreamed up the knee-length sleeveless white dress as part of a school project with mobile phone-maker Sony Ericsson to figure out ways of incorporating new technology into fashion.
Davis said the dress is designed to eventually be connected to the wearer’s phone by Bluetooth wireless technology, so she can be alerted to a call even in noisiest of places.
“When you’re in a pub or a bar, you can never, ever hear your phone,” 20-year-old Davis told Reuters on Wednesday.
The right shoulder of the dress is embellished with translucent white scales that move and light up.
I’ll run right out and get one for my wife. And she’ll smack me upside the head.
