There's something to interest almost everyone at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona this week:
For the lost
GPS is built in to an increasing number of mobile phones. Nokia is still the most aggressive vendor. This year it plans to sell 35 million phones with GPS. The Finnish phone giant is not alone; its competitors are also embracing navigation, so don't be surprised if in a few years GPS is as common in phones as cameras are today.
Trendsetters: HTC P3470 and Samsung G810
For shutterbugs
Phone makers also continue to develop cameras. Among the features that popped up during this year's show are face detection, image stabilization, and the ability to take better pictures in the dark. Phone cameras with a 5-megapixel resolution are also becoming more common, although you still only get a digital zoom.
Trendsetters: Sony Ericsson C902 and Samsung F480
For Linux
Apple isn't the only company redrawing the mobile phone map. Linux is nothing new in mobile phones, but the launch of Google's Android has given it a lot of extra attention. On the show floor, several chip manufacturers showed prototypes. The first real phones should be ready before the end of the year. One benefit with Android is the reduction in the time it takes to develop a new phone, according to Texas Instruments.
Trendsetters: ARM and Texas Instruments
For cineasts
If the mobile phone makers are to be believed, we should also use our next phone to watch movies. Two things that get us there: bigger screens in a widescreen format and larger storage capacity.
Trendsetters: Nokia N96 and Sony Ericsson Xperia X1
For globetrotters
Geotagging is a feature that combines built-in support for navigation and photography. When you take a picture, your location is also saved. Then you can overlay that information on services like Google Maps and see where you've been.
Trendsetters: Sony Ericsson C702 and Nokia 6220 Classic
For CIOs
With Sony Ericsson on board, four out of five of the biggest phone makers have phones based on Microsoft's Windows Mobile operating system. The last holdout is Nokia and it still has no plans. One interesting thing about a few of the Windows Mobile phones launched at the Mobile World Congress is that they fit just as well at home as at work.
Trendsetters: Samsung i200 and LG KS20
For speed freaks
Phones with support for HSDPA (High Speed Downlink Packet Access) are arriving at a steady pace. A few phones now support 7.2Mbps -- but to get the most out of that bandwidth, you need a laptop. A few phones also support HSUPA (High Speed Uplink Packet Access), an abbreviation that in the real world means faster upload speeds.
Trendsetters: Toshiba Portege G810 and LG KF700
For speed freaks II
To get more bandwidth to your phone, you can also use Wi-Fi. Support for this technology is also becoming more common. One of the advantages with Wi-Fi is that you can sometimes browse the Internet for free. Good luck doing that on a mobile network.
Trendsetters: Motorola Moto Z6w and Sony Ericsson G900
For your car
So how do you listen to your MP3 player without using headphones? One solution is to use the FM transmitter integrated in some new phones, and listen on your car radio. A small step for technology, but a big one for usability, according to Nokia.
Trendsetters: Nokia N78 and Sony Ericsson W980
For the touchy
Touch-based user interfaces are fast becoming the norm in mobile phones -- although buttons will still not disappear. The goal is, if all goes well, to make phones easier to use. Only the imagination of the phone makers limits what can be done.
Trendsetters: HTC Advantage and Samsung Soul
Feb 13, 2008
Top 10 trends at the Mobile World Congress
Mozilla delivers Firefox 3 Beta 3
Mozilla Corp. released the third beta of Firefox 3 yesterday, eight weeks after it made the last major milestone for its open-source browser, and right on a schedule it set a dozen days ago.
Mike Beltzner, Mozilla's interface designer, touted additions and enhancements to Beta 3 in a post to the company's Web site Tuesday, touting several new or enhanced security features, an improved download manager, one-click bookmarking, offline application support, faster page rendering, and new progress on plugging the browser's noted "memory leaks."
As he has previously, Beltzner discouraged casual users from trying the new code. "We do not recommend that anyone other than developers and testers download the Firefox 3 Beta 3 milestone release," he said. "It is intended for testing purposes only."
Mozilla has already committed to at least one more beta before Firefox is allowed to move on to the release-candidate stage. A week and a half ago, however, Beltzner declined to set a release schedule for the next beta, saying then only that "our goal is to do a quick turnaround on Firefox 3 Beta 4."
In its release notes, Mozilla trumpeted the fact that Beta 3 includes more than 1,300 changes made since mid-December's Beta 2 and boasted that its developers had also plugged over 50 new memory leaks in the past eight weeks.
Firefox has long been criticized by users for consuming increasing amounts of memory the longer it remains open, to the point where the browser hinders overall performance on the computer. The company made leak plugging a top priority, particularly after a member of the Mozilla board of directors said late last year that memory problems would make it tough to compete in the mobile browser market.
Firefox 3 Beta 3 also uses an XPCOM cycle collector that, said Mozilla, "completely eliminates many more [leaks]." The cycle collector, which periodically checks memory usage and tries to free any unused memory, has been in play since last summer, but as Beta 3 development has proceeded, more of its code has been written or rewritten to support the collector.
One noted addition to Firefox 3, however, is still buggy. Places, a souped-up bookmarking and browser history management tool that was once slated for Firefox 2, does not yet allow users to shuffle bookmarks by dragging and dropping. According to notes from a Tuesday Firefox 3 status meeting, Places is stuck.
"Cannot drag-and-drop items across different views/menus," the notes read. "This is blocking on resolution of platform bug 389931, which is a P1 [Priority 1] blocker regression from the thread manager rewrite, and seemingly unowned (no response from owner since July 2007). This is the cause of much weeping and gnashing of teeth."
Firefox 3 Beta 3 can be downloaded for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux in 32 languages from Mozilla's site.
E-Mail Carries Love And Viruses For Valentine's Day
The FBI is warning that an unexpected e-card in your in-box may contain the Storm Worm virus.
Just in time for Valentine's Day, Google (NSDQ: GOOG) on Tuesday released the results of a survey showing that young people are embracing e-mail to send love letters. Coincidentally, the FBI warned on Tuesday that cybercriminals are embracing e-mail to send fake love letters.
"The survey affirmed that e-mail is an increasingly important part of our most intimate and personal interactions, and that younger people are leading the charge: they are more likely to use e-mail for everything from sending love letters to ending relationships," said Google group product marketing manager Jen Grant in a blog post.
But the FBI advises caution. "If you unexpectedly receive a Valentine's Day e-card, be careful," the agency said. "It may not be from a secret admirer, but instead might contain the Storm Worm virus."
Security software vendor Trend Micro issued a similar warning on Monday. "As we had already forecast last month, Storm is already sending their Valentine greetings this week," said security researcher David Sancho in a blog post. "The owners of this powerful botnet are doing as much as possible to [sustain the number of compromised machines at their disposal]. This includes spamming people and making them click on malicious links. This time around, the messages are of love."
More and more of this virus-laden e-mail love is coming from Russia. According to Sophos, Russia has overtaken China to become the second largest sender of spam, behind the United States.
"Responsible for a third of all unwanted e-mail, USA and Russia can be viewed as the two dirty men of the spam generation, polluting e-mail traffic with unwanted and potentially malicious messages," said Carole Theriault, senior security consultant at Sophos, in a statement.
Memo to Microsoft: Yahoo's A-list
Working at Yahoo is getting riskier by the day. Even before merger-minded Microsoft could lay off some of the stars within its acquisition target, Yahoo executives beat them to it.
But there are some key Yahoo employees who are so indispensible for their experience, skill or leadership, that Microsoft would be crazy to let them go in the event of a merger, observers, insiders, and former Yahoo employees say.
Several of those mentioned by sources as vital to Yahoo were among the casualties of Tuesday's layoffs, which totaled an estimated 1,100. The layoffs are the latest black spot for Yahoo, which has been struggling to redefine itself in the shadow of Google's dominance in both search and online advertising. In an attempt to better compete with Google, Microsoft has made a $31-a-share offer for Yahoo, but Yahoo's board has rejected it as too low.
"The company was significantly overstaffed and with a coming consolidation with Microsoft there is going to be pretty dramatic overlap," said Jim Barnett, who left Yahoo in 2003 and is now chief executive of Turn, an automated targeting ad marketplace.
One of the main reasons Microsoft is aiming to buy Yahoo is to improve its expertise on the Web--a market the software giant has yet to dominate despite its best efforts. Even though Yahoo has been struggling, the Internet company is viewed as rich with valuable online brands and talented people. Microsoft will likely want to keep Yahoo employees in a host of areas, including online advertising, social media, and Web search.
"Microsoft needs assistance in the Internet business so they're going to be looking to bring in some Internet-based talent. Yahoo's a step up for them," said Steve Weinstein, research analyst at Pacific Crest Securities.
Still, many talented people departed Yahoo with the layoffs. Casualties include Randy Farmer, who was a community strategy analyst at Yahoo and a virtual worlds pioneer, and Bradley Horowitz, who headed up Yahoo's Advanced Technology Division and oversaw Brickhouse. Horowitz, who could not be reached for comment, may have taken a voluntary severance package and is reported to be joining Google. Salim Ismail, one of his top managers at Brickhouse--a program dedicated to launching innovative products--left voluntarily.
The departures of Brickhouse executives seem to undermine a need at Yahoo to focus on innovative, community-based Web services.
Who to keep
Among the talent pool at Yahoo, several executives stand out in divisions such as social media and search. Those include Jeff Weiner, who oversees Yahoo's consumer Web products. Several sources said he would be a must-hire for Microsoft. "He's a brilliant guy with tremendous insights," said Brian Bowman, who left Yahoo in 2006 as vice president of community and is now chief marketing officer at Reply.com.
Flickr co-founder Katarina Fake is also revered for creating one of the most popular social-media applications, at Yahoo and on the Web. "It would be absurd to lose anyone from Flickr or Delicious," said Danny Sullivan, editor of Search Engine Land.
Several sources also praised Tapan Bhat, vice president of front doors at Yahoo; Scott Moore, who left MSN and is head of Yahoo News; and Brad Garlinghouse, head of communications and community at Yahoo, who bravely wrote the famous "Peanut Butter Manifesto" in 2006 that foreshadowed Yahoo's current problems and suggested layoffs, management changes, and a refocusing on core products.
