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HTC Touch Diamond2 Clone With Dual Booting Android & WM

mushipkw — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 09:58:57 +0000

While the owners of HTC Touch Diamond2 use emulators and expect a full firmware from the operating system from Google, Chinese craftsmen have produced a clone of the smartphone, offering the user to choose the desired OS at startup: Windows Mobile or Android.
The clone is equipped with a processor with a clock frequency of 624 MHz and is inferior to the original screen resolution – only WQVGA instead of the usual WVGA. One of the additional functions of the smartphone is the support for WiFi and GPS.
Currently the smartphone is under development and can be loaded under Android 1.6 or Windows Mobile 6.5. It is unknown whether the versions will be updated before it will be available for production or not.
In any case, the owners of real HTC Touch Diamond2 will not win from that, because use of their own processors by Chinese manufacturers to install the firmware to the original practically is excluded.

How Google Can Kill Windows Mobile 7

mushipkw — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 14:58:01 +0000

So HTC manufacture the HD2, the most powerful smartphone and Windows Phone current on the market they also produce many other high profile Windows Phones and without the company the Windows Phones would be in a far worse state than the platform currently is. HTC have also worked with Microsoft on the HTC Shift which was one of the best Ultra Mobile PCs from a few years back.

Increasingly HTC are partnering with Google after making the first phone to run Android, the G1, and more recently manufacturing the Google Nexus One. It is also rumoured that HTC and Google are working to make a tablet device that could rival the rumoured iSlate and possibly the Microsoft Courier.

Now here is the scary thought, what if Google bought HTC. For Microsoft this would be horrendous, I know I wouldn’t even consider a Windows Phone without HTC making such great devices. Google could cripple Windows Mobile relatively easily by buying HTC and in doing so give themselves a prime way to design and manufacture their own phones, tablets and netbooks; all of which they believe are the way forward in computing.

The problem here is that Microsoft would not buy HTC as if they did they would lose their other phone manufacturing partners such as LG and then would have to take on a more Apple-like approach to the mobile market, not something that fits well with the Microsoft ethos. Where as Google are already trying to provide their own branded phone and still keep partners within the industry, maybe a tactic Microsoft will try if the gamble pays off.

I don’t think a single company can provide the best hardware for two very different, very competitive companies without something be sacrificed. With Google working very hard on its mobile OS and Microsoft planning to release Windows Mobile 7 by the end of the year I wouldn’t be surprised to see an increasing importance of HTC in the mobile world and some hostile action between Microsoft and Google.

How To Bypass Google Activation On Android Devices

mushipkw — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 20:39:30 +0000

Android devices needs registration before satrting up which requires network connection. Well xda user mr.tenuki has found out a way to skip this and start Android devices without registration. He explains a very simple process to do that. All which involves is simply pressing all 4 corners of the screen one after the other clockwise and done, you’re on your home screen. Start from the top left corner, then top right, bottom right, and then bottom left.

Here’s a screenshot explaining this:

This was successfully tried on both myTouch3G and Verizon Droid but on a stock G1 running cupcake and it did not work. Try this one on G1 running donut and check if it works. Share it.

Discussion Here.

Comparison Of Various MarketPlaces For Mobile Platforms

mushipkw — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 15:57:29 +0000

As previously announced by Microsoft, the online “desktop” web version of the service is now also available. I will briefly go through the different features and also recap with a nice comparison to the other application store fronts available on the marketplace today for iPhone, BlackBerry, Android, Nokia, WebOS, Samsung.

Windows Marketplace for Mobile on the web

The main login page is here: http://marketplace.windowsphone.com. And looks like this once you have signed on with your Live account:

You can easily drill down into any application and see the details, reviews and screenshots.

Features

Perhaps the most interesting is if you click on the “Purchase History” label at the top you can visually see all of your previous purchases, freebie or otherwise:

You can drill down into each purchase and see the additional details:

The “Account Settings” tab brings up an easy to use place to change your payment preferences. You can have different ones either for the phone or the web site.

The “Community” link brings you over to the Windows phone Forums, where there is also one for the Marketplace.

Filtering

Without signing into your Live account, or if you have never setup Marketplace on your Windows Mobile device(s) you can still view all the applications available. You can filter the available application for the 2 device types, Professional (touch screen), or Standard (non-touch screen) in the top right hand corner of the screen:

Language Selection

One last perhaps interesting tidbit I noticed, is that if you don’t sign-in you can actual select which language filter you wish to display the available Marketplace applications. In the bottom right corner there is a “Select Catalog” drop down:

Perhaps interesting to see the differences in the amount of available applications in certain languages just like they have been reported on the portable devices..

Quick Comparison to 7 Competitors

In the world of mobile application store fronts the monetary success of Apple’s iTunes store simply can not be ignored. So not just the operating system vendors are jumping on this bandwagon. Many mobile operators, and now OEM’s are also getting onboard. More competition is usually healthy for the consumer or enterprise customer. So it is definitely interesting times we are in.

Apple

The Apple iPhone folks actually have multiple avenues nicely packaged for them:

Web Apps: http://www.apple.com/webapps/ – Provides an overview of some of the 1700+ applications you don’t have to install on the iPhone, but uses a plain Internet URL to access them. Most are optimized for the specific iPhone screen size and Safari browser.

iTunes Store: http://www.apple.com/itunes/ – No native web interface to access the store. You must install the iTunes application, but can browse without a configured device. With it’s 100,000+ applications for the iPod Touch/iPhone the current defacto leader inthe mobile space. The newer Genius feature, where application picks based upon your current installation of application is very clever and surprising attractive..

For another interesting view of the iTunes App Store, be sure to check out the “App Store Wall”. Originally shown at the Apple WWDC (Worldwide Developers Conference) in the summer of 2009. It provides a live view of the top 20,000 applications and their live activity of purchases on twenty 30” monitors. Better screen shots here. It is now on display at Apple’s Cupertino, CA corporate office in the main lobby..

Blackberry

The RIM Blackberry folks have the launched their “Blackberry App World” earlier this year. It has a nice open web access to view it’s contents as well: http://appworld.blackberry.com/webstore/.

Several different filters and views to drill down into the applications you are interested in. A nice touch is the RSS feed on the featured applications.

Android

The Android Market web site appears not to be a full view into all the available applications. Just the featured, and top paid and free applications are highlighted. For the free applications, they can be filtered by 16 sub-categories.

Only screenshots and a brief description are made available. Hopefully some more development and feature will be added in the near future. Only a few months in life it clearly needs some more work..

Nokia

Nokia lunched it’s application store front back in May of 2009. It’s called “Ovi Store”, and was supposely launched with more than 20,000 applications in it’s back pocket to give it a boost from the get-go. Looking at the other platforms, probably not a bad decision for a mature platform to get it going.

However the web interface is not geared for desktop web viewing, even though it does pulls up in a fairly readable way: https://store.ovi.com/.

Ovi is already a cloud service for the Nokia platform, much like Apple’s MobileMe, or Microsoft’s MyPhone services. Nokia is also dabbling in the multimedia space with their own Nokia Music Store.

webOS

The Palm webOS application store is named “Palm App Catalog”. Tied to the public SDK releases for the operating system the App Catalog is coming up with a slow start it appears. Full support for paid apps appears to be coming up in December, where more developers and companies might have been waiting for to gain access into this well thought out platform.

No direct web accessible version of the Palm App Catalog so far, without using a webOS device itself. Although the application page on Palm’s web site gives a good glimpse of the top featured applications in 16 different categories.

The newly available Palm Pixi device running webOS does indeed look interesting and may push this platform into the application boom it probably deserves..

Samsung

Samsung is calling their own version simply “Application Store”. Limited to the United Kingdom, Italy and France at this time. Perhaps not a global or even regional play at this point in time, but shows their interest and willingness to have a full fledge “store” solution.

Samsung is borrowing heavily from the Apple playbook and created their own iTunes type application they are calling “Samsung Kies”. Installed on your desktop you can sync applications and browse for applications. On the device side, it appears they are catering this mainly to the Omnia line of devices running Windows Mobile at this time. But Samsung is a multi-platform OEM company and has not been shy to announce future Android and Symbian handsets coming out soon.

Verizon

One of the first larger mobile operators (United States-wise) to go public this summer that they want to have their own branded store front on their devices is Verizon. They are adding a new twist to this new frontier that only their own application store will be initially made available on the handsets sold by them to their customers. Customers can download and install the vendor store application (RIM, Microsoft, etc) but this is again a sign of the monetary gains at stake with mobile applications and stores.

The “VZAppZone” is already live and appears only Windows Mobile and RIM devices have been supported in the beginning.

BTW, for consumer LG devices sold by Verizon there is a whole other “Media Store” where ringtones, music, games, applications and wallpapers can be purchased and downloaded. Some with monthly usage fees. So a mobile operator driven store is nothing foreign to them and only natural to expand to more platforms and devices in their portfolio.

Discover Latest Mobile Applications – SmokinApps

mushipkw — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 04:41:33 +0000

SmokinApps lets you discover useful, entertaining and latest mobile applications for a wide range of mobile platforms including Android, iPhone, Blackberry, Windows Mobile and others, with up to 10 new app reviews added daily. Users can browse apps by platform, by tags (finance, games etc), sorted by rating and date, and filtered either by free/paid.

Read description, view screenshots and download apps onto your mobile phone from the website. To receive updates on the newest reviewed apps without visiting the website, you can subscribe by RSS or follow SmokinApps on Twitter at twitter.com/SmokinApps.
Features:

Discover the latest, useful and entertaining mobile applications.
Browse apps by a mobile platform (Android, iPhone, Blackberry, Windows Mobile etc.), by tags.
Filter apps by free/paid, sort by rating and by date.
Read independent app reviews, view screen shots and download the app’s version for your mobile platform.
App developers, submit your own apps to be reviewed in the directory.

Check out SmokinApps @ www.smokinapps.com