Tuxtops

The race for securing a slice of the "mobile internet" kicked off today with companies given their first opportunity to register for a new ".mobi" internet domain. From today, trademark holders from within the mobile industry have the chance to register their trademarks as .mobi domains. From 12 June to 22 August, all trademark holders will be given the opportunity to get their hands on a .mobi domain before the whole thing is thrown open to the world and its dog on 28 August.

Much to the market's anticipation, the Sony Ericsson W900i was announced a year and a half after the S700i. It was to be the flagship model for 2005, though it wasn't a hit at launch, as the firmware was not reliable with streaming services offered via portals like Hutchison 3 and Vodafone 3G. Three months later, a lot of the network compatibility problems have been addressed by firmware updates, the price is dropped a bit, and we are finally seeing an increase in popularity. Today we will be looking at whether the W900i is worth the money and the hype.

We've been feeling the Walkman love from Sony Ericsson for what constitutes forever on a tech timeline. Oddly, Japan is only now getting their first taste of these little musicphones with the newly announced W42S. However, don't feel sorry for our former tech overlords just yet, the W42S packs in a cool 1GB of internal memory which can be supplemented with up to 4GB of Memory Stick Pro DUO expansion and sports a power saving mode allowing up to 30 hours of music playback.

Agile Messenger 3.0 is an Instant Messenger for your Windows Mobile and Symbian S60 (UIQ and PalmOS versions are unmaintaned right now). It supports ICQ, AIM, Yahoo!, MSN, GoogleTalk and Jabber.

Installation on our Windows Mobile 5 cellphone was easy, either via the .exe installation file or directly via a .cab file. When the application starts it asks you which one of the protocols you want to login to. We tried all six protocols but Jabber/XMPP simply did not work (GoogleTalk did work though). It wouldn't login, saying that "jabber account does not exist" (while I have successfully used Jabber with Gaim, Adium and Psi). Looking at Agile's forums there are more people with this problem but Agile would not acknowledge the problem.

When logged in you are presented with your currently online and offline friends of all logged in protocols. You can select via the preference panel to not show up the offline contacts and you can disable the different contact groups too. When clicking on the name of a contact you have a number of options: send an image file, move the contact to another group, rename it or get his/her info from the server.

When composing a message you are presented with a traditional layout: the conversation history at the top, the input box below, a smiley pop-up window button, "send" and "send picture" buttons. When receiving a message and you happen to be in the main view or even on another application, Agile Messenger has multiple ways of notifying you of the new message: flashing a text line on its app, open a balloon information, open a notification window, play a sound and even vibrate.

In the preferences panel you will find many options, like assign a button to Push-To-Talk functionality, auto connect on startup, choose a new notification sound and more. Other options include viewing the history, adding/removing a contact and there is even a byte counter -- handy for those who pay big bucks for GPRS.

Overall, I find Agile Messenger the best mobile IM solution there is. There is no other that can come close to it, not even IM+. However, it does have its weak points: its custom multi-platform UI is slow to redraw, while there is no way to enter specific canned messages and use them as shortcuts (e.g. "Hello", "How are you?" etc). Finally, there is no option to not allow the PDA/phone go to sleep while connected on Agile Messenger. Skype has such an option and it's very handy you see. The problem is that when you are connected via WiFi to Agile and then the phone goes to sleep and then you wake it up, Agile tries to automatically reconnect using the default connection method, which for PocketPC phones is GPRS, instead of retrying WiFi again. This means that when your phone wakes up and connects to GPRS without your consent, it will cost you money! This is why an "intelligent" connection dialog should be presented by Agile Messenger to ask you exactly which connection method you want re-activated, in addition to an option to not let the device go to sleep.

Pros:

* Good compatibility

* Nice interface

* Today Plugin

* Picture sending

* PTT

Cons:

* Jabber does not work

* Slow redraws

* No way to prevent the device from going to sleep or enable GPRS

* No canned message option

Overall: 7/10

Microsot just released a stand-alone emulator of Windows Mobile 5 (AKU2.0) with both PocketPC and Phone bootable images in it. You will need the two files from here, plus this file (overall 59 MB). Elsewhere, Qtopia Phone Edition 4.1.1 is released as a bootable ISO for everyone to try out (only VoIP and video playback support is missing from that image, overall 119 MB).

Aplix, best known for its Java stacks for mobile phones, will add carrier-specific mobile phone software reference implementations (RIs) to its product line. Handset vendors will use its modular RIs to quickly create differentiated BTO (built-to-order) designs, it says. A Linux RI and a Brew RI are its first objectives.

So far only Nokia 550 and Sony Ericsson W710i may be considered as truly sport-orientated handsets. The biggest difference between these two is that Nokia offers more solid casing and runs S60 third edition operating system, which implies it originates from smartphones, while the solution by Sony Ericsson is just an ordinary feature-packed cell phone. And in light of the fact both of them share a motion sensor, it is really hard to say which looks more appealing. Nevertheless, it's a bit too early to talk about this, so let's move on the actually reviewing> Sony Ericsson W710i.

SavaJe, a spinoff of Lucent Technologies, threw its hat -- or, rather, cellphone -- into the ring at the 2006 JavaOne Conference in San Francisco this week, with the unveiling of a "sophisticated" handset that runs a unique, Java-centric operating system. The Jasper S20 mobile phone, made by Group Sense Limited PDA (GSPDA) and running SavaJe's Java-based SavaJe Mobile Platform, also garnered JavaOne's "Device of the Show" honors.

Symbian rang in the new millennium with the first handset built on its eponymous smartphone platform, the Ericsson R380. Six years later, the company celebrates the 100th model to run on the Symbian operating system (OS). Although the company isn't exactly sure what device enabled it to reach this milestone - three shipped on the same day - CFO Thomas Chambers told a couple of news agency's the likeliest candidate is the Nokia 3250.

Neuros was working on a firmware update that would fix the incompatibility issues with playback on the PSP. Neuros has now officially released firmware upgrade 2.0.12, which not only fixes the PSP incompatibility issue, but also includes additional video playback functionality and other bug fixes. A complete list of the updates is here.