mobile

iPhone coming to Canada

Apple's iPhone is expected to cross the Canadian border later this year, the country's largest wireless provider said Tuesday.

Rogers Communications, which is also Canada's only GSM (Global System for Mobile Communications) provider, will serve as the region's iPhone carrier.

"We're thrilled to announce that we have a deal with Apple to bring the iPhone to Canada later this year. We can't tell you any more about it right now, but stay tuned," Chief executive Ted Rogers said in a statement.

The announcement comes 10 months after the Canadian company let it slip out of the bag that it would be the exclusive iPhone provider in Canada. … Read more

Vodafone, China Mobile, and Softbank in mobile net tie-up

A trio of mobile companies including two global giants will collaborate to find more ways to profit from and develop mobile phone-based internet use, the Financial Times reported.

Vodafone, the biggest-earning mobile company, China Mobile, the company with the largest user base, and Softbank, the third-place Japanese carrier, form the coalition.

FT writes, "The collaboration underlines how mobile operators are keen to stop internet search engines such as Google and Yahoo dominating the provision of potentially lucrative services on the wireless internet."

Indeed, Google is working on ever more wireless applications. At WWW2008 in Beijing on Wednesday, Google'… Read more

CNET Live - Episode 51

We're very excited to have Bruce Damer and Allan Lundell from the Digibarn stop by with the history of mobile computing. And we don't mean just talk. They brought actual portables, luggables, and even an Apple Newton! Keep an eye out for the laptop that flew on Columbia.

Watch the show on CNET TV.

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Dia diagram software.

Insider Secrets E-mail huge files for free Best of the Web Search Me Your calls

Yes, AVG will provide good antivirus protection. … Read more

T-Mobile to carry Android phone by year's end

A T-Mobile executive said Wednesday that the carrier will offer a Google Android cell phone by the end of 2008.

At a wireless conference in Redwood City, Calif., Joe Sims, vice president and general manager of T-Mobile USA's Broadband and new Business Division, said that he has seen prototypes of an Android handset, and that the first in a series of devices will be available in the final quarter of this year.

Sims confirmed an earlier announcement by T-Mobile International CEO Hamid Akhavan at February's GSMA World Congress in Barcelona, Spain. During a news conference, Akhavan promised a … Read more

Google brings display ads to mobile devices

Google is expanding its advertising business into a new domain: graphical ads that appear on mobile devices.

As with the company's text-based mobile ads, the Google image ads are displayed on the basis of keywords that appear on Web sites that people visit with their mobile phones, Google said Wednesday.

Mobile devices are a new frontier for the Internet in general and for the advertising business that Google and many others are building atop it. The mobile Web has been hobbled by tiny screens, slow and unreliable connections, and carriers' data-access fees, but a new era is arriving.

Apple'… Read more

LaCie releases 500GB rugged hard disk

Ninjas, John Locke, and Bear Grylls take note: your active lifestyle have nothing on the LaCie Rugged Hard Disk. But even if you're not trekking through the trenches and sinister islands, you'll still appreciate LaCie's latest version of their rugged hard disk with an impressive 500GB capacity.

We loved the previous models so much that we gave them our much coveted Editors' Choice back in '06, and we're happy to see that LaCie stepped it up to an improved Hitachi Travelstar 5K500 2.5 inch internal hard drive. Like previous models, this also connects via USB … Read more

FreeMobile411 to one-up Yahoo's voice search?

At CTIA 2008 in Las Vegas, Yahoo's executive vice president of Connected Life, Marco Boerries, demonstrated with great enthusiasm the newest feature to grace its mobile search tool: voice input. The technique, which asks users to press and hold a key while speaking their lookup request, is already active in Windows Live Search Mobile. Yahoo, however, hasn't released it beyond a preview. On Tuesday, one ankle-biting competitor jumped into the ring with its version of voice search.

FreeMobile411, which was itself just released in WAP form on April 11 (4/11--sigh), announced a Java version that adds the … Read more

Linux to own 20 percent of the mobile market by 2013

Linux has been proclaiming the year of the desktop for years, to no avail. Meanwhile, quietly, insidiously, it has been taking a rising share of the mobile and embedded market. Indeed, ABI Research pegs Linux's share of the mobile market at 20 percent by 2013. Such growth, in part driven by Google's Android stamp of approval and Nokia's Maemo approval, puts a serious crimp on Symbian's and Microsoft's ambitions in mobile.

As ABI research notes,

Linux solutions will be at the center of the drive to bring more content-rich environments to users who currently utilize mid-tier devices. More importantly, it looks increasingly likely that mobile Linux solutions will be an important building block in enabling an application domain that embraces Web-based applications and blended Web/native applications.

Mobile Linux's rise is partly a function of its superior cost proposition, but as ABI implies, it's also partly due to its flexibility and the iPhone's introduction of web-based applications. As on the desktop, the more we move applications to the web, the less necessary it is that we have Windows waiting on the client to receive them.… Read more

Your cell phone: More than a jukebox

Got a few minutes to kill? Sure, you could flip through your tunes, but when the same songs get old, and when you tire of your headphones winding from your ears like some extraterrestrial umbilical cord, check out the worlds of communication, learning, and game-playing applications to discover beyond the beats. Or, dare we say, while listening to them. Check out your burgeoning options for cell phone entertainment in the slide show.