mobile

Last November, MobiMate revealed WorldMate Live for BlackBerry. A large stride ahead of its traditional business-class travel software, WorldMate Live got some souped-up features, including online management tools and functionality to push flight status alerts and scheduling reminders to the phone.

In a few more weeks, WorldMate Live will come to Windows Mobile phones, the number two platform pick for businesses, and therefore frequent corporate jetsetters. I got a preview today at the CTIA Wireless conference, and it looks good. By "good" I mean nearly identical to the BlackBerry version of WorldMate Live, with perhaps one or two … Read more

Starting Wednesday, fans of the 'cheezy' Internet phenomenon LOLcats will be able to get updates of the funny, iconic felines from their cell phones. (I bet you thought I was going to say "from soda bottles.")

That's right. With a little help from Frengo, the company behind the popular Facebook app, Flirtable, I Can Has Cheezburger will be pushing daily updates of the newest LOLcat via text and the mobile Web, transcoded from Frengo's servers. The functionality is simple, but sensibly actionable. Users can view past images and share image links with friends via text.

To … Read more

Good news, good news! At CTIA, smartphone manufacturer HTC announced that it will offer the HTC Touch Dual through Best Buy stores this quarter. And the news gets even better, as the unlocked quad-band smartphone will ship with Windows Mobile 6.1 Professional Edition and wait for it...it will include support for U.S. 3G bands.

Already available in Europe and Asia (of course), the HTC Touch Dual is the next-generation of the HTC Touch, and alleviates some of the text entry pains of the original Touch by providing a slide-out SureType-like keypad. You'll also still get the … Read more

As if Twitters and Seesmics and Tumblrs weren't enough, there's a new short-form multimedia format you now can publish to: Pinger's PingerCast. The service lets you record short audio clips and sends SMS alerts to your subscribers' mobile phones every time you have a new file. The SMS message contains the phone number that your subscribers call to get your audio.

Designed originally as a marketing platform for media brands (movies and popular music artists), it's now available to everyone, and at least for the moment, it's free to use.

It's like a podcast … Read more

I'm pretty excited about Vringo's new Facebook app for a number of reasons. First, I'm a big fan of Vringo's video caller ID service, which lets users choose a video ringtone (vringo) that plays on their friends' phone when they initiate a call to said friend. Second, this new app carries Vringo's concept of personalizing the moment of phone-to-phone contact by syncing your address book with your friends' Facebook profile photos.

It takes about 5 minutes and quite a few steps to set up the service, but the directions are clear and fairly straightforward. You … Read more

Soon after we heard the announcement of the LG Vu, we rushed over to the LG booth to take a look at it live and in person. The screen is indeed impressive--it measures 3.0-inch diagonally and displays 262,000 colors, and has a touch vibrating feedback (or haptic feedback) similar to that on the LG Glimmer and the LG Voyager. Its menu interface is almost identical to that of those phones as well. The four shortcut icons on the bottom of the standby page correspond to the main menu, AT&T Mobile TV, the contacts list, plus the … Read more

Of the four major mobile operating systems (Palm, Symbian, Windows Mobile, BlackBerry), we hear plenty of complaints from users that Windows Mobile devices are the hardest to use because of the laborious navigation. And we certainly agree. Seriously, do you really need to go through several steps just to open or close an application? To be fair, Microsoft has heard the cries and made some headway in making its smartphones easier to use with Windows Mobile 6. But there's plenty of room for improvement, and the company is hoping its latest build will solve some of the problems.

At … Read more

Microsoft is adding new features to its Live Search for Windows Mobile and the BlackBerry.

Microsoft already offers voice input for Windows Mobile users, and soon BlackBerry users will be able to speak commands to find businesses on Live Search and get driving directions with results displayed on interactive maps.

For Windows Mobile, Microsoft is adding the ability to view the address for contacts on a map and get directions and to view custom maps of locations and events created by you or others on a PC. Users also will be able to launch Web search directly from the client … Read more

Feel better now T-Mobile customers? That's right, in case any of you were frothing with jealousy over AT&T's next-gen RIM BlackBerry Pearl 8120, you can rest easy knowing that you'll be able to get your hands on one starting April 14 (you can preregister for the smartphone starting today). The upgrade to the original Pearl brings integrated Wi-Fi, which you can use for Web surfing as well as voice calls since it's compatible with T-Mobile's HotSpot@Home service. You'll also get the benefit of a 2-megapixel camera with video-recording capabilities, Bluetooth 2.… Read more