Mobility

Microsoft to limit the capabilities of cheap laptops:

“Microsoft is launching a program to promote the use of its Windows OS in ultra low-cost PCs, one effect of which will be to limit the hardware capabilities of this type of device, IDG News Service has learned.

Microsoft plans to offer PC makers steep discounts on Windows XP Home Edition to encourage them to use that OS instead of Linux on ultra low-cost PCs (ULPCs). To be eligible, however, the PC vendors that make ULPCs must limit screen sizes to 10.2 inches and hard drives to 80G bytes, and they cannot offer touch-screen PCs.”

Or, as an alternative, use a fully-fledged operating system which will work on pretty much any device you like: Linux.

I’m really enjoying using Brightkite at the moment (I’m ianbetteridge if you want to friend me), and I’m pleased to see that the iPhone web application has now been released in alpha form.

But I was even more pleased to see this comment from one of the developers on the Brightkite blog:

“The native iPhone application with core location (cell triangulation, GPS) is in the works. Checking in will become much easier. We will be releasing it in June through Apple. There are no plans to release a jail broken version as of right now.”

With Jaiku effectively stalled, Brightkite looks a nice solution for location awareness. Plus, it integrates with Fire Eagle, which is great.

Davey Winder reports on the demise of one of Microsoft’s least-successful products, the SPOT watch:

“Cast your mind back to 2004 and think of the exciting new smartphones that were just starting to appear, how mobile phone technology was making that decisive move towards data, how WiFi was a reality. Then think how anyone at Microsoft could seriously expect us to go bananas about a larger than you might like wristwatch, that also cost more than you might like, looked as if it had been created by someone who thought that retro was the same thing as ugly and which expected punters to pay as they went to get stupidly miniscule data fragments (news and weather) that could be found for free, and in full, elsewhere with less fuss. Yet that’s exactly what happened, and the SPOT watch was deemed a worthy product to pitch.”

Indeed. If there’s one lesson that MIcrosoft should learn from SPOT, it’s that in the consumer space, industrial design trumps the features list every time. And unfortunately for Microsoft, it also came into the market at exactly the time when smart phones started to take off - devices which could do everything that SPOT could do, plus lots more, and which had not only nation-wide coverage but international too. SPOT wasn’t quite up to the level of the BOB debacle, but it wasn’t far off.

jkOnTheRun: Nova iSync plugin supports 158 phones for Mac synching:

“With the newest iteration, version 6, it supports over 155 cell-phones that don’t play nicely with iSync on their own. Once installed, you can synchronize Contacts and Calendar events to and from your BenQ, Siemens, Motorola, Nokia, Samsong and Sony Ericsson device. “

If you’re using an unsupported phone, this looks like a very interesting option. If only it would work with the LG Viewty…

…more of which soon. I’ve had a Viewty for a while, and been using it side-by-side with my iPhone. The quick conclusion: if you’re looking for a nice looking phone with a really good camera and smart video, this could be for you. If you’re looking for an internet phone… not so good.

I don’t really agree with the headline, but it’s still worth knowing about. According to Jason O’Grady, there’s a “Remote execution DoS [which] exploits iPhone by simply loading a Web page” doing the rounds. It doesn’t sound like it’s at the stage of being an exploit (as yet) though - all it does is crash your phone, rather than execute arbitrary code.

furbo.org · Brain surgeons:

“Twitterrific on the iPhone could definitely make use of a background process to gather new tweets. In fact, a prototype version of the software did just that. And it was a huge design failure: after doing XML queries every 5 minutes, the phone’s battery was almost dead after 4 hours. In fact, the first thing I said after giving Gruber this test version was ‘don’t use auto-refresh.’”

And that is a massive, massive issue - and one where the iPhone will be at a major disadvantage to pretty-much everyone else until battery technology catches up to Jobs’ dreams.

And an interesting question: if pinging a server every five minutes causes the iPhone to die in four hours, what will ActiveSync’s over the air “instant” reception of events, mail and contacts do to it? This isn’t a rhetorical question: I genuinely don’t know. If Microsoft has some whizzy way of keeping a device listening for events without draining the battery using only software, that’s very interesting. And if they don’t, iPhone is basically going to be useless as a BlackBerry-killer.

I’m very much hoping that the announcement of a mobile version of Google Gears presages both a version for Safari on the Mac, and something for Safari on the iPhone, too.

I can’t help but think that some of the stories about the BBC making the content from its iPlayer catch-up TV service available on the iPhone and iPod touch might be a little bit wide of the mark. For example, take The Register:

“iPlayer availability on the iPhone will be via Wi-Fi only as O2’s EDGE data network is too slow. However, the BBC has a deal with hotspot provider The Cloud to offer free access to bbc.co.uk and iPlayer.”

Actually, all iPhone users already have free WiFi access via The Cloud - it’s part of the deal you get with O2. And given that The Cloud has a deal which gives you free WiFi for a few quid a month, I don’t think the BBC is going to offer to make up that lost revenue. (UPDATE: See Jem’s comment below… although of course, it’s still kind of irrelevant to iPhone users…)

Incidentally, the original story about this seems to be the one written by Mark Sweney for The Guardian. in which it’s pretty much an aside at the bottom of the story. There’s no link to any release from the BBC, and no indication of where or when exactly the statement was made - or, for that matter, who made it.

Because there’s so little context given, it’s actually almost impossible to get a handle on what this story means, or what is actually happening. It could mean that the BBC is developing an iPlayer application which uses the forthcoming SDK. It could, however, simply be a slightly confused reference to the release by BBC Worldwide of shows on iTunes.

And, perhaps most irritatingly of all, there’s no direct email address listed for Mark, so I can’t actually ask him. Of course, I could probably just guess it - but that’s hardly radical transparency, is it?

John Gruber makes some very good points about why Apple will not be releasing Flash for the iPhone any time soon. He also makes a point which I think a lot of people haven’t cottoned on to about the upcoming SDK:

“Lastly, perhaps you might be thinking that although Flash-for-the-iPhone may not be in Apple’s interest, it is in Adobe’s — and so perhaps Adobe will port it themselves once the imminent iPhone SDK ships. Think again. The iPhone SDK is not going to be the sort of environment like Mac OS X where developers are free to create system-level plugins. No one is going to get to diddle with MobileSafari without Apple’s approval.”

Apple is NOT going to be creating the kind of SDK which allows you to build just about anything, and my own personal guess is that it won’t match the features of the “unofficial” SDK (which consists of jailbroken iPhones and the documentation that Erica Sadun has put together).

I suspect this means that a lot of people in the hacker community will be disappointed, but I suspect that Apple won’t really care - and neither will the majority of iPhone users.

Yes, that is Second Life running on an iPhone… kind of. According to Tech Digest, it’s really a very different kind of proof of concept:

“In a layman’s nutshell, all the processing is being done NOT on the iPhone, on a central server. All that’s being streamed to the iPhone is the visuals - essentially, a video feed of the Second Life environment. Then, when you tap the on-screen buttons to move, or type in a message, that’s sent back up to the server for processing.”

Personally, I’d settle for being able to IM from my phone to avatars in Second Life, and hopefully we won’t have to wait too long for that…

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Apple, iPhone, Second Life