BMW has come up with a novel – and legal – way to drive its new Z4 Roadster while using the iPhone.
No, it’s not some ingenious hands-free device designed by engineering geniuses at the German car-maker.
Smartphone News
Cast your eyes over most office desks and something they have in common is a fixed-line telephone – at least for now.
Ivar Plahte, CEO and co-founder of OnRelay, has no doubt that mobile PBX is the future – with smartphones increasingly replacing desktop phones to become the sole business phone.
It was always on the cards from the moment Acer announced its intention to enter the smartphone arena.
Now the Taiwanese electronics giant has made it clear that it plans to drive down the cost of smartphones – to a level where mobile operators could give them away for free.
Acer plans to release two low-priced handsets – the F1 and L1 – in October. Both will be touchscreen devices running Windows Mobile 6.5.
Read more
While prospects for the overall mobile handset market remain gloomy, smartphones remain a bright spot with global unit growth as high as 11.1 per cent in 2009, according to iSuppli.
The analysts’ optimistic forecast for global smartphone unit shipments translates into 192.3 million units in 2009, up from 173.6 million in 2008.
Read more
Ofer Tziperman, president of LocatioNet, spoke in detail to smartphone-biz.news about its free navigation and local search service amAze.
A pioneer of ad-funded mobile applications, he gave his views on the revenue model’s future prospects – and the benefits of targeting mobile users with location-based adverts.
Read more
TuneWiki is taking the idea of giving listeners lyrics to go with their mobile music a stage further by extending it to streaming radio.
The social media player already offers audio and video while displaying synchronized or translated lyrics.
Smartphone-biz.news spoke to Chad Kouse, VP of R&D and CIO of the US-based developers, at the recent Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.
Read more
A true visionary, a trend spotter, truly innovative and the driving force behind OnRelay.
Just some of the plaudits from those that voted OnRelay’s CEO and co-founder Ivar Plahte as smartphone-biz.news’ Person of the Year 2008.
AmAze’s free navigation and local search service is the winner of smartphone-biz.news’ Product of the Year 2008 award.
With 41 per cent of the nominations, the turn-by-turn GPS program was the clear winner in a field that included Fring, mobile messaging service Nimbuzz and cellular fixed mobile convergence solution OnRelay MBX.
Watching movies on smartphones has in the past had its drawbacks – picture quality, screen size and memory limitations among the most obvious.
Those are fading rapidly but it seems that delivering video content to mobiles is occupying a lot of people’s attention.
Many factors influence consumers’ decisions to buy one mobile phone over the other – but it seems that embedded content is an increasingly important one.
A survey by independent app store GetJar has found that brand remains the key purchase decision factor (28% respondents), followed some way behind by user experience (17%).