Mar

20

2008

(1) Comments

Free Mobile Phone, Courtesy of your bank

02:12PM by Wayne Lam

This interesting NFC-enabled GSM phone surfaced on the FCC website recently.  More interestingly though is its branding: Citibank.  Apparently, after the utter failures of name-brand MVNOs like ESPN, Amp’d Mobile, Disney & Voce, the next wave of mobile virtual network operators will come from more mundane companies such as your bank.  The device does offer a compelling design - by combining your bank card and your cell phone, you can now leave your home with one less thing in your wallet!

Mar

18

2008

(2) Comments

How Usable is your Camera Phone?

02:27PM by Wayne Lam

If you are camera snob like I am, you’re probably wanting for a better camera phone.  Year after year, new phone models with higher mega-pixel count comes along but fails to impress in both quality and, more importantly, device usability. The sad fact is that camera phones are, by definition, primarily designed to make phone calls.  The taking picture part is largely a design after-thought or more likely a marketing gimmick to sell you a longer wireless contract.  But all is not lost, a new batch of 5MP camera phones are on their way from the major handset manufacturers.  These new generation of camera phones are finally making up for the failures of past models in both image quality and usability design. 

In this blog we will focus on 2 particular high end camera phones - Nokia N95 and the Sony Ericsson K850i.  Both phones are endowed with 5MP digital senors but each takes a different design philosophy to achieve their intended task.  Camera phones are all about opportunistic photography.  The value of the device is having the capability to take a picture when you least expect to.  Therefore, I believe camera phones should be judged on how usable they are in that purpose.

Mar

17

2008

(0) Comments

Carrier Independent “Social Radar” Applications

06:19PM by Wayne Lam

Have a built-in GPS on your smartphone but not a subscriber on the Helio network? Well, you too can enjoy the much-hyped location-based social application that is popularly known as “Buddy Beacon” (trademarked by uLocate).

Mar

6

2008

(0) Comments

Vudu intro’s XL model, upgrades software to v1.3

01:41PM by Wayne Lam

As expected, Vudu introduced the 1TB model of their VOD set-top box to capitalize on their expanding High Def movie library.  At the same time, they’ve also introduced a new firmware upgrade to existing customers.  The most significant change in v1.3 is the capability to archive select movie titles.  Archiving essentially means that movies are “backed-up” on the network and can be re-downloaded at anytime. This upgrade is designed to help customers free up more disk space on their Vudu boxes for additional downloads of newly released movies, hence, more business for Vudu!. Pretty savvy move I must admit! 

Mar

4

2008

(0) Comments

Google Gears goes mobile

03:37PM by Wayne Lam

Mobile web browsing is great [or so Apple would like you to believe]… that is, of course, if you can keep your wireless connection consistently connected.  In the real world, wireless data connections regularly drop while you roam about making mobile browsing a frustrating proposition.  So, what’s the fix? Enter Google Gears.