May 14 2009

Clearwire, Cisco Team Up On Wireless WiMax

The companies are pairing Cisco’s mobile WiMax infrastructure with Clearwire’s ecosystem of partners to deploy mobile broadband.


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May 14 2009

Apple and AT&T playing favorites with the App Store?

There’s a disconnect between some video-streaming applications approved for 3G use in Apple’s App Store and those, like SlingPlayer Mobile, which are limited to Wi-Fi access only. While Apple has certainly not been shy about exercising its veto power over App Store applications–just ask Trent Reznor, for example–it’s unclear why Sling’s…


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May 13 2009

Measuring the User For CPU Frequency Scaling

An anonymous reader writes “The Empathic Systems Project a Northwestern University demonstrate up to 50% power savings by controlling CPU frequency scaling based upon the end user. They measure the user with eye trackers, galvanic skin response, and force sensors to find a CPU frequency that the user is satisfied with. They are currently studying user activity and system performance on mobile architectures, specifically the Android G1 phone.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.


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May 13 2009

AT&T issues official statement on SlingPlayer’s 3G blackout

AT&T’s obviously taking a good helping of heat today over Sling’s rock-and-a-hard-place decision to remove 3G streaming capability from its SlingPlayer Mobile build for the iPhone — a decision that gets at the very heart of several hot-button issues plaguing AT&T and Apple alike — and the carrier understandably felt the need to release an officia


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May 13 2009

Google’s mobile jihad: Support the web, live with the app

Over the last year, it’s become clear that Google has a bigger war on its hands in mobile than it had anticipated. It’s principal antagonist is sexy Apple iPhone, which has seriously disrupted Google’s ambitions to turn mobile industry into a Web-based …


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May 11 2009

Android to grow faster than iPhone in 2009

The number of phones shipped using Google’s Android platform is set to grow much faster than the iPhone this year, estimates from Strategy Analytics maintain today. Devices like the T-Mobile G1 have just a small fraction of shipments today but are expected to grow 900 percent in 2009; iPhones will grow only by 79 percent.


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May 11 2009

Ten Features To Love About Android 1.5

An anonymous reader writes “Last month, Google officially announced the Android 1.5 update, dubbed ‘cupcake.’ The new software is apparently ready to roll out to Android-powered devices beginning tomorrow. Make no mistake, Android 1.5 is a major upgrade — they could have called it 2.0. The software brings a host of new capabilities, some of which can’t be found on rival mobile platforms, including video recording and sharing.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.


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May 10 2009

Mobile Wi-Fi Hot Spot

bsharma writes to let us know about a little goodie that we will be able to buy starting May 17: a battery-powered, rechargeable, cellular, Wi-Fi hot spot that you can put in your pocket. “What if you had a personal Wi-Fi bubble, a private hot spot, that followed you everywhere you go? Incredibly, there is such a thing. It’s the Novatel MiFi 2200, available from Verizon starting in mid-May (0 with two-year contract, after rebate). It’s a little wisp of a thing, like a triple-thick credit card. It has one power button, one status light and a swappable battery that looks like the one in a cellphone. When you turn on your MiFi and wait 30 seconds, it provides a personal, portable, powerful, password-protected wireless hot spot. … If you just want to do e-mail and the Web, you pay a month for the service (250 megabytes of data transfer, 10 cents a megabyte above that). If you watch videos and shuttle a lot of big files, opt for the plan (5 gigabytes). And if you don’t travel incessantly, the best deal may be the one-day pass: for 24 hours, only when you need it. In that case, the MiFi itself costs 0.” The device has its Wi-Fi password printed on the bottom, so you can invite someone to join your network simply by showing it to them.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.


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May 10 2009

A Look Back At the World’s First Netbook

Not-A-Microsoft-Fan writes with this excerpt from The Coffee Desk: “Netbooks are making huge waves within the hardware and software industries today, but not many would believe that the whole Netbook craze actually started back around 1996 with the Toshiba Libretto 70CT. Termed technically as a subnotebook because of its small dimensions, the computer is the first that fits all of the qualifications of being what we would term a netbook today, due in part to its built-in Infrared and PCMCIA hardware, and its (albeit early) web browsing software. The hardware includes the two (potentially) wireless PCMCIA and infrared network connections, Windows 95 OSR 2 with Internet Explorer 2.0, a whole 16MB of RAM and a 120Mhz Intel Pentium processor (we’re flying now!).”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.


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May 9 2009

The Grid, Our Cars, and the Net

Wired is running a piece on the big idea of Robin Chase — the founder of Zipcar — that we need to build our smart power grid on open standards and include cars as nodes in a mesh network. “‘Today in Iraq and Afghanistan, soldiers and tanks and airplanes are running around using mesh networks,’ said Chase. ‘It works, it’s secure, it’s robust. If a node or device disappears, the network just reroutes the data.’ And, perhaps most important, it’s in motion. … Build a smart electrical grid that uses Internet protocols and puts a mesh network device in every structure that has an electric meter. Sweep out the half dozen networks in our cars and replace them with an open, Internet-based platform. Add a mesh router. A nationwide mesh cloud will form, linking vehicles that can connect with one another and with the rest of the network. It’s cooperative gain gone national, gone mobile, gone open.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.


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