Just looked at the new HTC Touch Diamond which has just been officially released. My first impression is that the device is a very pretty piece of hardware. The design is sleek and the interface seems to be a good implementation of something resembling the iPhone in many ways (including motion invoked portrait/landscape display change).

Comparison with iPhone is inevitable both because of the motion detection and the user interface itself, but these things are becoming the way of the future and are probably going to be included in future mobile devices, so enough with the iPhone praise.

The specs (on the HTC site) are alright, although pretty standard for a smartphone nowadays. My P1i has pretty much the same abilities (minus the design and screen implementation), although the W960 would be a much better comparison to the Touch Diamond. It has plenty of internal memory (256 MB ROM, 192 MB DDR SDRAM) and 4 GB of internal storage space. The screen is a TFT LCD flat VGA touch sensitive screen. It covers a broad range of connection speeds (HSDPA, WCDMA, GSM, GPRS, EDGE), and sports GPS/aGPS support. The camera is 3.2 Mpixels with auto focus. Connectivity wise it’s got WiFi, BT 2.0 (EDR), HTC ExtUSB (11-pin USB and jack all-in-one). It’s got Windows Mobile 6.1 Professional as the OS of choice.

Crave C|NET has a nice gallery of the HTC Touch Diamond, so check it out.

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If you were thinking about getting an ultra-portable PC or sub-notebook, you’ll have to gather information about a lot of new devices that have appeared in the last months. Brad Linder over at Liliputing.com wrote a great post which gives an overview of ultra-portable devices along with specifications. A great list that should be helpful if you’re still wondering what to get. The list includes:

• Asus Eee PC 701
• Dreambook Light IL1
• Everex Cloudbook
• HP 2133 Mini-Note (HP Mini)
• Asus Eee PC 900
• ECS G10IL
• Everex Cloudbook Max
• MSI Wind
• 2Go PC
• 3k Longitude
• ACi Ultra-mini
• Airis Kira
• Blue Digital Systems Deep Blue
• Elonex One
• Fukato Datacask
• HCL MiLeap X
• Jisus
• Kohjinsha SCC
• Medion Akoya Mini
• Noahpad
• Nohrtec Gecko
• Proview Handbook PC-81001
• Sungjut TangoX
• Gigabyte M912

So, there you go. This should you give a lot to think about before you buy.

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In the spirit of Acid tests for web browsers, now you can test your mobile web browsers for compatibility with web standards. The Mobile Web Test Suites Working Group at the W3C has published a test for mobile browsers consisting of twelve checks. The result is displayed as a twelve-square grid where each square represents a single check. If a square is green the mobile browser has passed that particular part of the test, and if a square is red or white, it hasn’t. Here is the checklist (taken from Ajaxian):

1. CSS2 min-width
2. Transparent PNG
3. GZIP support
4. HTTPS
5. iframe inclusing of XHTML-served-as-XML content
6. Static SVG
7. XMLHTTPRequest
8. CSS Media Queries
9. Dynamic SVG
10. The canvas element
11. contenteditable
12. CSS3 selectors

On the top right is a screen capture of Opera Mini (hifi ardentopium sr v.4.0.10406, 20080228) on my Sony Ericsoon P1i. The grid shows my Opera Mini doesn’t support “iframe inclusing of XHTML-served-as-XML content”, “Static SVG” and “Dynamic SVG” (I am assuming the grid layout is a standard matrix layout).

Here’s a screen shot of how FF 2.0.0.12 renders the test page:

Here’s the QR code (if you have a QR enabled phone):

or simply enter one of these URLs:
http://tinyurl.com/37e33p
http://dev.w3.org/2008/mobile-test/test.html

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As announced earlier, the new HP 2133 or Mini-Note is here, except it’s probably going to be simply called HP Mini. I don’t want to get into too much detail about it (read the HP 2133/Mini specs here), so maybe this hands-on video from jkOnTheRun.com will suffice (it’s kinda long, a little more than 30 minutes):

I don’t know… I still like the design, but I was a little put off by the amount of time it took to fire-up from hibernation, and the one shown was the top model. The size is okay, but you still need a backpack to carry it around (although a small one at that). We need smaller.

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To follow up on what I wrote initially when the HP 2133 was announced, according to a post on Engadget, it’s coming on April 7, with a starting price of US$549 (running SuSE Enterprise). They also got their hands on the specs, so here they are:

I don’t understand why there isn’t an option with SuSE and Bluetooth for, say, $600. Bluetooth must come with MS Windows?!? I hope this will change.

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The next generation of EEE PC will sport a touch-screen interface and other goodies, such as a GPS module most probably. According to DigiTimes, the new 8.9-incher will go for around US$500 which is pretty good. The new EEE PC will have SSD space from 8-12 Gb, unlike the currently available model with 4 Gb of SSD space. One of the things that I also like is the fact that the new bigger screen will also have a higher resolution (1024×600 pixels).

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Sounds like a name for a car concept featuring a hybrid power plant, but it’s actually the latest sub-notebook warrior. It’s a very sexy design featuring things like built-in webcam, three USB 2.0 ports, ethernet, 56Kb/s modem (?!). Info is pretty thin for now, with everyone waiting for ECS (Elitegroup Group Systems) to give out more information. The design is good though…

Images from pocket-lint.co.uk

I just love the keyboard, and the design is very agreeable with me, as it reminds me of the VAIO I used to have (well, still got it, but broken, awaiting reparation). Some already call it the EEE PC killer (although HP Compaq 2133, better looking than EEE BTW, and Cloudbook are threatened as well). I don’t know, but it definitely looks good, maybe because it brings a little bit of a Mac Book and Sony VAIO mix that the others lack as far as design is considered.

According to Pocket Link, the device comes with a HSPDA 7.2 datacard built-in, so we’ve got mobile broadband connectivity. I am expecting the G10IL to feature all the wireless connectivity it can with WiFi and Bluetooth. There’s no optical drive, which is kinda expected for a device this size. Judging from the picture and hand-to-casing size ratio, it’s going to be a nine-incher. ECS is aiming at a below $500 price mark, which sounds alright.

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Almost a month ago Yahoo! announced Yahoo! oneConnect, a mobile communications aggregator and yesterday they announced Yahoo! onePlace, which is also to appear live sometime in Q2 2008. Basically, Yahoo! onePlace is going to be a pretty nifty attempt by Yahoo! to help mobile users organize “everything” they need in one place.

“Yahoo! onePlace(TM) will bring together a consumer’s interests, passions and important information into a single location - creating a rich and highly personalized experience. Everything is instantly organized, dynamically kept current, and served to them the way they want. So now, the content they consume and the way they consume it will be hyper-customized to their specific preferences and tastes.”

They are promising it will be simple to use, being based on bookmarking as a way to link to practically any content on the Web (news feeds, web sites, videos, images, emails, search queries, whatever)… Every item will be automatically updated with new values and data (quotes, scores, etc.) and the users will be able to categorize content freely. Yahoo! gives an example of a scenario where a user may find Yahoo! onePlace a neat application to use:

“…if a user is planning a holiday to Paris in June, he could create a “Paris” collection, and begin linking it to any information he thinks will be useful to him on his trip: weather conditions, city guides, restaurant reviews, hotel reservations, walking maps, songs of Edith Piaf, English-French dictionaries, winery recommendations, etc. Yahoo! onePlace will give consumers a single location to consume all of their information contextually, keeping it updated (so they know, for example, if their flight times have changed) and instantly accessible whenever and however they want it…”

Sounds pretty good, and will be released just in time for summer holidays

Smart phones are changing the way people use mobile phones, and we’ll probably be seeing a drastic shift towards web-based applications aimed at mobile devices, rather than applications that have to be installed on the device itself, taking up valuable memory and causing inevitable hangs and slow-downs.

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Great news for all hi-tech adopting professionals (smart phone oriented) who find LinkedIn a useful business social networking tool - LinkedIn released a mobile version of their service. It’s available at m.linkedin.com. The interface allows for any mobile internet enabled device (with Wireless Application Protocol) to access the service, although there is a special beta version for iPhone.

The team behind the new mobile LinkedIn is working on introducing more applications to the mobile LinkedIn platform, such as LinkedIn Answers and LinkedIn Experts.

The new mobile LinkedIn service is available immediately in these languages - English, French, German, Spanish, Japanese and Chinese, but additional languages are to follow in the near future.

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It seems Apple is working hard on developing a new generation input interface. The new patent pertains to something called “multi-touch input surface” and is a step forward (or a few steps forward) from the existing solutions, implemented on iPhone for example.

There’s a lot of technical details involved, but basically it comes down to improved ergonomics. The new interface will allow multiple ways for users to use it - finger touch and stylus (pen) - but without having to make all the excess hand, arm and body movement that inherently leads to fatigue injuries over time. It will “provide tactile key or hand position feedback without impeding hand resting on the surface or smooth, accurate sliding across the surface.”

See in more detail on Apple Insider.

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