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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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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Gypsii is a social network for people who use mobile devices and the web. The core of the network is that all content is geo-location tagged. This means that if you produce content in form of pictures, text, video - it will not only be shared with others on the network, but also tied to the exact location where the content creation took place (country, city, street, club, bar, restaurant, etc). Your friends on the network will be able to get information about the exact time and place where the shared event happened. That’s not all - users can create points of interest (ex. restaurant with good food and low prices). Each user can find these points of interest and get distance from their present location to the point of interest. There are plenty more ways to use this network, for example for checking what another friend did today (where they went, and corresponding generated content if available), and their present location relative to your own (if they are close by). Friends can easily find each other and meet for coffee or lunch, or at a common point of interest (a sale at a fashion store). Their video does a good job of explaining features, so check it out.

Gypsii officially announced their services at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona yesterday. It’s available in several languages for now - US English, UK English, German, Spanish, French, Italian, Korean, Russian, Simplified Chinese and Traditional Chinese.

The fact that geo-location is deeply integrated into the service, may represent a nice advertising opportunity for local services and vendors. Each advertised business could easily be added by the user as a point of interest.

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Mozilla is busy developing the new mobile version of the Firefox browser. Doug Turner, Firefox mobile product manager, has just released another idea for the user interface for the new mobile FF, on his blog. Basically, the browser would have a hidden UI layer that would come up when a user touches one of the icons that translucently sits on the bottom of the screen. The whole idea is that the user would have the whole screen available for viewing the internet page, and use the UI extension only on demand. Here are two pictures which represent what the new mobile FF UI could look like:

  

Pretty good idea, although I am hoping the mobile FF will not inherit blocking glitches of its big brothers (open a few tabs and run a couple of AJAX intensive sites, and that’s it). The Mozilla Wiki already has an entry for the new mobile touchscreen browser interface from a while ago, although quite different than the one just presented.

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Skyfire, a company which specializes in mobile web browsing technology, released a Beta version of their new mobile web browser which should deliver PC browsing quality to mobile phones. The idea is to allow mobile web surfers to do anything they would on a PC based web browser, without any restrictions or limitations. There are already mobile web browsers that are very good like Opera Mobile and Opera Mini, Internet Explorer Mobile, which all do a very decent job of presenting web content.

Skyfire promises greater speed, no technology limitations (supports latest Flash version, Quick Time and Java embedded content).

“We’re talking about full-featured PC versions of your favorite web sites. Skyfire gives you speedy page loads, full audio, video, images, dynamic Flash content, advanced Ajax, Java and more – just like your PC.”

Okay, that sounds pretty good. The browser is still in Beta, but you can sign-up for testing right away. There is only a version of the software for Windows Mobile phones for the time being (and US based numbers only), but Skyfire promises versions for Symiban as well. Here’s their video which shows a demonstration of the new product:

It’s free, so if you are in the US, have a Windows Mobile phone, sign up for the Beta release and get an early taste.

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No really! Just look at this thing. It’s like the ultimate pocket sized internet tablet device and it’s got the muscle to go with the good looks (except for the VGA camera):

• integrated GPS receiver
• Wi-Fi connection
• up to 45 hours of music playback and memory to store up to 7,500 songs
• 10GB memory card
• large (4.13″), sharp (800×480 resolution) wide screen
• powered by maemo Linux based OS2008
• Mozilla based browser with Ajax and Adobe flash 9
• Bluetooth
• VGA camera (why?!? VGA) for video chat

This is a very good looking upgrade from the previous N800 (qwerty keyboard to start with). Read in more detail in the press release on Nokia.com .

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Would you buy a CD with three singles and a ring tone? The music industry certainly hopes so. It has decided to wake up and do something old new. The latest thing to hit the music stores will be the ringle - a CD format containing three songs (a latest hit, a remix, and an older track) and a ring tone in slip-sleeve cover. The new product is expected to retail for $5.98 or $6.98, and that means about a 33% profit margin, with wholesale price at around $4.

According to Reuters, Sony BMG Music Entertainment, which came up with ringle, and Universal Music Group are going to be the first to roll out ringles. Sony BMG will release 50 titles during October and November, while UMG will have somewhere between 10 to 20 titles ready by then. The “ringle” name has been approved by the Recording Industry Association of America, and there is an industry wide logo to help with branding. Only Sony thus far can distribute ring tones, while the other major players will have to seek deals with operators.

Music on CDs has been retailing for prices much lower compared to a few years ago, mainly due to various new ways of digital distribution (mostly through the Internet). Personally, I wouldn’t buy ringles for one reason at least - the ring tone on the CD and the couple of songs you will eventually have to move to your preferred listening device, whether it’s your MP3 player, or your mobile phone or computer. The CD will be virtually useless, except maybe as a collector’s item, or original backup storage. There will probably be millions of copies in the stores, and that’s millions of pieces of plastic, metal and other materials that will eventually find their way into the environment, if not recycled or disposed of properly. Would you buy ringles?

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Yahoo has created abundance of mobile content. Just check out mobile.yahoo.com, and you’ll get the picture. The latest addition to Yahoo’s mobile portfolio is Actionality, a mobile game ad company. Basically, Actionality puts ads into mobile games and applications as they are being downloaded from the web to a mobile phone. Having recently announced its expansion of mobile ad services with the inclusion of Vodafone, Yahoo has made an even clearer move towards the mobile ad direction with the acquisition of Actionality. Whether the mobile advertising is yet profitable remains to be seen. Results have shown that so far mobile ad usage has increased but with very questionable results. The whole platform is still in its infancy so it may just be to early to judge on it yet.

Mobile advertising is certainly a platform that will experience growth, especially with significant improvements in the mobile phone industry. With the ever increasing demand for smart phones on the market, and growing advancements in that area (just look at the number of new smart phones that come out every couple of weeks and advancements in software platforms such as Symbian and Windows Mobile) mobile advertising will surely gain a lot of momentum.

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Facebook has released a special part of their site devoted to iPhone users. As of yesterday iPhone users can access Facebook on a new address ( iphone.facebook.com ). NetVibes has already launched their iPhone site allowing iPhone users to access NetVibes tailored to their device.

TechCrunch has published pictures of what the two social networks look like on the iPhone, so go and see Facebook on iPhone here, and NetVibes on iPhone here.

The iPhone has spawned a whole wave of changes online. Facebook and NetVibes followed, which is logical considering their sites cater to exactly the kind of audience that may be the majority of iPhone users.

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M:Metrics, a Seattle (US) based company specialized in mobile content and application consumption benchmarking, released a press release about a study measuring mobile social networking in the US and Europe. The results are interesting, and show a growing trend in mobile social networking in these areas. MySpace leads in the US and EU market, whereas MSN was the number one choice for Web 2.0 content. Bottom line is 3.5% mobile users access social networks through their mobiles in the US, whereas 2.5% (largest part) users in the UK user mobiles to access social networks. Here is a screenshot of the data from the press release:

Nearly every online social networking site has added the ability to connect to these communities with a mobile phone, allowing people to access profiles and share content while they’re on the go. With the mobile phone playing a central role in people’s social lives, it’s only natural that social networking sites are working to bridge the gap between the online and mobile worlds.

MySpace and Facebook seem to be the social networks of choice for mobile users. With the significant rise in Facebook subscribers in the past months (well, years really), I wouldn’t be surprised to see Facebook come on top, especially since Facebook has made a special interface for iPhone users.

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