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Archos Android Home

July 25th, 2011

ARCHOS 35 Home Connect

ARCHOS continue to push technological boundaries and innovation with two new Android devices designed for the home – The ARCHOS 35 Home Connect, an Android-based web radio and the ARCHOS 35 Smart Home Phone, an Android DECT phone. Both are smart devices and feature all of the Android functionalities.

The ARCHOS 35 Home Connect is the perfect music box and the best portable Android device for streaming radio and music anywhere at home with an amazing sound quality.

The ARCHOS 35 Smart Home Phone will make owning a home phone popular again.

Both cutting-edge ARCHOS Android-based home devices, thanks to the front facing webcams, bring new usages such as video calling, baby monitoring and even room surveillance.

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Posted in Mobile Technologies |

TestiPhone and iPhoney

February 16th, 2011

A web browser based simulator for quickly testing an iPhone web applications is available on the website TestiPhone.com. The simulator is based on iPhoney, a free iPhone web simulator for designers.

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Posted in Mobile Technologies |

mobileOK Checker

February 6th, 2011

mobileOK

W3C provides a mobileOK checker to perform various tests on a Web Page to determine its level of mobile-friendliness. The tests are defined in the mobileOK Basic Tests 1.0 specification.

The checker is based on the open source mobileOK checker library developed by the Mobile Web Best Practices working group.

The mobileOK checker is part of the MobiWeb2.0 Project and of W3C Quality Assurance Tools.

mobileOK conformance can be claimed using POWDER.

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Posted in Mobile Technologies |

MobiReady from dotMobi

December 20th, 2010

The mobiReady testing tool evaluates mobile-readiness using industry best practices & standards. The free report provides both a score (from 1 to 5) and in-depth analysis of pages to determine how well your site performs on a mobile device.

The WordPress Mobile Pack gets a high score with this test tool.

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Posted in Mobile Technologies |

BlackBerry Playbook

September 28th, 2010

BlackBerry Playbook from RIM

Yesterday, RIM announced the launch of the BlackBerry Playbook tablet. The tablet will utilize an OS created by the recently acquired QNX company. The BlackBerry Tablet OS, which will offer full OpenGL and POSIX, support alongside web standards such as HTML5. The PlayBook will handle Flash content via Flash 10.1, as well as Adobe AIR apps. It’s equipped with an 1024 x 600, capacitive multitouch display, a Cortex A9-based, dual-core 1GHz CPU, 1GB of RAM, and a 3 megapixel front-facing camera (for video conferencing) along with a 5 megapixel rear lens. The PlayBook will be capable of 1080p HD video, and comes equipped with an HDMI port as well as a microUSB jack, 802.11a/b/g/n WiFi, and Bluetooth 2.1. The Playbook will be available beginning 2011.

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Posted in Mobile Technologies |

Cellspark animator

June 21st, 2010

Cellspark version 2

The CellSpark animation editor creates compact flash-like vector graphics animations for nearly all Java enabled phones.

Developped by Colin Mummery a few years ago, this tool allows to create presentations, screen savers and more for different handsets.

Runnable midlets can be created for Midp 1 and Midp 2 devices. In 2005, during the Luxembourg Presidency of the Council of the European Union from 1st January till 30th June 2005, I used the licensed version of Cellspark to create a multimedia show about the member states of the European Union as a Midlet for the Nokia handset 6680.

Today, a reinstalled Cellspark (a java program) on my new labtop running Vista and Java 6 without any problems. The program is still very useful, userfriendly and fascinating.

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Posted in Mobile Technologies |

BlackBerry .cod and .alx files

June 20th, 2010

jar/jad 2 cod/alx

BlackBerry uses .cod and .alx files to deploy Java applications from the PC desktop (BB Desktop Manager) to a BlackBerry device. These files are generated automatically by the BlackBerry JDE or by the Eclipse BlackBerry plugin.

.alx is an XML-based BlackBerry application descriptor which can be generated by hand. An example for the Java application FirstApp.cod is shown below :

<loader version="1.0">
    <application id="FirstApp">
        <name >
        </name>
        <description >
        </description>
        <version >
        </version>
        <vendor >
        </vendor>
        <copyright >
            Copyright (c) 2010
        </copyright>
        <fileset Java="1.5">
            <directory >
                MyFolder
            </directory>
            <files >
                FirstApp.cod
            </files>
        </fileset>
    </application>
</loader>

To download a BlackBerry application over the air to a BlackBerry device, a standard .jad file is used to describe the application. The .jad file is selected from the browser to load the .cod file. If the BlackBerry service to download standard MIDlets is enabled,  the Mobile Data Service feature of the BES provides a built-in transcoder that converts .jar files into .cod files.

Brandon Dante Swift developped an offline conversion tool from .jar/.jad files to .cod/.alx files (JAR2ALX).

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Posted in Mobile Technologies |

BlackBerry Desktop Manager

June 20th, 2010

last update : 8 August 2011

Today I installed the BlackBerry Desktop Manager Version 5.0.1.37 (march 10, 2010).

This dashboard offers the following functions:

BlackBerry Desktop Manager
  • Media Sync (synchronise iTunes or Windows Media Player music with BlackBerry device)
  • Application Loader (add or remove applications, update software)
  • Backup and Restore (backup or restore device data)
  • Device Switch Wizard (transfer data from one device to another : BlackBerry, Palm or Windows mobile)
  • Synchronize (synchronize email and organizer data)
  • IP modem (set up BlackBerry device as a wireless modem for internet access)

The desktop manager works with my three different BlackBerry devices : 7100v, 8100 et 9000.

The firmware and microedition versions are shown below :

7100v
  • BlackBerry 7100v
  • v 4.0.2.35
  • Platform 1.8.0.138
  • CLDC-1.1
  • MIDP-2.0
  • JTW 1.0
  • Media 1.1
  • PIM 1.0
  • 2005

8100
  • BlackBerry 8100
  • v 4.2.1.109
  • Platform 2.3.0.85
  • CLDC-1.1
  • MIDP-2.0
  • JTW 1.0
  • Media 1.1
  • Pim 1.0
  • File 1.0
  • 2007

9000
  • BlackBerry 9000
  • v 4.6.0.216
  • Platform 4.0.0.183
  • Branding 1.0.194.166
  • CLDC-1.1
  • MIDP-2.0
  • JTWI 1.0
  • Media 1.1
  • PIM 1.0
  • File 1.0
  • Bluetooth 1.1
  • Location 1.0.1
  • Security and Trust 1.0
  • WLAN 2.4.0.71
  • 2008

My desktop manager was recently updated to version 6.1.0.35 (Bundle 34) released on June 7, 2011.

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Posted in Mobile Technologies |

“Thoughts on Flash” by Steve Jobs : go to HTML5

May 26th, 2010

Recently, Steve Jobs published his thoughts on Flash on the Apple website.

Steve Jobs explains why Apple does not allow Flash on iPhones, iPods and iPads.

  1. open standards : Adobe’s Flash products are 100% proprietary
  2. full web : most videos are available in a modern format, H.264, and viewable on iPhones, iPods and iPads
  3. reliability, security and performance
  4. battery life
  5. touch : Flash was created for PCs and mice, not for mobile devices with touch interface
  6. Apple wants to provide the most advanced and innovative platform to the developers

Steve Jobs recommends to use the open standards HTML5, CSS and JavaScript for mobile devices.

One on the first to follow this idea is the developer of the JW video player, Jeroen Wijering. Even if he thinks that there is still a lot of work to be done before HTML5 reaches the maturity level that Flash has for delivering video content to the users, he released the beta version of the HTML5 JW player two weeks ago.

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Posted in Mobile Technologies |

BlackBerry RSS reader

October 26th, 2008

Viigo Inc. develops and markets one of the world’s most popular mobile content and services applications for smartphones. With over 5,000 channels and information services, Viigo customers around the world enjoy up‐to‐the minute access to news, weather, sports, stocks and markets, entertainment, and blogs in one intuitive, simple, freely-downloadable application.

Viigo offers a free beta version of an RSS reader for BlackBerry. This third party application is also used by RIM executives, as stated by crackberry.com, the #1 site for BlackBerry users & abusers.

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Posted in Mobile Technologies |

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