Not living in the U.S. puts me at a slight disadvantage in understanding the mobile Internet market out there but my head is going through a number of scenarios today after reading about the possible, but likely, $3.2Bn investment plan to prop-up the WiMax effort in the U.S. Intel, a silicon manufacturer, a WiMax chipset manufacturer and mobile Internet platform specialist is giving $1bn. Google, an Internet search, advertising and services company, is giving $500m. Comcast, a cable company, is giving over 1 billion dollars. Time Warner, cable company and […]

At last, Nokia have created a way for Sportstracker users to export their tracks onto an external website. I’ve been using sportstracker for mobile photo blogging recently and exporting data was one thing I highlighted as a possible improvement for the service. Although the data still seems to be locked into a Nokia Applet and i’m not sure if it’s live, i’m testing as I post here! (see right hand column for applet) These are the sort of apps that lock me into a brand. Nokia is showing me I […]

Just announced in London, the HTC Diamond looks like an interesting alternative to a MID if you’re a one-man-one-device type of person. With an HSUPA modem, a touch-sensitive 2.8" VGA screen, GPS, Wifi, Bluetooth, Windows 6.1, the Qualcomm 528Mhz platform (as seen in the Xperia) and HTC’s new touch-flow 3D it gets interesting but add Opera 9.5 into the mix (O2 are apparently shipping it with 9.5) along with a YouTube application and you’ve got something that, to my ears, is more thrilling than the iPhone. The Windows Mobile 6.1 […]

The Eee PC madness continues. There must be 20+ Eee PC web sites by now and every day there’s at least one good set of new information. I’ve even seen a couple of Eee PC books on Amazon which just shows what sort of a market there must be out there. The Eee PC ecosystem alone must be ten times larger that that of the traditional ultra mobile PC market and that’s not including the rest of the netbook market! There’s no way we can highlight all the news here […]

Yes, its that time of year again where we get the first encouraging days of sunshine in Europe so I’ve been into the cellar and dusted-off my Sunlinq 24W solar panel.  Sun strength for the last 2.5 days.   I’m not planning a solarumpc tour this year but I am planning to get some use out of the panel. At the moment, the plan is to run a UMPC from the solar panel that could serve this blog. I doubt i’ll be able to do it 24/7 for the whole […]

I surprised myself yesterday morning when I managed to get live digital TV working at 120kmh. I had heard reports that the dual-tuner DVB sticks in ‘diversity’ mode were good but never expected it to be this easy to get live TV working in the car. I was using a Terratec dual-tuner diversity DVB-T USB stick connected to a Wibrain B1H UMPC for this test. DVB-T is an over-the-air (terrestrial) digital TV standard that is common in Europe (not in the U.S) and without any real testing of antenna positioning […]

EeePCnews.de reports the first sighting of the MSI Wind U100 online. The specs match up with what was given in the MSI press release and the price shown is 406 Euro. Expansys also have an MSI Wind page up (aff.) now but there’s no real information available on delivery dates apart from  an expected date of June. I personally doubt it will be in peoples hands in June but a launch at Computex in Taipei is likely. These online ads are often just there to pull in early enquiries , […]

Two things happened today to make me want to write something about mobile TV. Firstly, I was testing the WiBrain with a Terratec DVB USB stick in the car this morning. It was a an interesting and largely successful test of a digital TV standard that wasn’t designed to be mobile. I’ll write more about my 130km/h testing later but for now, lets take a look at a New York Times article that highlights the growing trend of mobile TV in Europe. [continues after the break…]