It’s so funny. One of the last comments I wrote last night was that I thought the next Nokia Tablet would be based on Omap 3. Today, its confirmed. Dan (Thoughtfix) is out in Berlin and has just started live blogging. The other thing I wrote in my comment was ‘I’ll be extremely interested to see it, how fast it is, whether they include 3G/4G’ That seems to be happening too. However, there has been no device announcement. It appears that Nokia are just giving details of the platform. The […]

As the day goes on I’m sure we’re going to get more MID-related software news from Open Source in Mobile, the conference taking place in Berlin for the next three days. The first MID-related press release comes from Fluendo, the media player software company. They’ve announced a codec pack for Moblin that will cover MPEG2, MPEG4 part2, VC1 (WMV 9) and H.264 decoding and will utilise the hardware decoding layers of Poulsbo.  "“We are so excited to see the Portable Media Player and Sub Notebook market expansion with GNU/Linux solutions. […]

Watch Tablet Blog for news as Thoughtfix has just put a tip up. All he says is: Major changes are on the way for the Nokia Internet Tablet line. Here’s the partial scoop: The "Internet Tablet" line may be ending in name but the maemo platform is going strong. Wait a few hours, watch this space, and there will be more. New hardware platform? Moving to X86? Built in WWAN? Keep watching  TabletBlog.com to find out what’s happening. Thoughtfix is at the Open Source in Mobile conference in Berlin. I’m […]

It seems we’re giving a lot of airtime to ARM-based architectures today. And why not; The evolution of the smartphone into the MID and netbook sectors is one that we should all be aware of. In this, largely promotional video from Texas Instruments, Seshu Madhavapeddy, General Manager, Mobile Internet Devices talks about the MID segment, their OMAP 3 platform (as used in the new Archos)  and mentions a 1-watt MID. That is, 1-watt at full power including connectivity and screen. Wow! My N82 smartphone with its tiny screen and highly […]

When I wrote about Opera 9.5 Mobile a short while back I highlighted how it was a great browser with no hardware to run it on. What I said was that the processing power and screen size wasn’t enough for the software. The user interface was good but in order for it to be taken seriously as a crossover mobile/desktop, entertainment/productivity browser, it needed better hardware so when we heard about the new Archos devices recently and their Cortex ARM general purpose processors we knew there was a chance for […]

Continuing my thoughts on smartphones today, I wanted to highlight the Nokia N96 that I checked out in Amsterdam yesterday. Now there’s a phone that, for the first time, has me thinking about upgrading from the N82. Its got a crappy browser, J2ME apps are slow to start up and its got a DVB-H receiver that’s as good as useless in most places due to the lack of any service but it doesn’t matter because it does all the stuff that MIDs don’t do. Its got an amazing camera and […]

WVGA, even at this 3.5″ screen size, requires zooming to click links with a finger (as it does on the Nokia tablet devices,) there’s no mention of the browser so if it’s not Opera Mobile 9.5 then it falls flat on its face, its going to be extremely expensive and with the single-core ARM11-based CPU it won’t be noticeably faster than a Nokia N800 which, in my opinion, is way too slow to use for any serious Internet work. The HD Touch Pro looks very nice and will satisfy many […]

The good guys at Dynamism have sent me an Aspire One netbook for review; have a look at the unboxing shots (if that is your thing), and read my initial impressions below. Aspire One Unboxing Initial Impressions As I opened the box to take a first look at the Aspire One I was immediately impressed with its design. They went with a very minimalistic approach and they did a really good job. Lots of curved edges make this netbook look really smooth, and it is apparent that they took their […]