Can Mobile Phones Change the World?

The Economist has a special section this week on mobile phone technology in emerging markets. The section includes articles on trends in mobile phone ownership, the role mobile phones are playing in economic development, and new uses for the technology. Mobile phones in developing countries are now used to provide farmers with agricultural information, remind patients to take their meds, gather health information in the field, and transfer money. Jeffrey Sachs has called mobile phones “the single most transformative tool for development.”

Our will be open the Video Game Business

In order to thanks for customer support.we will be Open the video game in our shipping mall today.

Gmail push comes to HiPhone, Windows Mobile,OPhone

On Tuesday, Google expanded the over-the-air syncing capabilities in its Google Sync service to include Google’s email, but only for the iPhone and iPod Touch (version 3.0), and for Windows Mobile phones.

Google Sync began as a beta service to sync Google calendar items and contacts to iPhone, Windows Mobile and Symbian Series 60 phones. Owners of iPhones, iPod Touches and Windows Mobile phones can now set it up to include Gmail messages as well.

The phones will receive Google Sync messages through their native email, calendar and address book apps. Depending on a user’s settings, their phone could vibrate and/or chime to let them know a new message has come in.

Note that Google Sync will not push visual notification boxes to iPhone and iPod Touch interfaces. For that, users will need third-party apps such as GPush for iPhone. Instead, it pushes email from the server to the phone, rather than pulls in a list of email messages, a request that the phone’s email client makes of the server.

BlackBerry and Nokia Symbian Series 60 users will not have access to pushed Gmail yet, but they can still sync calendar and contact events to the phone’s built-in address book and calendar.

To get started, visit the Google Sync website from your desktop or mobile browser. The step-by-step setup process is best navigated from a computer, and will require users to ultimately configure their phone to sync over the Microsoft Exchange Server.

HTC Touch Diamond 2 Mobile Phone Review – A Business Focussed Handset That Also Entertains

The HTC Touch Diamond 2 is an upgraded version of the HTS Touch Diamond. Weighing in at 117 grams, it measures 108mm x 53mm x 14mm, and includes a large WVGA LCD screen measuring 81mm which displays 65,000 colours at a maximum resolution of 450 x 800 pixels. The screen is as large as physically possible in the body of the phone, with an ultra-sharp widescreen display, allowing the user to enjoy websites, photos and videos.

The phone is compact, sturdy, and yet sophisticated in appearance.

The Touch Diamond 2 uses Wi-Fi technology where hotspots are available, and its on-board Internet browser to access the Internet. USB and Bluetooth make printing and connectivity to other devices such as laptops or personal computers easy.

The integrated camera has a 5-Megapixel capacity with autofocus, video recording and a video player which supports MPEG4, ASF, AVI and 3GP formats. Separate, preinstalled albums are provided for photos and video. There is also a second VGA CMOS camera for 3G video calls.

With its support for polyphonic and mp3 ringtones, this little mobile phone is sure to please. It is a quad phone – designed to work on the GSM 850, GSM 900, GSM 1800, GSM 1900, HSDPA 900 and HSDPA 2100 networks. It is therefore useful for the person who frequently travels abroad, however the actual coverage will depend ultimately on the network provider selected when purchasing the handset.

Message services that come standard are SMS and MMS. Instant messaging allows chatting through the phone without the need for a personal computer.

The office assistant services are reasonably standard compared to similar mobile phones – the Touch Diamond 2 includes a phone book, calendar, alarm clock, and a document viewer which supports standard formats, including PDF, MSWord, MSExcel and MSPowerpoint. The zoom facility allows close-up views of internet pages and documents viewed and the voice to text feature is regarded by happy users as a particularly good one.

The Touch Diamond 2 shows a communication history ‘tree’ associated with the individual contacts in the phone – very useful if you are inclined to forget when you last spoke to someone and what you talked about at the time.

The Touch Diamond 2 has capable music playing facilities – supporting many formats of audio data, including WAV, MIDI, WMA, QCP, MP3, AMP, AAC, AAC+ and eAAC+.

Pre-installed games are part of the package, and more games can be downloaded straight from the internet for use on the handset.

What we didn’t like:

The Windows-based user interface has a tendency to freeze, and is slow in response when it is used.

What we did like:

This is a good looking little phone which is a useful office assistant. It can store messages, contacts, photos and videos, and open documents in different formats for reading during commuting hours. It has 512MB read-only memory and 288MB RAM which can be increased by the use of a microSD memory card. From fully charged – the battery life will allow 5.5 hours of talk time and 360 hours stand by.

The sharp display makes watching videos and choosing photos for storage a pleasure. It is also much easier to surf the internet using a widescreen formatted view.

As PCs, cell phones converge, Intel finds new rival

SAN FRANCISCO (MarketWatch) - As the market for personal computers has matured, Intel Corp. has moved into new battlegrounds for portable devices - bringing the semiconductor giant a roster of new rivals.

One of the main ones is ARM Holdings, a lesser known British technology company with a strong track record of designing low-cost, low-power chips for mobile phones.

The companies are likely to collide in a new market for portable computing devices that fall between laptop computers - a market Intel /quotes/comstock/15*!intc/quotes/nls/intc (INTC 18.71, -0.07, -0.37%) currently rules - and cell phones, which is ARM’s key market. Intel already has a strong foothold in this market with its Atom chip, which powers so-called netbooks. But a rush is on to develop new devices that can offer consumers the full computing power of PCs and the portability of a wireless phone.

“We have this hybrid market literally riding the line between the two,” analyst Dean McCarron of Mercury Research said in an interview. “All the ingredients for the collision are there.”

ARM /quotes/comstock/15*!armh/quotes/nls/armh (ARMH 6.25, +0.06, +0.97%) technology is used in millions of cell phones and other products made by companies, such as Samsung /quotes/comstock/11i!ssngy (SSNG.Y 185.67, +0.53, +0.29%) , Nokia /quotes/comstock/13*!nok/quotes/nls/nok (NOK 12.25, -0.10, -0.81%) and Palm /quotes/comstock/15*!palm/quotes/nls/palm (PALM 13.51, -0.03, -0.22%) .

On the other hand, Intel’s chips power the world’s most popular PCs made by such companies as Hewlett-Packard /quotes/comstock/13*!hpq/quotes/nls/hpq (HPQ 43.98, +0.15, +0.34%) and Dell Inc. /quotes/comstock/15*!dell/quotes/nls/dell (DELL 14.55, +0.10, +0.69%)

Intel and its allies have been pushing the netbook, the stripped down version of a notebook, and so-called MIDS, or mobile internet devices. Meanwhile, the wireless market has been moving toward smart phones such as the iPhone, BlackBerry and Palm Pre that offer Web surfing and email capabilities.

Power vs. consumption

It’s a collision where two factors could prove critical: A processor’s computing capability, and its appetite for electrical power. Intel is widely expected to have a huge advantage in performance, while ARM is seen as having the edge in power efficiency.

Bob Morris, ARM’s director of mobile computing, portrays Intel as being in a desperate position, saying the chipmaker has no choice but take on the new market because it now finds itself boxed in in the maturing PC market.

“Intel has to go after this market, as the PC market is not growing,” he said in an e-mail. “The growth market moving forward will be the mobile device market. We are closely approaching the point (if we are not there already) where people accessing the Internet from a mobile device will exceed those accessing it from a PC.”

Intel Spokesman Tom Beerman disputed that view, saying the company is moving into the new market because of opportunities in the changing cell phone market.

“Cell phones are becoming more PC-like,” he said. “There are more and more requirements for that device to be more PC-like. Our view is that Intel is very well suited to provide that technology.”

Not a household name

Despite the ubiquity of its technology, ARM, which is based in Cambridge, UK, is not a household name, like the Silicon Valley behemoth made famous by its slogan, “Intel Inside.”

“They’re very invisible,” Global Equities Research analyst Trip Chowdhry said in an interview. “You don’t see devices saying ‘ARM Inside,’ or ‘Powered by ARM.’ I don’t think they have the mass consumer awareness like Intel.”