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RIMs Blackberry Gets a Grip on Color
Research In Motion will release a BlackBerry handheld with a color screen this summer, according to RIM Chairman Jim Balsillie. “We didnt want to do (a BlackBerry with a color screen) until the battery system was there” to handle the display, Balsillie said. He did not reveal the cost of the new device.
Read the full story on: CNET News.com
Opera Offers Mobile Browsing
Users of smart phones equipped with Nokias Series 60 software running on top of the Symbian operating system can download a mobile phone browser featuring small-screen rendering technology from Opera Software. The availability of the Opera mobile browser for Series 60-based phones follows the February launch of the companys small-screen rendering, or SSR. Unlike mobile Web systems in the past requiring developers to code pages in special languages, Operas SSR technology takes a Web page written in HTML and reformats it to fit on a smaller screen, thus eliminating the need for horizontal scrolling, the company said. The new browser will cost $21.90.
Read the full story on: PCWorld.com
UK 3G Network Sharing Not Anticompetitive
Sharing of 3G (third generation) mobile network infrastructure between operators in the U.K. does not breach European Union competition rules, the European Commission ruled Wednesday. The Commission has also approved national roaming agreements between licensed network operators, as this will “benefit consumers by allowing operators to offer better and quicker coverage,” the Commission said in a statement. Roaming between operators will exclude the ten largest cities in the U.K., where operators will each be obliged to build their own networks. National roaming in smaller cities will be exempt from competition rules until the end of 2007, and rural areas will be exempt until the end of 2008, the Commission said.
Read the full story on: IDG
Riding the Airwaves
After years of neglect, datacasting — a decades-old technology that delivers bits of information over radio and TV using the public broadcast spectrum — is drawing unprecedented interest from powerful players in the media and technology industries. Walt Disney plans a major datacasting trial this fall. The company will test a video-on-demand service that will use the broadcast facilities of its ABC network to send hundreds of hours of movie programming in digital form to be recorded on hard drives for playback on TV sets. In the last decade, technology improvements and the advent of digital TV have also boosted TVs datacasting capacity, from a few kilobits to more than 4mbps — well above the requirements needed to support Disneys envisioned video-on-demand service.
Read the full story on: CNET News.com
Synad Rolls Linux-Based WLAN Access Point
Startup chip developer Synad this week unveiled a wireless LAN (WLAN) access point called AgileAP that is designed to highlight the capabilities of its Mercury chipset. AgileAP is Linux-based access point that can support 802.11a/b/g operation. The chip set incorporates advanced security features such as hardware accelerated WiFi Protected Access, the wired equivalency protocol and AES encryption, together with support for 802.11x authentication protocols. Advanced spectrum management functions like transmit power control and dynamic frequency selection are also included.
Read the full story on: CommsDesign