Wireless Blog

Mark Cain felt like a rock star. The chief technology officer of medical imaging software company MIMvista got that sensation as he stepped onto the stage at Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference on June 9 to demonstrate a new program that delivers medical scans to an iPhone. Suddenly he was in front of an auditorium packed with thousands of Apple faithful, reporters, and bloggers, all eager for news of the latest iteration of Apple's music-playing cell phone and the software applications designed to run on it. "We went from thousands of people knowing about our company to millions, in just a moment," he says.

MIMvista's application is just one of the 4,000 applications being developed specifically to run on the iPhone. These are part of a wave of so-called native applications, meaning they're designed to run directly on the phone, as opposed to being downloaded onto the phone from a Web browser. The first of these programs becomes available by mid-July, around the time the new iPhone 3G hits store shelves.

Native applications take full advantage of the new device's improved computational power, including its navigational features and ability to run on a more advanced wireless network. "[Both] Web-based and native applications have a place," says Erica Sadun of the Unofficial Apple Weblog. Yet, "native applications access location, and do a lot of things using the onboard sensors."

Apple has packed plenty into the new gadget. Like the first version of the iPhone, this one boasts a 2-megapixel camera, a snazzy touchscreen, and an accelerometer that helps it respond to motion. The fancy features make this "a truly sexy device," says Kevin Burden, director of mobile devices at ABI Research.

Business Class

As appealing as it may be to hipsters, the iPhone 3G was designed with business users in mind as well. Software developers are all...

You've got to feel a little sorry for the folks at Samsung and Sprint Nextel. Last Friday, they launched a feature-rich, attractive and generously priced $130 smartphone called Instinct, yet all anyone wants to gab about is the new iPhone coming July 11 from Apple and AT&T.

Instinct invites the inevitable comparisons to its iconic rival. Instinct and iPhone kind of resemble each other. And both run off their respective carriers' fastest cellular networks.

Moreover, it may be an iPhone wannabe, but Instinct boasts features the iPhone doesn't offer. These include mobile radio and TV services, voice dialing, stereo Bluetooth, expandable memory, a camera that shoots video and a removable battery. Heck, Sprint even tosses in a spare, which you can charge outside the phone.

One more thing Sprint supplies that Apple doesn't: a carrying case that in hindsight I should have used. Its touch-screen got a nasty scratch after I carried it unprotected in my pocket during tests in Manhattan, northern New Jersey and South Florida.

All this indeed makes Instinct a worthy rival to the iPhone, even if it falls short. Apple's software is more intuitive and pleasurable. The iPhone makes beautiful use of an "accelerometer" for orienting the screen horizontally or vertically depending on what you are doing. With Instinct, there doesn't always seem to be a rhyme or reason for when you must rotate the device.

Moreover, even with a Web browser capable of showing the real deal Internet rather than pages optimized for mobile viewing, the experience pales next to iPhone. Ditto for e-mail.

Here's closer look:

*The basic Instinct. At 4.4 ounces and just over 4 1/2 inches tall, 2 inches wide and a half-inch thick, Instinct is close physically to the iPhone. Its 3.1-inch display is a little smaller than Apple's, however, and of a lesser resolution.

Three main touch controls...

Nokia rocked the wireless industry June 24 with news it would purchase the portion of Symbian, a maker of mobile-phone software, that it didn't already own -- and then give away the software for nothing.

The prospect of free software would surely lure users away from competing cell-phone software makers including Google, which in the past year threw its hat into the cell-phone software ring by spearheading the creation of Android, an operating system for wireless devices. Or so the argument runs.

But Nokia's move may play right into Google's hands, by helping to nurture a blossoming of the mobile Web and spur demand for all manner of cell-phone applications -- and most important, the ads sold by Google. "There's nothing to say that this isn't what Google's plan was all along," says Kevin Burden, research director, mobile devices at consultancy ABI Research. "They might have wanted a more open device environment anyway. This might have been Google's end game."

Opening the Airwaves

Google, which makes money from ads placed on Web pages and alongside search results, stands to benefit from anything that helps spread the use of the Web -- be it on computers or the advanced cell phones known as smartphones that run Symbian software. With the desktop search market showing signs of slowing, the company needs to ramp up usage of its applications from mobile devices. U.S. mobile search ad sales are expected to rise to $1.4 billion in 2012 from $33.2 million in 2007, according to consulting firm Kelsey Group.

But in the U.S. market, Google has long been hampered in getting its applications onto cell phones for a variety of reasons. To now, Web search on phones has been too slow or awkward, mobile data plans and smartphones are often expensive, and carriers and cell-phone makers place restrictions on which...

For 10 years, scientists have been waiting for the outcome of a global examination of the habits of thousands of brain cancer patients to explore whether there are links between cell phone use and brain tumors.

But now the findings of the euro 15 million, or $24 million, Interphone study are stalled, caught in an international rift among prominent cancer researchers who are divided about how to interpret the risks of radio-frequency radiation emitted by mobile telephones.

The research group's manuscript of results has drifted for almost three years among scientists in Europe, Israel, Japan and Canada without publication. Some of the researchers are barely on speaking terms, according to some participants. And there is the prospect of further delays because of an ongoing general debate about whether or not cancer patients accurately report their mobile telephone use.

"There seems to be a split," said Lennart Hardell, a participating Swedish cancer specialist who said the divisions focused on whether the faulty memories of brain cancer patients skewed the results of the study. "It's not fair to the public. This has been paid for by taxpayers and they have a responsibility to show the results."

Many of the individual countries involved in the study have already started to release results, some of which have shown increased risk of brain tumors for heavy users -- those who have used their cell phones for more than 10 years on the same side of the head. But since national samples are small, the information is not considered as significant as the pooled analysis of the 7,400 patients in the study with tumors in the head and neck area in the study.

Until the Interphone study is published, institutions like the World Health Organization and the European Commission have cautioned that conclusions about possible cancer risks cannot be drawn....

What's more boring than the stuff on AM radio? The stuff on FM radio, of course. No wonder millions subscribe to satellite radio services like XM and Sirius, or sample the delights of Internet audio streams.

According to Arbitron Inc., 33 million Americans listen to Internet audio every week. Most hear the audio streams through computer speakers, but that's a lousy deal when the PC is in one room and you're working or relaxing in another.

Luckily, a solution is at hand: the Wi-Fi wireless networking system that can transmit data over the air to any nearby digital device. And I don't just mean desktop PCs. You can now buy Wi-Fi equipped desktop radios that will let you hear thousands of online audio streams almost as easily as tuning in a Red Sox game. You can also listen to music stored on your computer's hard drive.

I went looking for one or two such radios and came up with four.

None of them are cheap (though one looks it). An audiophile set from Boston's own Tivoli Audio costs an eye-watering $650, or $750 with a secondary plug-in speaker.

Each radio works in much the same way. Turn it on and follow a setup procedure that connects the radio to your home Wi-Fi signal. Then enter your Wi-Fi password by using a rotary knob or an infrared remote control -- this part can be a hassle, but you need only do it once. You will also want to set up your home computer to recognize the radio as a network device, so it can play back tunes on your PC or Macintosh.

Each radio comes with a library of preselected Internet audio streams. By registering the device online, you can add your favorites. The process doesn't always work with subscription services like the Live365 Internet audio network,...

News Laptop Use Helps Spur Adoption of 802.11n By Mikael Ricknas June 27, 2008 Products that support the 802.11n wireless networking standard are starting to take off, with vendors reporting acceleration in ...