Wireless Blog

A cell phone company is offering free wireless phones and 68 minutes of free air time to more than 800,000 low-income Tennessee residents in a program aimed at ensuring they can make a call in an emergency.

Refined Pavilion design; "frameless" display bezel enhances screen's appearance; high-end Centrino 2 components result in great multimedia performance; touch pad On/Off button; light-touch media controls; dual ...

NASA plans to bomb the moon to find water, explains Popular Mechanics.

A team of NASA and Northrop-Grumman engineers aims to solve the mystery of lunar ice in February or March of 2009, by crashing its low-budget kamikaze spacecraft into a crater. The LCROSS spacecraft, (for Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite), would remain attached to an Atlas upper-stage rocket. Using the moon’s gravity, LCROSS would maneuver into an elongated orbit around Earth that assured a collision with one of the moon’s poles.

Nine hours before impact, and 24,000 miles above the lunar surface, LCROSS and the Centaur would separate. The 5000-pound Centaur would crash into a dark crater at twice the speed of a rifle bullet, kicking up a plume of debris more than 6 miles high. Four minutes later, the heavily instrumented LCROSS would ride the plume, checking for water and relaying data to Earth until it, too, slammed into the lunar surface.

A case of life imitating art?

Meanwhile, an Ariane 5 placed AMC-21 into orbit on Thursday. The new Ku-band satellite will be placed at 125 degrees West and enter service next month.

The U.S. Public Broadcasting Service and their local broadcast affiliates will anchor the satellite. It will also be used for new applications, such as maritime mobile broadband.

The Ariane 5 also released Superbird 7, a Japanese satellite that will supply 28 Ku-band transponders for broadband Internet, high-definition cable and direct television broadcasts to customers in Japan, East Asia and the Pacific Ocean.

Served as CEO of Nextel Partners and chief operating officer of Orca Bay Sports and Entertainment.

Oops there goes a billion kilowatt dam.

Network World’s article Nine wireless companies to watch, focuses on products and services that can impact corporate computing. What topped their list? RedFly from Celio.

Redfly Makes Your Smartphone a Laptop. It’s a smartphone terminal, not unlike the ill-fated Palm Folio, with an eight-inch screen and full keyboard. It enables you to use your smartphone like a laptop.

Redfly links to the smartphone via a USB cable or with Bluetooth, enabling your smartphone applications to be used on a larger screen and with a full keyboard. It simply re-displays what is on the phone onto a laptop-sized screen, (it also has a VGA port).

It weighs two pounds and also acts a charger for the smartphone. There is no operating system, central processing unit or storage. The device sells for $499 and has eight hours of battery life.

It works with Windows Mobile operating system, found in smartphones from Palm, Motorola, Samsung & HTC. Currently it doesn’t work with the Blackberry or devices like Nokia’s WiMAX web tablet ($410).

India will have over 27.5 million WiMAX users by 2012, says the WiMAX Forum. Now imagine a $200 WiMax phone plugged into a $150 mobile terminal/settop. Deliver it all on the big screen.

What is on Network World’s list of hot products?

1. RedFly:

The aforementioned smartphone terminal.


2. GainSpan:

A 802.11bg implementation via a dual-core ARM system-on-a-chip, and software, that uses so little power you can run Wi-Fi-based sensors for years on simple batteries. The company incubated in Intel’s New Business Initiatives Group, where the co-founders were exploring sensor networks.


3. The Mojix STAR System:

A distributed passive RFID system that lets a single Mojix-patented antenna array read tag emissions as far as 1,000 feet.


4. Ozmo Devices:

An extension to the 802.11 protocol, making it possible for a laptop and devices to exchange information on a predictable schedule (your laptop uses 802.11’s contention mechanism to connect to an access point). The 9Mbps connections are point to point within a 30-foot range, and can use both the 2.4GHz and 5GHz bands.


5. Strata8

Local area cellular service for your enterprise, via its own spectrum in the 1900MHz band, available in 16 U.S. markets. You select from a gradually growing set of CDMA cell phones (including Moto Q and Treo 700wx), and pay $29.95 per month per subscriber.


6. SynapSense:

A wireless sensor-based system to monitor and manage energy use and cooling in big data centers.

7. uMobility: A set of three applications that together create a secure, optimized connection for data as well as voice. Works with cell phones as well as Wi-Fi/cell phones. The software spans both cellular and Wi-Fi networks, to extend desktop PC and phone (via SIP PBX support) desktop phone features to mobile devices.
8. MobilityCentral:

A hosted software service pulls user information from your enterprise directories, mobile devices, and cellular carriers. It correlates all this, and creates up-to-date Web dashboard reports so you can compare planned cellular minutes and spending with actual usage data. Monthly fee is typically about $5 per user.


9. Innovaticus:

Lets wireless (and wired) devices negotiate automatically with each other to share any kind of digital content. Users create and manage their personal network of devices, and designate files of all types (and soon “things” in their network like screens, disk drives, speakers, keyboards, printers and digicams) for access and use from anywhere by other Innovaticus users. In beta testing.

Yet another vendor has fallen prey to "premature launch syndrome." Yesterday someone at Palm uploaded a text and visual presentation of the Treo Pro to the Palm Web site, and it didn't escape notice. Even though the presentation was pulled just minutes later, pictures and text were dutifully scooped up by bloggers and passed throughout the Net.

The as-yet-unannounced Treo Pro, formerly known as the Treo 850, sports clean, sculpted lines, a black finish with silver trim, and other features Palm fans have been waiting for.

According to the annotated online photo, the Treo Pro includes a 2.4-inch, 320-by-320-pixel touch screen, a micro-USB connector, microSD expansion slot, and a long-awaited headphone jack. The unit is supposed to include both Wi-Fi and GSM. The snatched information, most clearly on display at Gizmondo (http://gizmodo.com/5037301/palm-treo-pro-revealed-best-looking-palm-ever), seems to indicate that the device will run Windows Mobile 6.1 Professional rather than the not-yet-released refresh of the Palm OS.

Specs Grabbed from the Web

The Pro seems to be a variant of the Palm Treo 800w that is on the streets now, with some keyboard layout differences. The current Treo 800w, a CDMA network phone, includes GPS -- so odds are the GSM version of the Pro will, as well. A camera port is clearly labeled on the captured photos, but there is no indication of the resolution. The current 800w has a two-megapixel camera. Speculation is that T-Mobile or AT&T will be the first carriers to offer the Treo Pro with their GSM 3G networks.

According to one source, the following unconfirmed specs were grabbed online:

* 14 mm in thickness, width 60 mm, and length 113 mm

* GSM, EDGE and UMTS HSDPA 3.6

* GPS

* Wi-F 802.11b/g

* 320-by-320-pixel screen, touch panel

* microSD slot under the battery

* Two-megapixel camera

* 1500mAh battery

* A micro-USB connector for...

Sun Microsystems will make an open-source version of its Java Mobile Edition (ME) technology in a bid to ramp-up development of Java-based mobile applications, reports vnunet.com.

The development kit - known as the Light-Weight UI Toolkit (LWUIT) - was unveiled in April, but is now available to developers as open-source under GPLv2, a standard free software license. “By open-sourcing the LWUIT code, we are enabling mobile developers to quickly and easily create rich, portable interfaces for their applications,” said Craig Gering, Sun’s head of embedded Java software.

Sun’s decision to open-source LWUIT seems prompted by the increasing threat posed to Java technology in the mobile space by projects such as Google’s Android, the LiMo Foundation, The Symbian Foundation, an open-source version of Symbian, the platform favored by Nokia, as well as OpenMoko, built using free software.

Phoenix police moved on a case of a woman who called a national talk radio show and bragged that she got away with murder. Phoenix police Sgt. Joel Tranter said while police won’t arrest the 30-year-old, they are seeking charges of first-degree murder and obstructing a criminal investigation for filing a false police report.

Two years ago, a woman claiming to be the dead man’s girlfriend said on the Tom Leykis Show, a nationally syndicated radio talk show, that she killed him but had convinced police it was a suicide (MP-3).

When Leykis told the woman his system captured her number and that she had just confessed to murder on a national radio show the woman said, “But people call up and make stories up all the time, Tom”. Then the line went dead. Leykis said in all the years of broadcasting he’s never taken such an appalling call and offered $5,000 out of his own pocket to anyone who knew her and if a court convicts her.

Itron Inc. and SmartSynch announced today that they have extended their existing partnership to include delivery of cellular communications for advanced metering infrastructure solutions integrated into the ...

Reports continue to flood in from U.S. iPhone 3G users about problems with 3G connections and speeds. The problems tend to come from large metropolitan areas, but one informal survey points to the San Francisco Bay Area and Los Angeles.

The problem, BusinessWeek reported Thursday, may be faulty firmware in a communications chip supplied by Munich-based Infineon. BusinessWeek said its confidential sources backed a report released earlier this week by Nomura Securities analyst Richard Windsor that pointed to the firmware.

Patch May Be Imminent

An Infineon spokesperson declined to address the iPhone issue directly, but defended Infineon's technology, saying it works fine in other 3G phones. "Our 3G chips are, for example, used in Samsung handsets and we are not aware of such problems there," he said.

Apple is reportedly working on a firmware upgrade to fix the problem. USA Today reported that the fix could be available via iTunes as early as next week, but Apple has not commented.

Tim Bajarin, principal analyst with Creative Strategies, said in an e-mail, "Historically, Apple does not respond to something like this automatically just because there are reports of problems. If there is merit to the issue, they work overtime to fix it and usually, at the point of the fix, that is when they respond."

Bajarin expects Apple to eventually make things right with its 3G customers. "Apple prides itself on its customer-service reputation and I would be surprised if they don't go the extra mile to make sure anything that impacts that image will be corrected as fast as possible," he said.

Problem Is Global

Another theory is that Apple programmed the Infineon chip to require a stronger-than-needed 3G signal, so some users are being knocked down to slower networks even though there really is sufficient 3G bandwidth.

Alternatively, it may be that AT&T hasn't built out its 3G...