Palm Pixi to ship October 20?

Palm's Pixi may already be in stores in less than three weeks' time if a leak proves true. A new but seemingly realistic source for BGR claims that the phone will be in stores on October 20th. The release would be complete and include not just Sprint's own stores but Best Buy and other third-party chains as well.

The cost of the phone or its customizable shells wasn't mentioned. Unofficially, however, the Pixi is believed to come in at $100 or less as it will take the Centro's former place at Sprint. Palm has already dropped the price of the Pre down to $150 despite its having a better camera, a larger screen and Wi-Fi.

Symbian OS goes open source four months early

The Symbian Foundation’s announced that it would make its code open source in 2008 and has now completed the move. It means that any organisation or individual can now use and modify the platform’s underlying source code “for any purpose”. Symbian has shipped in more than 330m mobile phones, the foundation says. It believes the move will attract new developers to work on the system and help speed up the pace of improvements.

“This is the largest open source migration effort ever,” Lee Williams of the Symbian Foundation told BBC News.

“It will increase rate of evolution and increase the rate of innovation of the platform.”

Ian Fogg, principal analyst at Forrester research, said the move was about Symbian “transitioning from one business model to another” as well as trying to gain “momentum and mindshare” for software that had been overshadowed by the release of Apple’s iPhone and Google Android operating system.

Free Ovi Maps by Nokia Gets 1 Million Downloads in First Week

Nokia (NYSE: NOK) has today announced that since the 21 January 2010 launch of the new version of Ovi Maps with free walk and drive navigation, there have been over 1.4 million downloads. The one million mark was reached just one week after the launch.

"We're averaging a download a second, 24 hours a day," said Anssi Vanjoki, Executive Vice President, Nokia. "When we announced free walk & drive navigation we knew it would be a game-changer. The number of people now using their Nokia for navigation, and as a result looking for more location-aware software, is growing faster than even we predicted."

The success of the new version Ovi Maps is a key part of Nokia's strategy to lead the market in mobile maps, navigation and location-based services. By leveraging its investment in NAVTEQ, Nokia has been able to remove the costs associated with navigation for drivers and pedestrians and is quickly activating a massive user base to which it can offer new location features, content and services.

"This is great news for our 3rd party application developers. Within a matter of days there is an installed base of more than 1 million active users all potentially hungry for new and innovative location-aware apps," continued Anssi Vanjoki. "For the operators too there is a growing opportunity to sell more data-plans and a complete navigation package to existing and new customers."

As of 31 January 2010 the top five countries downloading the new version of Ovi Maps were: China, Italy, UK, Germany and Spain. The top five most popular Nokia devices installing the download were: Nokia 5800 XpressMusic, Nokia N97 mini, Nokia N97, Nokia 5230 and Nokia E72.

"There is a huge appetite for GPS navigation on mobile phones. We estimate there were already 25.9 million people actively using GPS navigation on their mobile phones at the end of 2009," said Chris Jones, VP & Principal Analyst at research firm Canalys.

From next month, all new Nokia GPS-enabled smartphones will include the new version of Ovi Maps, pre-loaded with local country map data, with high-end walk and drive navigation and access to Lonely Planet and Michelin travel guides at no extra cost.

Ovi Maps covers more than 180 countries with car and pedestrian navigation for 74 countries, in 46 languages, and traffic information for more than 10 countries. There are more than 6000 3D landmarks for 200 cities around the world. Lonely Planet and Michelin guides have information on more than 1,000 destinations globally.

Dell Mini 3 Android Smartphone Showcased at MWC 2010

Although it’s new in the mobile biz, Dell was also present in Barcelona, taking part in the MWC 2010 event. The company showcased the Dell Mini 3 handset, that you can check out below, running Android and supporting 3G connectivity.



The device comes with a 3.5 inch TFT capacitive touchscreen display, with a 360 x 640 pixel resolution, an accelerometer, a microSD card slot, Bluetooth 2.0 and a 3 megapixel camera with autofocus and geotagging. Dell Mini 3’s battery provides 3 hours of talk time and 400 hours of standby, or so we’ve learned from the same MWC event.

Also, the handset packs a GPS, supports WiFi, email and features 256MB of internal storage, JAVA MIDP 2.1 and voice memo.

2 Million iPhone Handsets Sold Says O2 UK

Although O2 UK recently lost their exclusivity over the iPhone they have still managed to notch up some 2 million iPhone sales announced the chief exec of O2 UK Ronan Dunne and Telefonica Europe chief exec Matthew Key reports Reuters.

O2 was the first to offer the iPhone in the United Kingdom in November 07 and thus benefited from early sales, while Orange and Vodafone have only recently begun offering the iPhone in the UK.

Dunne also stated that sales of the iPhone along with good sales of the Palm Pre have helped O2 UK finish the year well and he anticipates that the next set of trading results will show that O2 UK was the only operator to gain growth for the period.

Matthew Key stated that O2 Germany was also showing signs of improvement although added that the Czech Republic and Ireland were still tough.

T-Mobile Pulse Mini does cheap, tiny, prepaid Android for Europe

Although in the US we’ve yet to see a prepaid Android phone, this offer will be available in Europe soon, through T-Mobile Pulse Mini. The T-Mobile Pulse successor is smaller and it’s made by Chinese company Huawei, providing Euro HSDPA and running Android 2.1.

The device replaces its predecessor’s HVGA display with a QVGA one, it comes with a Qualcomm MSM7255 processor, a 3.2 megapixel camera with LED flash, Bluetooth, WiFi and a 3.5mm audio jack. The above-mentioned screen is a 2.8 inch display and we also found out that T-Mobile Pulse will be available starting April for $155, without contract (UK and Germany first).

HTC Desire leaked and rom ported to Nexus One

For those of you who think that HTC Desire and Nexus One are very much the same thing, know that the Desire is a tad better than Google’s handset. However, this can be fixed, since that bit of customization brought by HTC can now be found in a ROM that was ported to Nexus One.



This process was done thanks to Paul from MoDaCo, who discovered the ROM and started playing with it, in order to create a port for the Nexus One. We remind you that HTC Desire isn’t even available yet, since it’ll go live in April and already people are messing with its software.

The purpose of the port was to get the new phone’s goodies to the Google Phone, stuff like the HTC Sense UI and camera apps with face recognition, but we’ve also found out that Flash in the browser is working and bugs are being corrected as we speak. More info on this beta ROM and download links for it can be found here.

Meebo iPhone App to Chat With Friends on AIM, Gtalk, Yahoo, MSN

Meebo is integrated, all-in-one instant messaging that connects you with your friends everywhere. Meebo supports all the major IM networks: AOL / AIM, Yahoo!, Windows Live Messenger, Gmail / Google Talk, Facebook, MySpace, and 100+ other networks!

Reliability / Connectivity

- Push notifications even when the app is closed

- Stay connected as you move from Edge to 3G to WiFi

- Meebo’s proven multi-network access protocols

- Automatically reconnect if you lose coverage so you don’t miss a message

Access / Integration

- Searchable, synchronized chat history on your iPhone and meebo.com

- Get Meebo on the web, your desktop, or your iPhone

- Tap any links to open the built-in browser

- Advanced chat session management lets you go seamlessly back and forth between Meebo on the iPhone and meebo.com

Chat features

- Swipe to switch between multiple conversations

- Rotate for landscape mode and a wider keyboard.

- Message preview from the Chats List

- Full Meebo emoticon support

- Push notifications

- Searchable Chat History

- Sort chats by most recent or full view

- Support for all the major IM networks, and many more

Account features

- Buddylist search as you type

- View profile info, status messages, and buddy icons

- Add/Remove individual buddies

- Add/Remove network accounts

- Open and close buddy groups in your Buddy List

- Set custom status messages

- Sign on/off individual accounts

- Set presence to Available/Invisible/Away for individual accounts, or all at once

Name: Meebo | Download from: App Store | Price: Free

Recognizr: Face-Recognition Software for Android [Video]

Want an app that connects facial recognition to your social networking profiles and adds a dose of augmented reality in the mix? Enter Recognizr, an app created by The Astonishing Tribe and used to recognize a person simply by photographing it with the handset’s camera. Afterwards, the photo will be connected to the person’s social networking profiles.

The image will also link to the contact’s address, phone number, name and everything you need to know about it, as shown in the demo video below. Recognizr was demoed at MWC 2010 and Dan Gärdenfors, head of user experience at The Astonishing Tribe mentioned that the company will launch the app via Android Market.

It would be nice to see the software on the iPhone as well, unless Apple has a problem with this app