
I first blogged about sports venues lighting up WiFi networks earlier this year in posts about the San Francisco Giants. Now eWeek reports that there are other Major League Baseball teams also wireless-enabling their common areas.
I can’t wait to try this out on the 9500!

Nokia has begun shipments of its first Series 60 fold phone. Read the press release, or better yet check out the 6260’s specs and learn more about Series 60 Platform 2nd Edition Feature Pack 1 which it uses.

Nokia and other participating companies recently released jointly developed specifications for Unlicensed Mobile Access (UMA).
UMA enables access to GSM and GPRS mobile services over unlicensed spectrum technologies such as Bluetooth and WiFi with security equivalent to GSM. In other words, subscribers will be able to roam and handover between cellular networks and public and private unlicensed wireless networks using dual-mode mobile handsets while maintaining access to mobile services.
Re-read the paragraph above and think about this a bit. Very powerful stuff.
Learn more from the UMA site via its Overview and Technology pages. Or dive into the details by reading the specifications.
What next? UMA is being introduced into 3GPP for official standardization, so hopefully a seemless cellular and WiFi roaming experience will be coming to handsets near you in the not too distant future.
Following up on my Blogging on BillDay.com site changes:
I’ve continued merging various parts of my site into my CMS infrastructure and the new common look and feel. Changes I’ve made include:
This completes the cutover to the new CMS infrastructure. Future site work will focus on content improvements such as J2ME Archive updates, context specific ads for related services, etc.
Read all about it from Reuters/USA Today: “Global handset sales reached record in Q2“.

Planning to attend CTIA Wireless IT or in the Bay Area anyway October 24th?
Check out the Nokia Enterprise Developer Workshop. Among other things we’ll be covering new Series 60 and Series 80 technologies and handsets such as the 9500 and 9300.
Bonus tip: Register today and you’ll also be eligible for free admission to the CTIA WIT exhibits and keynotes.

Nokia introduced the Series 80 based Nokia 9300 today. Read MobileBurn’s review and check out more photos from the Nokia press site.
The 9300 will support Blackberry email access along with other Series 80 based devices such as the 9500. In fact, one way to look at the 9300 is as a slimmed down 9500 for those with a “pocket space premium” (I definitely find myself in that camp quite often). Two areas trimmed to shrink the 9300’s size: digicam and WiFi support. If one or both of those is critical for your application development, look at the 9500 or other Nokia cellcams such as the 7610 instead.
Developer details: The 9300 is the second Series 80 Developer Platform 2.0 based device announced (the first was the 9500). 9300 supports development using either of the two J2ME stacks as well as C++:

Nokia and Six Apart have announced support for Typepad in Nokia Lifeblog.
Lifeblog’s blogging support will be Atom based. For more information, read Christian Lindholm’s post on Lifeblog and Typepad, learn more about Typepad’s implementation of the Atom API, and watch the Nokia Lifeblog site for more details. I need to dig into the details myself and verify if I’ll be able to Lifeblog to my own Atom enabled site…more to come on that as I get the skinny.
BTW, if you’re interested in Lifeblog you might also want to check out Nokia Album, available now for 7610. Russ wrote a short review last month if you’d like a third party take on it.
Nokia and Metrowerks announced a number of related things today including Nokia’s purchase of Metrowerks Symbian OS development tools.
Other details: Nokia will make employment offers to approximately two dozen Metrowerks employees who develop and support the technology being purchased. Nokia will also license a number of core Metrowerks technologies.
Click here for details from the joint press release.

I recently switched home broadband providers and decided to use the switch as an opportunity to upgrade my home network’s internals, too.
Centerpiece of my faster setup: Netgear’s WGR614 802.11g Wireless Router. This WiFi cable/DSL-ready router gives me 54Mbps speed for 802.11g devices while maintaining compatibility with 11Mbps 802.11b equipment such as the Nokia 9500 Communicator (Nokia’s first WLAN handset; click here for more details), older WiFi PC cards, etc.
Router specs are available from Amazon or the Netgear datasheet.
Notes on setting up the WGR614 via the provided Web administration interface and recommendations for usage:
- Limit the visibility of your network to casual WiFi users by changing your network name (SSID) to something other than the default and turning off SSID broadcast
- Use the MAC address based access control list to limit access to particular devices
- The router includes stateful packet inspection (SPI) and a number of other security capabilities built-in, but you should always assume your network is vulnerable and being sniffed: Use the highest level of encryption supported by your devices (WEP and WPA-PSK are available in the router), and even better still, use VPN (WGR614 supports IPSec and L2TP pass through)
If you’re interested in the WGR614, you can buy one via Amazon.com for $34.84 USD after a $20 mail in rebate. Be sure you get the latest available revision (when I bought mine, the WGR614 was up to v4).

Interested in OpenGL ES support in upcoming Series 60 2nd Edition Feature Pack 2 based devices such as the Nokia 6630?
Check out the training from Khronos Developer University available in 2004 and the first half of 2005.
Following up on things I’ve written about number portability in the US: Switching seems to be picking up steam of late as Reuters/Yahoo News reports in “Pace for Wireless Number Switches Quickens“.
Stats worth noting from the article include:
- There are approximately 168.5 million US wireless subscribers as of now
- 5.4 million customers have switched since number portability rules went into effect in November 2003
- More than 2.8 million of those switched from May to July 2004
- 544,000 “cord cutters” moved their home or office landline phone number to their wireless phone since last November

Wireless highlights from my August blog entries:
Previous 2004 wireless recaps are available for: March | April-June | July

Top wireless news for developers from July included:
Previous 2004 wireless recaps are available for: March | April-June
Now that I’m settled in my new position at Nokia, I’ve got some catching up to do on my monthly wireless recap posts.
My last installment was in my java.net blog way back in March. What I’ve decided to do to catch up is post this April, May, and June conglomeration, then resume monthly posts from July and August onwards. And since I’ve ramped up my wireless-related blogging on BillDay.com a great deal since March, I’m going to post the original entries here, then link from java.net.
Without further ado, here are some of the major wireless developments and stories from April-June in reverse chronological order: