Excellent news from the mobile Java front: The Register reports on Unicom’s selection of JTWI for its mobile development platform (learn more about JTWI and its relationship to MIDP 2.0, MMA, WMA, etc. here). J2ME comes to 90 million+ more Chinese mobile users!
Tips and tricks for using MIDP 2.0’s Push capabilities via SMS.
As I mentioned previously via jGuru, Nokia, Warner Bros. et al have announced the CMLA recently as part of their mobile anti-piracy efforts for movies and music.
Wondering what exactly the CMLA intends to do? Thankfully they’ve launched a site, CM-LA.com to help explain. Their one sentence overview:
CMLA is a licensing and compliance entity formed to provide a full solution implementation of the OMA DRM version 2.0 interoperability specification.
Whew, what a mouthful! I hope in the end this doesn’t boil down to “How the music and movie industries killed fair use.”
It’s definitely an interesting idea in theory, but will it turn out to be a good idea or bloody dangerous in practice? You be the judge.
RealNetworks adds Telefonica Moviles, Wind, TIM, 02, and TeliaSonera to an already impressive list of carriers using its mobile audio/video streaming technology.
Read the details in the Reuters/Yahoo news story “RealNetworks Signs New Carriers in Handset Battle“.
Excellent news from the ever-smaller-gadget front: Texas Instruments Sees Phone-On-Chip by Year’s End.
Confirming my ongoing suspicion that cellcams are about to go big, Canon, Seiko Epson, and HP have announced they are forming a consortium to create a standard for printing photos directly from cellcams.
Together, these three manufacture the vast majority of the world’s consumer printers. It’s a fairly safe bet that their new consortium, MIPC, will succeed. If it does, what then?
It may be a while before cellcam prints approach the quality of dedicated digicam prints, but one way or another, approach them they will. And with the “back pressure” MIPC will be indirectly putting on the cellcam makers to provide even higher quality image capture, things could get very interesting, very quickly. HP and Canon’s printer divisions may love this announcement, but I bet their digicam engineers are sweating a bit.
Canon has announced their line-up of new digicams and it includes the one I’ve been waiting for, the PowerShot S500 (aka Digital IXUS 500 or IXY Digital 500, depending or where in the world you buy it).
The S500 is the 5MPixel follow-on to the S100/200/400 series cameras. After reading about the announcement and its stats from Digital Photography Review, I’m ready to buy one. My problem: they won’t be available until late April according to Amazon.
I’ll guess I’ll just have to wait. Hey, maybe I should buy some accessories to pass the time(?). A car charger might come in handy…hhhmm…
PalmSource has joined palmOne in licensing IBM’s J2ME implementation.
I adapted the J2ME Archive (and also my copyright notice and Grid Archive, btw) to use the new BillDay.com v2.0 look and feel. I’ll continue tweaking this in the coming days/weeks, but the basics are ready now.
Previous update: Dec 2003-Feb 2004
BillDay.com 