Nokia will report its Q2 numbers next Thursday, July 20th.
Early reports are for strong growth:
Nokia, which has revamped its product portfolio since 2004, when it lost market share to rivals with more popular designs, is expected to report strong sales of its N-series multimedia phones, such as the N70.
Good news for smartphone, and NOK, fans.
4Info.net is a very useful mobile service that’s been around for a while, but I haven’t written anything about it B4 (sorry, couldn’t help myself). A recent business trip begat a hotel stay, which begat a USA Today at the door, which per the paper’s deal with 4INFO begat this post.
What the heck does 4INFO do? As they say on their site:
4INFO is a free Mobile Search service that allows you to access information and downloads at anytime, from anyplace.
I’ll have to Look Into why “Mobile Search” is in caps, but anyway, its a handy way to find all kinds of things while on the run. Most searches work over SMS (code in at 44636, or ‘4INFO’), or you can use their WAP interface or downloadable application to get the maximum goods. I love their range of services, especially those which I use on the spur of the moment such as price comparison and movie showtimes.
You can also set up a number of useful alerts. Example: 4INFO can text confirmation of a Fedex or UPS delivery of your choosing. Note that alerts and SMS service currently work only on major US carriers, but the WAP interface works anywhere that WAP works. Get the full skinny from the 4INFO FAQ and their corporate blog.
Competition? Check out Google SMS (code 46645, ‘GOOGL’) and Yahoo Mobile Search (code 92466, ‘YAHOO’). 4INFO claims it’s better geared for mobile search for a number of reasons; click here to read them all.
My take? Bookmark all three and use what works best for you.
The article notes:
With nine out of 10 college students carrying cell phones — and many of them using traditional landline phones rarely or not at all — schools are seeking ways to maintain a line of communication while deploying technologies they believe students want and need.
Some colleges are abandoning the wires and phone jacks in their dormitories. Many of those systems, formerly a source of extra revenue for institutions, now operate at a loss.
As a replacement, some are introducing their own cellular services and handsets customized to connect students with campus services and information, while adding security and instructional tools.
Some of the new services enabled by and for an all-mobile student body are compelling. At Montclair, for instance:
Students can use the phones to get real-time alerts and information from the university, check class assignments, learn about specials at campus restaurants, or track the location of school shuttle buses through Global Positioning System technology.
There are a great many corporate services and sites (internal company portals especially) which should be available on every employee’s cell phone but aren’t properly mobilized yet. I wonder how long it will be until the average business does for its workforce what universities are doing now for students? Or is that what students are doing for universities?
[Tip o’ the hat to Engadget Mobile for the story link and Moto-Belushi]
Fox Sports sums it all up in Bobby McMahon’s “All you need to know about the World Cup final“.
Allez Les Bleus!
Google Earth Blog has pulled together several useful weather and storm tracking tools. Recommended for GE users.
Whoa! Yahoo reports on Nokia’s apparent abandonment of future in house CDMA development.
Update: PC Magazine calls it like it seems to be in “Nokia Cuts and Runs“.
Only 3 spams have made it through while Akismet killed 3755 in the last twenty-four hours.
I am very impressed!
I’ve upgraded my WordPress install using DreamHost‘s fab-o upgrader. Nothing broke during the upgrade, which was a two step process: Run DreamHost’s upgrader, then run the WordPress database upgrader et voila, done!
As a part of my upgrade, I activated the Akismet comment and trackback spam killer plugin bundled with WP. So far, I love it! Akismet’s throttled back an ongoing spam attack from several messages per second to one spam in the last three hours. Talk about an improvement!
The newest WP+Akismet are highly recommended for anyone considering the upgrade.
Someone’s finally written the first known J2ME malware.
Read up on the details (including how to avoid infection or remove Redbrowser.A from an already infected mobile) from Symantec and McAfee.
I guess it was inevitable, but given the huge number of deployed devices as potential targets it’s amazing that it’s taken close to seven years for something as weak as Redbrowser to finally appear.
IBM devWorks continues Claus Höfele’s series on Mobile 3D Graphics with part 2 covering M3G’s retained mode.
Retained mode allows one to build and manipulate 3D worlds using a scene graph such as the example below, excerpted from Claus’ article:
This approach is amenable to using modeling tools (Claus uses an open source tool called Blender for the article). Read on to learn more.
BillDay.com 