phones

BlackBerry owners may be feeling like they have nothing to brag about now that the iPhone has added connectivity to Exchange e-mail systems--the BlackBerry's bread-and-butter feature.

Not to worry. By April, Blackberry owners will have something the iPhone still lacks--the ability to download songs over the air from any location with cellular access. Canadian company Puretracks, which has licensed more than two million songs from all four major labels and plenty of indies, announced plans to launch a mobile store for the BlackBerry family of devices in April.

The files will be in the AAC format used by … Read more

Here's an idea that we bet could easily become the most copied design, after the iPhone. Check out the Mooon+." (Yes, that's three o's, presumably since that will be your expression of awe when you first see this concept phone in person.) It isn't so much the copycat touch screen and sleek lines that will make an impression, but designer Sunman Kwon's clever twist at the end. Snap off the top piece and--voila!--you get a Bluetooth headset that's been craftily docked onto the handset the whole time. There are no other specs … Read more

As if things weren't bad enough for flash memory companies this year, they're now even more concerned since Apple has yet to place a major order in 2008, according to a report out of Taiwan.

Digitimes hasn't always been the most reliable source, but they have gotten enough things right lately to take notice, and their report Tuesday suggesting that Apple's flash memory orders have fallen off the face of the Earth jives with other information we've seen this year. According to Digitimes' sources in the Taiwanese flash memory industry, Apple has yet to place … Read more

I remember a time when making ringtones used to be a very cumbersome experience. My technique of choice was to use the open-sourced Audacity then do various conversions in iTunes or Quicktime Pro by tweaking some of the advanced settings. However, the Web has spawned newer, less tedious methods. On of them, Audiko, is a particularly well-done effort, letting you grab audio tracks from your hard drive or the Web and customize them for use on your mobile phone.

While I think ringtones of popular songs are largely annoying and superfluous, the tools to create them are actually quite fun. … Read more

There's nothing the lipless feline won't do for world domination, and that includes mating with your mobile phone via a proprietary cable to accomplish its goals. This mini-kitty juices up the handset using what looks like two AA-sized batteries, though that's not clear because those specs weren't available.

The problem, according to Akihabara News, is that this charger is compatible only with only Japanese cell phone battery connectors. However, GeekStuff4U--maker of this device--plans to develop a mini-USB version so that fans outside Japan won't be left out in the cold.

(Source: Crave Asia)

You'd think that the design for power strips and surge protectors would be pretty much played out, but Belkin has actually done some pretty interesting things with them in recent years: clamp-on models, ones that hide all of the wall warts, and even the forthcoming Conserve, an eco-friendly model that truly shuts off connected devices at the touch of a wireless remote.

The company is taking that spirit of innovation on the road with its latest power product: the Belkin Mini Surge Protector. The travel-friendly model packs three grounded three-prong power outlets and two powered USB ports into its … Read more

After the release of the software development kit for Apple's iPhone, Sun Microsystems says it's going to enable Java applications to run on the device, InfoWorld is reporting.

Sun will build a Java Virtual Machine (JVM), based on the Java Micro Edition version of the programming language after June of this year. It will be available in the iPhone AppStore. Eric Klein, vice president of Java marketing at Sun, told InfoWorld Friday that although Apple passed on enabling Java on the iPhone, Sun decided to do so anyway after Thursday's SDK unveiling. After combing through the documents … Read more

My former teammate and now editor in chief of ZDNet, Larry Dignan, and I continue our weekly podcast (formerly called "Between the Lines") covering the top headlines of the week. This week on "EIC Squared," we two square editor in chiefs discuss the iPhone's quest to seduce business users, some of the highlights from Microsoft's Mix '08 conference, and Facebook's new chief operating officer.

Twenty-four hours after Apple revealed its procedure for getting third-party applications on the iPhone, developers have a few questions about the software development kit, but seem mostly satisfied.

In the immediate aftermath of Thursday's presentation at Apple's headquarters in Cupertino, Calif., reaction was almost universally positive to Apple's SDK plans. Some developers had feared worse outcomes, such as having to submit their source code to Apple, and seemed willing to let Apple take a piece of their revenue and be the exclusive distributor for iPhone applications in exchange for getting a crack at the technology.

Now that … Read more