Slashdot | Viruses Find A New Host: Cell Phones

Slashdot has a story on possible cell phone based large scale virus infection Slashdot | Viruses Find A New Host: Cell Phones. The comments down there also show some insight.

UK train company offers on-train Wifi

The technology behind this is GNER Mobile Office - How Does It Work?. Each train has satellite connection and cellular data connection. This is a real mobile office.

kDDI vs DoCoMo on 3G

An article on IEEE Spectrum's October 03 issue "Nifty New Cellular Phone Systems Race to Capture Japan's Consumers" talks about the slower CDMA2000 data service provided by KDDI is leading the market of 3G over the faster service WCDMA by DoCoMo.

Japan 3G Users 69 Million

Japan 3G Users 69 Million.

The reasons that 3G is getting much more popular in Japan than in the West are, as stated in Tanenbaum's book "Computer Networks, 4th ed" page 667, are:
(1) potential customers in the West already have large-screen computers with Internet access
(2) People in the west are not used to pay $1 a month to access news site.
(3) i-Mode is mainly used when people commute by train in Japan.

Intel's Universal Communicator Platform

Intel labs is doing research in so called 'universal communicator platform' (List of docs here) that enables seamless switch back and forth from 802.11 networks to a GSM cellular one during the same phone call. They have a working headset already.

5 reasons not to buy an Applet iPod

Funny that after I posted the last blog of handheld to work like an iPod, there is an article at CNet talking about the problems of using an iPod. Battary, price, and so on. Could a PDA beat this?

Handhelds Call for New Enterprise Thinking

Peter Coffee's eweek column Handhelds Call for New Enterprise Thinking pointed out a basic yet important design paradigm of applications and services for handheld devices. A handheld could augment user's accessibility of some network services as the user moves, compared with desktop computers. A simple example is to use software on handhelds to find the nearest printer or Internet access.

Handhelds should have functions that provided by Apple iPod, and user should be able to access online music store anytime, anywhere. With the convergence of cellular and PDA, this will happen some day.

Turn your head into a speaker

Well, this is not a smart handhelds, but a smart metal that will make your head work like a speaker. So you can throw away your headset now. Existing small electronic devices such as SoundBug could even turn any hard glossy surface into a sound source, only $29. The quality is good, as reported.

Will this idea help the design of smart handhelds in some regards?

Motorola releases Linux Phone A760 in China

The phone is also notable for its use of a chip by Intel, the PXA262 processor, using QtEmbedded as software development framework. Earlier in October, Motorola's launched its mpx200, a Windows PPC 2002 phone. Seems like Mot don't want to rely solely on a single OS. However, eventually it might go all the way to Linux.

PDA is dead????

PDA makers have to face the trend that phone makes are going to add more stuff into a wireless phone, making a PDA less of use. But PDA makes also have their own powerful weapon: the software, power consumption, easy-of-use, etc. Let's wait and see.