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Xperia X10 Launch Event interviews, available now at Rogers

Sunday, April 18, 2010

Rogers launched the Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 Android-packing phone, for $149.99 on a 3 year contract, $549 outright. It runs Android 1.6, with Sony Ericsson’s custom Timescape and Mediascape UI. It has 1GHz Snapdragon processor, 4″ (480 x 854) screen and an 8.1 MP camera. Included in the box is a 16gb MicroSD card, charger and wired stereo headset, but sadly no carrying case. We should be getting an X10 to play with soon, and will post our in-depth hands-on review next week. You can buy phone today at your local Rogers Wireless store, or online here.

We also had the opportunity to attend the Canadian launch party for the X10. Besides the free drink tickets and an early chance to try out the premium Android device, towards the end of the event we sat down for a few minutes to talk with talk with Anderson Teixeira, President of Sony Ericsson US and Raj Doshi, Vice President, Device and Product Management of Rogers.

If the video weren’t a giveaway, it was a dimly lit bar setting.

A couple of interesting takeaways include that the Xperia X10 will be getting the Android update treatment during the Christmas season, to coincide with new models packing the latest Android. Sony Ericsson also plans on taking the four OS approach (Android, Windows Phone, Symbian and their own proprietary OS) going forward, and in regards to Windows Phone in the future, well he said that SE still has “a very close relationship with (Microsoft), but that’s all I can tell you.”

As for whether the funky Timescape and Mediascape would appear on non-Android SE phones? “No comment”. Read into that what you will.

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Samsung Wearable Mobile Device Makes Communication Easier For An Active Lifestyle

The Samsung wearable mobile device concept, by designer Erik Campbell, is a next generation smart phone that can be worn in style. The mobile features innovative technology along with futuristic imagination, aimed for athletes, adventure lovers and tech savvy consumers. This device includes a touch screen OLED display with a tactile keypad and memory alloy articulation, offering the user convenience when riding a mountain bike or surfing the sea. This compact device with stylish split pad design allows for increased airflow, preventing sweat build up. The smart mobile eliminates the need of carrying bulky communication devices, while offering an all-in-one solution for taking and making calls, capturing wildlife, and making tweets.






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Palm software chief to quit

Michael Abott parts company with the troubled handset maker.

Palm’s software and services chief Michael Abbott will leave the company next week, as rumours continue to circle that the troubled handset manufacturer is about to be sold.

A filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission on Friday revealed that Abbott would be leaving by 23 April.
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“Palm is implementing a retention program for certain key employees, including executive officers,” the filing continued.

“The program includes equity awards and cash bonuses to be earned over a two year period provided that the individuals remain as employees of the company.”

As part of this program, Palm’s senior vice president of Global Operations, Jeffrey Devine, and Douglas Jeffries, Palm’s chief financial officer, each received a grant a cash bonus of $250,000.

The news comes as rumours spread this week that the Pre smartphone maker could soon be up for sale. Palm refused to comment on what it said was "market speculation", but a Bloomberg report citing three people familiar with the matter claimed that the company could be sold to Taiwan's HTC or China's Lenovo.

The company disappointed analysts last month when it released its third-quarter results, reporting a net loss of $22m (£14.5m).

Palm provides products for consumers and businesses including the Pre, Treo and Centro smartphones, as well as software, services and accessories.

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Crème de la Cell: Six-Figure Phones

IN 2006, Frank Nuovo was 45 — “boom!” he says, “five more years to 50!” — and at the top of his game. Except for one thing: “I’d kind of lost my soul.”

For Nokia, Frank Nuovo oversaw cellphone design for the mass market. For Vertu, he creates diamond-studded and other phones with high bling factors.

As chief of design at Nokia, the world’s leading mobile phone supplier, Mr. Nuovo presided over a huge team that brought 250 products and accessories to market each year. Among many other things, he was credited with inventing removable face plates, those colorful accessories that turn a phone into a personal fashion statement.

A sought-after public speaker, Mr. Nuovo logged about 200,000 miles a year on planes and was often inter viewed by journalists, one of whom, in a profile in The New Yorker, called him “the Henry Ford — or at least the Calvin Klein — of cellular communication.”

But something wasn’t right. Everybody’s heard of the Peter Principle, the idea that organizations tend to promote people to one level beyond their competency. But what do you call an almost-opposite phenomenon, when a person is promoted to the highest heights and excels at that altitude, but is left feeling empty? Whatever you call it, that’s what Mr. Nuovo was experiencing.

“It was painful. Being chief of design at Nokia was a dream job, and I had so much invested,” he says, describing the creative crossroads at which he found himself. But when it came to hands-on design, he recalls, “I was talking about it rather than doing it. And I needed to go back to doing it before I talked about it anymore.”

So, four years ago, a few days after his 45th birthday, Mr. Nuovo stepped down — or up, depending on your point of view. Immediately, he set about re-educating himself, mastering new design tools, like Rhinoceros for modeling and Photoshop, that had become essential in the years he’d been busy with administration and corporate strategy. With Nokia’s blessing, he also became a full-time champion of Vertu, a subsidiary he had set in motion in 1998 and had been nurturing ever since.

Mr. Nuovo says Vertu, a maker of cellphones so high-end that he calls them “communication devices,” made him whole again.

Some may mock the idea that Mr. Nuovo relocated his soul by devoting himself to creating status symbols for the world’s richest people. Vertu phones, after all, are made of gold, platinum, titanium and stainless steel. Some are wrapped in hand-tooled leather and ostrich skin or set with pavé diamonds. Depending on their bling factor, most Vertu phones retail from $5,000 to $25,000. (Special editions start at $80,000; one sculpted gold-and-sapphire phone sold for more than $325,000.)

To ponder Vertu’s ruby bearings and laser-cut ceramic keys is to imagine Thorstein Veblen, the Norwegian-American sociologist and economist, thrashing about in his grave. In his 1899 book, “The Theory of the Leisure Class,” he coined the term “conspicuous consumption” to describe how people, rich or poor, acquire cool stuff to impress and to establish a pecking order. To this guy, even silver flatware seemed like wretched excess. Veblen would surely have seen Vertu as too-too.

One tech blog could have been channeling Veblen when it declared: “Overkill, thy name is Vertu.” But Mr. Nuovo, an amiable Californian who lives in Bel Air and tends to wear black blazers over black T-shirts, rejects that critique. Beautiful objects are desirable, he says. And as objects go, the cellphone is increasingly more ubiquitous than those old lions of luxury, fancy pens and wristwatches.

Vertu won’t release sales figures, but Mr. Nuovo says the company — which has more than 80 boutiques in cities like Tokyo, Dubai, Milan, Las Vegas and London and is opening one on Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills in May — is plenty profitable, even in these tight times.

“The watch is disappearing. And everybody in the world is walking around with these,” he says on a recent afternoon, spreading an assortment of cellphones — all of them Nokias or Vertus of his own making — on a table at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, Calif., where he was once a student.

If it is politically incorrect to have a finely constructed phone, Mr. Nuovo asks, “does that mean we are forever banished to bits of plastic?”

Not if he has anything to say about it. And this is the foundation of his happiness today: he has everything to say about Vertu. As the company’s creative director and principal designer, he can execute on a single vision — his own.

“I made it very clear when I hired for this,” Mr. Nuovo says, recalling how he assembled his team. “I said: ‘You know what, this is going to be a dictatorship creatively. You can all contribute. But I’m not holding back.’” Vertu, based in Hampshire, England, has 600 employees.

The results of his unbridled self-expression are undeniably satisfying artifacts. Vertu phones feel good in the hand. They’re just heavy enough to connote solidity, but not so heavy that they drag down your jacket pocket. They flip open with a slow, exacting movement. Their ringtone — a custom-made ditty that he calls Sandpiper — is the opposite of shrill.

Even if you start off a skeptic, as I did, you can’t help but acknowledge that, like Montblanc pens or Rolex watches, Vertu phones offer something seductive — “addictive!” Mr. Nuovo says. You don’t need one, of course. But you might just want one.

Mr. Nuovo, meanwhile, got what he wanted: a new connection to his creative mojo. Early next year, he says, he will show another side of what that mojo can do, teaming up with a Swedish company to start the F.Nuovo Collection, a line of premium travel accessories informed by the nearly four million miles that he’s traveled on Nokia and Vertu business over the last 20 years.

Talk about R & D — Mr. Nuovo estimates that he’s spent more than a year of his life in the air. While it’s too early to give details, he says, he is sure of one thing: his new collection will be functional and beautiful. With not a bit of plastic in sight.

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Microsoft's Embedded Database - SQL Server Compact - Team Blog

SQL Server Compact is a SKU of SQL Server family of products from Microsoft. This is a thin light-weight, embedded, in-proc database engine which supports synchronization to SQL Server, etc.

Microsoft SQL Server Compact 3.5 with Service Pack 2 released with Visual Studio 2010 and on the Web.

The latest release of SQL Server Compact also referred to as SQL CE or SQL Server Mobile, released with Visual Studio 2010 on the 12th of April 2010. SQL Server Compact 3.5 SP2 is a SQL Server Compact 3.5 with SP2 release, meaning that installing it on a machine using the Windows Installer (MSI) file upgrades the existing installation of SQL Server Compact 3.5 or SQL Server Compact 3.5 SP1 on the machine to SP2.

The main features for SQL Server Compact 3.5 SP2 are as given below:

* Supports working with a SQL Server Compact 3.5 database using the Transact-SQL Editor in Visual Studio 2010. The Transact-SQL Editor can be used to run free-text Transact-SQL queries against a SQL Server Compact 3.5 database. The Transact-SQL Editor also provides the ability to view and save detailed estimated and actual query show-plans for SQL Server Compact 3.5 databases. Previously, the functionality provided by the Transact-SQL Editor was only available through SQL Server Management Studio.
* New classes and members named SqlCeChangeTracking have been added to the System.Data.SqlServerCe namespace to expose the internal change tracking feature used by Sync Framework to track changes in the database. The SQL Server Compact change tracking infrastructure maintains information about inserts, deletes, and updates performed on a table that has been enabled for change tracking. This information is stored both in columns added to the tracked table and in system tables maintained by the tracking infrastructure. By using System.Data.SqlServerCe.SqlCeChangeTracking one can configure, enable, and disable change tracking on a table, and also access the tracking data maintained for a table. The API can be used to provide functionality in a number of scenarios. For example it can be used to provide custom implementations of client-to-server or client-to-client sync for occasionally connected systems (OCS) or to implement a custom listener application.
* The managed assemblies of SQL Server Compact for use by the applications that privately deploy SQL Server Compact are installed in the folder %Program Files%\Microsoft SQL Server Compact Edition\v3.5\Private. Using these assemblies ensure that the application uses the privately deployed version of Compact even when a lower version of SQL Server Compact 3.5 is installed in the GAC.
* Visual Studio 2010 installs both the 32-bit and 64-bit versions of SQL Server Compact 3.5 SP2 on a 64-bit machine. If a SQL Server Compact application is deployed using Click Once in Visual Studio 2010 then both the 32-bit and the 64-bit version of SQL Server Compact are installed on a 64-bit machine
* SQL Server Compact 3.5 SP2 supports Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2, and can sync data using merge replication with SQL Server 2008 R2 November CTP.
* A list of the bug fixes in SQL Server Compact 3.5 SP2 will be also released as a KB article similar to the KB article - http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=KB;%5bLN%5d;955965 within two weeks. Apart from the bug fixes, the hot fixes that were released for SQL Server 2005 Compact Edition or SQL Server Compact 3.5 SP1 have been rolled up in SQL Server Compact 3.5 SP2. The list of hot fixes is as given below:
o http://support.microsoft.com/kb/953259: Error message when you run an SQL statement that uses the Charindex function in a database that uses the Czech locale in SQL Server 2005 Compact Edition: "The function is not recognized by SQL Server Compact Edition"
o http://support.microsoft.com/kb/958478: Error message when you run a "LINQ to Entities" query that uses a string parameter or a binary parameter against a SQL Server Compact 3.5 database: "The ntext and image data types cannot be used in WHERE, HAVING, GROUP BY, ON, or IN clauses"
o http://support.microsoft.com/kb/959697: Error message when you try to open a database file from a CD in SQL Server Compact 3.5 with Service Pack 1: "Internal Error using read only database file"
o http://support.microsoft.com/kb/960142: An error message is logged, and the synchronization may take a long time to finish when you use an application to synchronize a merge replication that contains a SQL Server 2005 Compact Edition subscriber
o http://support.microsoft.com/kb/963060: An error message is logged, and the synchronization may take a long time to finish when you synchronize a merge replication that contains a SQL Server Compact 3.5 subscriber: "UpdateStatistics Start app=.exe"
o http://support.microsoft.com/kb/967963: Some rows are deleted when you repair a database by using the Repair method together with the RepairOption.RecoverCorruptedRows option in SQL Server 2005 Compact Edition and in SQL Server Compact 3.5
o http://support.microsoft.com/kb/968171: Error message when you try to create an encrypted database in SQL Server 2005 Compact Edition: "The operating system does not support encryption"
o http://support.microsoft.com/kb/968864: Error message when you run a query in SQL Server Compact 3.5: "The column name cannot be resolved to a table. Specify the table to which the column belongs"
o http://support.microsoft.com/kb/969858: Non-convergence occurs when you synchronize a SQL Server Compact 3.5 client database with the server by using Sync Services for ADO.NET in a Hub-And-Spoke configuration
o http://support.microsoft.com/kb/970269: Access violations occur when you run an application under heavy load conditions after you install the 64-bit version SQL Server Compact 3.5 Service Pack 1
o http://support.microsoft.com/kb/970414: Initial synchronization of a replication to SQL Server Compact 3.5 subscribers takes significant time to finish
o http://support.microsoft.com/kb/970915: Error message when you synchronize a merge replication with SQL Server 2005 Compact Edition subscribers: "A column ID occurred more than once in the specification. HRESULT 0x80040E3E (0)"
o http://support.microsoft.com/kb/971027: Error message when you upgrade a very large database to SQL Server Compact 3.5: "The database file is larger than the configured maximum database size. This setting takes effect on the first concurrent database connection only"
o http://support.microsoft.com/kb/971273: You do not receive error messages when you run a query in a managed application that returns columns of invalid values in SQL Server Compact 3.5
o http://support.microsoft.com/kb/971970: You cannot insert rows or upload changes into the SQL Server 2005 Compact Edition subscriber tables after you run the "sp_changemergearticle" stored procedure or you add a new merge publication article when another article has an IDENTITY column
o http://support.microsoft.com/kb/972002: Error message when you try to create an encrypted database in SQL Server Compact 3.5: "The operating system does not support encryption"
o http://support.microsoft.com/kb/972390: The application enters into an infinite loop when you run an application that uses Microsoft Synchronization Services for ADO.NET to synchronize a SQL Server Compact 3.5 database
o http://support.microsoft.com/kb/972776: When the application calls the SqlCeConnection.Close method or the SqlCeConnection.Dispose method in SQL Server Compact 3.5, the application may stop responding at the method call
o http://support.microsoft.com/kb/974068: Error message when an application inserts a value into a foreign key column in SQL Server Compact 3.5: "No key matching the described characteristics could be found within the current range"



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LG Joypop - mobile phone technology to support FMC and Wi-Fi networks

South Korean company LG Electronics announced a new mobile phone model, made in a folding form factor - LG Joypop (index model LG KH3900), the distinguishing feature is the availability of technology support for FMC (fixed-mobile convergence - the convergence of fixed and mobile networks). This technology allows subscribers to local operator KT to use both mobile and fixed networks, as well as VoIP calls over the Internet using Wi-Fi networks.

On the technical side, LG KH3900 is as follows:

* Dimensions: 108,5 h52h14, 6 mm
* Weight: 108 gr.
* Main Display: 2.8-inch, a resolution of 240x400 pixels
* External display: LED matrix
* Camera: 2 MP + 1,3 MP
* Support for Wi-Fi networks
* Memory: 190 MB, microSD memory card



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HTC Incredible Debut

HTC Incredible Debut at the 99% conference in NYC. Distributed by Tubemogul.



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Nokia N97 mini Gold edition - unboxing & overview

Nokia N97 mini Gold edition - unboxing & overview



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iPad in Car, Pt. 2, First Ever, SoundMan Car Audio

Part two of the iPad Tacoma install. in this video Doug Bernards hows you the completed dash panel for the removable iPad. The install is planned for the 3g iPad which is on pre-order, the amp to be used is the McIntosh mcc406m. Doug goes over the difficulties of integrating into the iPad's dock connector. Stay tunned for part 3.



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HTC HD mini vs HD2

James looks at the HD mini and compares it to his HTC HD2.



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Ari Krupnik: iPhone Controls R/C Model Airplanes

No jailbreaking. No WiFi. Stock receivers. I fly model airplanes and helicopters with my iPhone. I use an off-the-shelf 2.4GHz module and a custom iPhone app. The app is now in beta testing.

I use the phone's headphone jack to communicate with the Spektrum module. I make no modifications to the module or the receivers. This application does not use WiFi, Internet, external servers or microcontrollers.



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