Recent Articles

Mal and Dieter discuss Ballmer's strategy discussion surrounding Windows Mobile, some new devices, and your emails. Listen in!

• Download it directly with this link
• Subscribe via iTunes
• Subscribe directly to the Podcast feed with your favorite Podcatcher here
• Listen to it here with the flash player above.

In a sense, it was a calm after the Mobile World Congress storm this week, but we got together and recorded a massive hour-and-a-half-long Smartphone Experts Roundtable Podcast to discuss all the news from Windows Mobile 6.5 to the Ovi app Store to Apple's "absent presence" at the show.

If you didn't realize, SPE has four podcasts for your listening pleasure: the CrackBerry.com Podcast, the Phone Different Podcast (with the occasional iPhone LIVE! show), the PalmCast on both TreoCentral and PreCentral.net, and finally the WMExperts Podcast. The bold and daring may even want to try the (still in Beta, since it's based on the somewhat unreliable Yahoo Pipes feature) Smartphone Experts Combined Podcast Feed, which puts all four podcasts into a single feed -- also available in iTunes, if that's how you roll.

Now for the roundup of the week's news!

My, my, look at that piece of pie. We can imagine that there's a little more gloating going on than is the norm at TheiPhoneBlog.com, with the mobile browsing numbers for February released by Net Applications, by way of cnet. And that's cool. Safari's a great browser on the iPhone. No denying that.

Really of note is Android, which at 6.15 percent of total market share is as high as Symbian, and nearly as high as Windows Mobile. And that's with only being released in October 2008.

Obviously, this will be taken as a measure of how many people are using each platform. And it should be. But, ponder this: On which platform would you be more like to browser the Internet? And in what order would you rank mobile browsers? Safari likely would be first, and Android's browser isn't too shabby, either. It should be interesting to see what this chart will look like, say, in six months, when Mozilla starts to get its mobile browser into Windows Mobile users' hands.

Not that we were likely to see it with a widespread U.S. release, but it looks like the Asus P565 — which at one point was calling itself the world's fastest — may have been killed off by Asus' recent teaming with Garmin.

German site GPSandCo (translated) reports that the P565 has been pulled from the French and German markets, likely because of the new partnership.

Sounds like Garmin-Asus is really going to be pushing its Nuvifone line. And why not? We were plenty impressed with the M20 at Mobile World Congress.

Via Unwired View

HTC has released an update for the Touch Diamond for users with the following ROM versions: English (Pan Europe and UK), Italian, Dutch, German, Swedish, Spanish, Portuguese, Danish, Norwegian, and Finnish.

The fixes:

• When you launch the Camera while the system is working on other programs, the preview screen may become black.
• When playing a video, sometimes a portion of the video will be cut off a little bit.
• Fixes Audio playback problem with the speaker. Specific issues: sometimes the music will turn off and on after 10 minutes, or there is a buzzing sound or no sound at all.
• Fixes the problem of not being able to receive MMS when in standby mode.
• When launching music via the Music tab on TouchFLO 3D, the sound may intermittently turn off for a second and come back on.

HTC notes that users who applied this upgrade before Feb. 27 need to apply it again. As always, make sure your phone meets the upgrade requirements, and back up all of your contacts and other information before trying to upgrade anything.

Via Pocketnow

The black slab gods have bestowed on us another behemoth, this one born from the bowels of Asus. Behold, the P835. [via]

OK, we couldn't keep up the alluring alliteration any longer. But what we have here is a sporty little multimedia phone. It's got a 3.5-inch WVGA screen running Windows Mobile 6.1 with its own custom "Glide" interface on top, Opera Mobile for your browsing needs, a 5-megapixel camera, a trackball, and it reportedly can serve as an honest to goodness wireless access point. And, again, we'll point out the little Windows flag button, which could well point to a future 6.5 upgrade.

Full specs after the break, and more online at ASUS' Web site.

We've been following these perpetual WM6.5 leaks for a few weeks now. While the early ones were not really recommended for daily use and were more experimental, this latest build brings some stability and speed to the table.

For those wanting the deets, this is build #21169. The big deal here is that it has that spanky new version of Internet Explorer 6, including those big ol' buttons shown at MWC. It's also has more icons built in, Sliding Panels are faster and overall much more stable.

Feel like trying your luck with a custom ROM? Head on over to give it a shot. Just remember that this is advanced stuff, not at all officially and you really need to know what you're doing. Alternatively, take a peek at some of the screen shots after the break, which you can now imagine running on your very own Touch Pro or Diamond ... today even!

Thanks conflipper!

Here's some weekend fun for ya: an accelerometer-based lightsaber app for HTC's smartphones that have said feature, namely the Touch Diamond, Touch Pro / Fuze, and the Touch HD.  It's based on the unofficial API, sports background music and 'fighting sounds' and it's pretty much the most impressive thing you can install on any phone, ever, in the history of mankind.

Maybe, just maybe, it will help you forget about what Lucas has done to your precious childhood memories, if only for a moment. [via mobiltech addicts]

Congratulations, Canada. As we here in the U.S. continue to wait on a CDMA Palm Treo Pro, you get it on Bell. [via] Adding insult to injury, you can pick it up for a mere $99 after the standard three-year contract.

So those of us in the states will continue to wait for the Treo Pro on Sprint, and hope that those reported RAM issues will get cleared up soonest. Now, on the total speculation side: We can't help but notice that flag button staring us in the face. Anyone want to guess whether the Treo Pro will get the upgrade to Windows Mobile 6.5 later this year?

Sorry. We couldn't resist that. But indeed, the Federal Communications Commission has given the Samsung SGH-i637 the what-for, and it's likely we could see it on AT&T as the Propel Pro. When we first got a glimpse of it a month ago, we were expecting Windows Mobile 6.1 Standard.Now we know it'll sport a 1,000 mAh battery, WiFi and the usual Bluetooth 2.0 + EDR.

This is kind of a continuing trend in which manufacturers have a low-end feature phone and then re-release basically the same thing, only with Windows Mobile and a "Pro" name. Not that there's anything wrong with that.

Via Engadget Mobile and Unwired View