Crave

Live stats overlay a game streamed to the NBA League Pass mobile app.

(Credit: NBA)

Not about to be outdone by baseball, pro basketball is getting in on live streaming to mobile phones.

The National Basketball Association will announce its first set of applications that let fans watch games live on a mobile device Thursday. NBA League Pass Mobile will be available for download for the iPhone, iPod Touch, and Android phones starting Friday, the third day of the league's regular season. BlackBerry users will have to wait a bit longer, the league saying that application will arrive "by the end of the year."

The NBA follows Major League Baseball, which introduced its iPhone- and iPod Touch-compatible live streaming application in July, and a beta version of an Android app Wednesday.

The NBA's application will cost $39.99 and let users watch up to 40 live games per week via their smartphone, though local TV blackout rules will still apply. The app also has an option to watch some games on demand for up to two days later and comes with game alerts and live stats.

Currently there is not added benefit if customers are already subcribers to the NBA's League Pass TV package. But bundling the two is something the league is looking at for the future, said Bryan Perez, senior vice president and general manager of NBA Digital.

Besides the live streaming app, the NBA already has its Game Time and Game Time Lite apps on Apple's App Store, the Android Market, and BlackBerry App World. The Lite version is free and comes with scores, stats, standings, and team schedules. The $9.99 Game Time includes some on-demand video, game highlights, live game alerts, stats, and access to an NBA Twitter feed.

Perez said the league has made an aggressive push into mobile this year, mostly because it knows who its fans are.

"We have one of the younger demographics of the major sports leagues," he said. "As we look to the future of our fan base, they're consuming content in a much different way, and in many ways the mobile phone is the connection to the world for the youth market. If we want to cultivate fans and be innovative, we need to follow our fans where they're going."

More screenshots after the jump.... Read More

(Credit: Handmark)

The countdown is well under way for Microsoft's Windows Mobile app store, called Windows Marketplace for Mobile, which is slated to arrive in early fall alongside the Windows Mobile 6.5 operating system. Yet on Tuesday, mobile media company Handmark outmaneuvered Microsoft, releasing a rival application for Windows Mobile phones: HandMarket Apps for Windows Mobile.

Handmark's HandMarket app store is compatible with phones running Windows Mobile 6.0 and up. At launch there are 600 applications and games each, plus about 50,000 ringtones and wallpaper items. Prices range from $0 to about $60.

HandMarket fits what can now be recognized as the app store paradigm. It has a quick search function, browsable categories, and users' star ratings and reviews. Like the BlackBerry App World, HandMarket Apps for Windows Mobile includes a screen summarizing past downloads at a glance. If you uninstall an app for space considerations, you'll be able to reinstall through this "locker."

Tracking app store downloads goes hand-in-hand with billing. HandMarket can bill you through your cell phone carrier (your monthly bill reflects your download purchases,) or you can tack purchases onto a credit card that you associate with your account.

In addition, the app store will alert you when an app update is available. HandMarket also lets you share app details with others.

Handmark's HandMarket may well turn out to be a good interim app store for those who want to jump on board the store's centralized distribution and billing model without waiting for Microsoft. The fact that it's also available now for earlier Windows Mobile platforms means it will remain an app store option for those who don't immediately jump aboard Windows Mobile 6.5. It's likely, though, that today's HandMarket users could abandon the app tomorrow when and if they do trade up to a Windows Mobile phone featuring Microsoft's built-in app store and billing system.

To reward early adopters, Handmark is opening its app store with an 80-percent-off sale on some Windows Mobile games, which can be found in the "Specials" screen.

Handmark's free HandMarket Apps for Windows Mobile is currently only available in North America for a variety of Windows Mobile phones, but the company says that it does plan to expand support internationally.

(Credit: Crave UK)

During the day, we're mild-mannered tech bloggers, wearing glasses and looking moody in our vast, yet innocuous, Crave penthouse. But at night, we fight crime. We take on the persona of a creature of the night--black, terrible, shadowy. We become the Ghost Pigeon.

To protect our loved ones, we have to keep our secret identity super-duper seekrit. That means hiding our calls and texts to the police commissioner, especially when we send him MMS messages with videos of us collaring a miscreant.

Luckily, just for people like us there's Sonaworks' Ghost Pigeon software, a secret-phone-within-a-phone that will hide your texts, MMS messages, and calls. It's available now in the U.K. and a bunch of other countries, including Estonia, Bulgaria, Norway, Nigeria, and Cyprus, but apparently it hasn't made its way to the U.S. yet.

Ghost Pigeon is invisible on the phone--there's no icon in the menu. Instead, you launch the application by typing in a password. Here at Crave UK, we installed Ghost Pigeon on our 8GB Nokia N95, and although it's visible in the list of installed apps, its name is well disguised.

We could hide contacts, so that we only saw them from within Ghost Pigeon, not in our normal list of contacts. The phone rang normally for incoming calls from hidden --or "pigeonated"--contacts, but they were only stored in Ghost Pigeon's call logs and weren't visible in the normal call log.

Similarly, our phone alerted us to incoming texts from a hidden contact, but the texts didn't show up in our normal in-box, only in the Ghost Pigeon in-box.

Article updated 6/5/09 at 8:05am PSTwith more information about countries of availability.

(Credit: Google)

Nokia S60 users can finally bypass the browser and start Google searches from the same application that most other smartphone users have been using for months. The free Google Mobile App has arrived on Nokia S60 phones.

As with CNET Editors' Choice winner Google Mobile App on BlackBerry, this Symbian build places a search bar at its heart. The search bar supports search suggestions, history, and edits to the history, all of which saves you typing on subsequent searches for similar topics. Submitted searches return results in the default browser.

The search bar is flanked on the top by icons for Gmail, Google Maps for Mobile, YouTube, and Picasa Web albums. Clicking either of the first three will launch each separate native app if you've got it installed, or will install it for the first time if you don't have it. A 'more" button fast tracks you to online versions of Goog 411, Google Reader, Google SMS, and Orkut.

The final feature in this approachable and endlessly useful app is the My Location feature that uses the phone's GPS or cell tower triangulation to guess your general neighborhood. With it activated, Google can automatically localize your searches, which takes typing your city or zip code off your hands.

You can launch Google Mobile App from Nokia's Today screen by pressing the phone's "back" key. Users can opt out by disabling the quick launch hot key in the app's Setting menu.

Get Google Mobile App for Nokia S60 by visiting m.google.com from your mobile browser, or mobile.google.com from a desktop. It is available for handsets used in Canada, China, Denmark, France, Germany, India, Italy, Netherlands, Poland, Russian Federation, Spain, Turkey, United Kingdom, United States, Finland, Hong Kong, Macao, Norway, Portugal, Taiwan, and Sweden.

If you missed last week's news about Google's feature-honing update for its native BlackBerry app, here's your chance to see it in action.

As part of a few well-appointed changes, the new Google Mobile App for BlackBerry does away with its predecessor's penchant for hogging space on the home screen and has rearranged its resources to pack a greater wallop with search. Tune into the video to see what we mean.

The new BlackBerry app replaces the ungainly Google Mobile Updater and smartens up search.

(Credit: Google)

Current users of Google's Mobile App for BlackBerry will receive an unexpected benefit when upgrading to the latest update to the mobile app: a cleaner home screen.

Announced on Wednesday, the new Google Mobile App for BlackBerry replaces the Mobile Updater package before it, a hub for downloading and updating Google's native BlackBerry apps for news, search, e-mail, and photos that permanently lived on the home screen, along with the separate applications it downloaded and quietly managed.

The new application does away with the extraneous hub by folding its capability to download and update Gmail, Picasa, and so on into a new search app. The result is an application anchored by a search bar that marches a string of icons along the top for downloading or launching BlackBerry-specific apps or mobile Web sites for the panoply of Google apps.

The application's sharper interface and shrunken home-screen footprint are welcome, as is the new and easy way to scroll through search history and repeat it with a click, or to edit a misspelled search term without having to retype it. Google's new mobile app also offers to autocomplete your search queries. It is disappointing, however, that most of the Google apps remain Web-based and have not merited a native application of their own. Gmail, Maps, and Sync, which syncs Google Calendar to the BlackBerry, are each represented by a native download, but clicking Reader, News, and Picasa photos from the new interface launches the appropriate page in the BlackBerry browser.

While the Web-based method does indeed whittle down home-screen clutter and save Google engineers a heap of maintenance work on a software download for each Web app, it also puts users at the disadvantage of getting their news in BlackBerry's bare-bones browser with its questionable readability. I'd personally rather spare my eyes than a pocketful of memory, and am therefore less likely to use the quick access icons. Still, as the new app's more compact interface and smarter search and history push Google's BlackBerry app in the right direction, I'd recommend making the switch. Download Google Mobile App for BlackBerry by pointing your phone's browser to http://m.google.com.

In March, Apple CEO Steve Jobs announced an upcoming system for downloading third-party applications for the iPhone. At the Worldwide Developers Conference on Tuesday, he brought a parade of developers onstage to show off exactly what those new apps can do.

The apps range from monkey slinging to medical imaging and should be available sometime in early July (along with the iPhone 2.0 software required to run it), according to Apple representatives. Follow the jump to check out demos of each of the applications announced during the keynote speech. We'll update this post with more video demos as they come.

Mobile app publishers are obsessed with creating the fast, flawless mechanism to deliver content to mobile phones. That's great news for users, whose choices for accessing content through apps, browsers, or feed readers grow daily. Viigo for BlackBerry and Windows Mobile 5 and 6 is a new contender. See the screenshot-by-screenshot blow in this Viigo slide show.

Incidentally, I've used Ilium Screen Capture (review) to nab my images. It's a great little program for Windows Mobile.

Take your docs with you on the go. Just keep in mind that you can't make any changes.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Google unveiled Google Docs mobile this morning. It's a smaller, lightweight version of Google Docs and Spreadsheets, which lets you browse any stored documents, spreadsheets, or presentations on your mobile phone.

Like the mobile version of their calendaring service, Google has spent a considerable amount of time optimizing Docs for the iPhone--making items larger, and more finger friendly. iPhone users are also the only group who gets mobile access to the freshly launched presentations service, which shows up in thumbnail form with simplistic back-and-forth controls. Both services share a similar lack of editing options, as you can't go in and make changes to an item that's already been created. I'll give a small nod to Google Calendar mobile for at least letting you add an item with the "quick add" feature.

Google says it's working on an edit function, however provided no time frame on when we'll be seeing that. In comparison to other efforts--most notably by EditGrid and Zoho, developers are proving you can in fact add extensive editing functionality to mobile apps while keeping some form of user-friendly UI and speed using over-the-air data. Many of these mobile apps have been iPhone-centric, despite the larger portion of mobile users on other platforms. It will be interesting to see where Google puts their focus, especially with the rumored Gphone (possibly) right around the corner.

Speaking of which, we got to take a peek at Nokia's new mobile offerings this morning. The company claims its new N810 Wi-Fi enabled tablet is "great" for browsing and making edits to Google Docs and Spreadsheets. With the Palm Foleo's demise, we're looking forward to getting our hands on this thing too.