Webware

RIM's BlackBerry App World is slowly but surely gaining ground as a storefront for distributing BlackBerry applications. eBay is the latest major company to forge a presence in the storefront, in the form of an eBay app for BlackBerry auctioneers in the U.S. and Canada.

The official eBay for BlackBerry application, which was co-developed by eBay and RIM, includes features to search for, track, and buy an item from the smartphone. Unsurprisingly, the eBay app accepts PayPal payments--PayPal has not only been an eBay company since 2002, it is also currently the only payment system for purchasing BlackBerry apps through the App World.

(Credit: RIM/BlackBerry)

In addition to letting users search and buy, the eBay app will notify you of your bidding status, including when you've won or lost a bid. It can also schedule auction-related reminders in the BlackBerry calendar.

eBay's app isn't the first of its kind for the BlackBerry platform. Earlier this year, Bonfire Media released U.S. and international versions of its app, Pocket Auctions for eBay. Since Pocket Auctions doesn't include hooks into the phone's native calendar, and costs $10, we're guessing that most eBay fans will easily pick the free, official app over Bonfire Media's third-party offering.

We got a brief demo of the then-under-wraps eBay app at the BlackBerry Developer Conference earlier this month. We liked the ease of the PayPal integration, but we won't really know how well the app works until we've spent some time with it. Tune back for our first impressions.

Google coupons now available on the go.

(Credit: Google)

Google has been giving companies in its business listings ways to offer digital coupons to visitors since 2007. It wasn't until this week, though, that Google could bring the same coupons to mobile users.

It works like this: Businesses add a coupon to their listing in Google's Local Business Center. When you search a Google local listing from your Internet-enabled phone, any available coupons show up. As with other mobile coupon sites and applications, you'll simply present your phone face at the check-out stand. The checker will enter in the coupon bar code and you'll get your discount.

Google's mobile expansion of its digital coupons brings the search and advertising giant in direct competition with coupon providers like Coupons.com, Coupon Sherpa, Cellfire, and Yowza. With the exception of Yowza, which is a mobile-only application for the iPhone and iPod Touch, each service has a mobile coupons site and at least an iPhone app. Yelp has also jumped into the mobile deal business by letting businesses place special offers to Yelp users on Yelp.com and in its iPhone app.

Users' biggest complaints with mobile coupons tend to boil down to one thing: variety. While national chains are easier (and generally more effective) for a coupon service to sign, millions of other shoppers may prefer discounts for local or specialized brands, restaurants, and stores. Any business model that can capitalize on a self-service coupon sign-up for local and national businesses should have the upper hand.

So long as mobile shoppers navigate to Google's site from their cell phone browsers, Google's coupon business should grow. After all, Google isn't creating a brand-new business for digital deal distribution, but extending one that's already in place.

Another iPhone worm has been spotted in the wild.

Unlike the previous exploitation, which merely changed a jailbroken iPhone's wallpaper to a picture of Rick Astley of "Rickrolling" fame, this new threat allows hackers to steal sensitive information.

According to security firm Sophos, which wrote about the exploitation after a Dutch ISP spotted it late last week, the worm attacks jailbroken iPhone and iPod Touch devices only.

The worm "uses command-and-control, like a traditional PC botnet," Sophos wrote in a blog post on Saturday to warn users about the exploit. "It configures two startup scripts, one to execute the worm on boot-up, and the other to create a connection to a Lithuanian server to upload stolen data and cede control to the bot master."

Jailbreaking, which has been around for about two years, is a hack that enables iPhone and iPod Touch users to download applications unavailable through Apple's App Store.

Sophos wrote that the worm attacks users on several ISPs, including UPC in the Netherlands, Optus in Australia, and T-Mobile in several countries worldwide. Worse, the worm spreads faster on a Wi-Fi connection than a 3G connection. Users with affected devices might notice extremely short battery life while on Wi-Fi. According to Sophos, that's mainly due to the worm engaging in "so much network activity."

When a device is infected, it's assigned a unique number so that the attackers can easily pinpoint a single device. It also looks for authentication systems that use SMS, better known as mTANs. mTANs are frequently used by banks that send an SMS message with a password to mobile phones, allowing people to log in to their online accounts, Sophos wrote.

In essence, this threat is serious.

Sophos recommends that people with infected iPhones and iPod Touch devices restore them back to Apple's most recent firmware update. For now, there is no other way to fix the problem.

The Twitter service with the cutesy raccoon mascot is making a new home on BlackBerry and Google Android phones. The free Seesmic, like its proliferate rivals, lets you read, manage, and compose Twitter messages much more flexibly than you can do from Twitter's Web site. We crash-tested both mobile versions as soon as we heard the news.

Seesmic on Android
Seesmic 1.0 for Android is available from the Android Market app, which is located on the smartphone. It takes up just over 1MB. The interface spreads four tabs along the top in both landscape and portrait mode, one each for the timeline, replies, direct messages, and your profile. There's also a ribbon on the screen that you can tap to refresh the feed. Click to open a tweet and you can save it as a favorite, retweet, or reply as a public "@" message or as a private posting. From the menu button, you can refresh, compose, or tinker with the settings.

Although Seesmic's Android interface is much more stripped down than its desktop AIR app for Windows and Mac, the app manages to remain flexible by giving you a choice over the kinds of notifications you'd like to receive, and over the partner services you'd prefer to use to send a photo, video, or shorten a URL.

Sure, it's blurry (blaming the BlackBerry camera), but squint hard enough and you'll see that Seesmic associated a picture with my account that's not actually my face.

(Credit: Jessica Dolcourt/CNET)

The biggest flaws we've noticed so far? ... Read more

What frequent drivers need is a way to search for information while cruising without taking your eyes off the road. That's what Robert Acker, president and CEO of Aha Mobile, thought when creating his yet-to-be-released application for iPhone and Android.

Before they put foot to pedal, drivers will set up a dashboard of buttons, each representing an audio channel for everything from the traffic report for the road you're on, to a search for nearby bathrooms and cafes, music channel, and your Facebook news feed. As we saw in Acker's demo at the Under The Radar start-up event in Mountain View, CA, pressing a button triggers a robotic voice that reads out the information you've selected.

The demo wasn't long enough to gauge the app's efficacy, but it's clear that application-makers like Aha Mobile are looking for ways to bring search capabilities found in a navigator to those without.

Aha Mobile will partner with providers like Yelp to match its content to your location. Expect to see an iPhone app in the next month or two, followed by one for Android. Aha Mobile is also working with carmakers to explore a radio implementation or other in-dash solution.

Trillian IM is finally available to iPhone users.

(Credit: Trillian)

It took a few months, but finally, Trillian IM is available to iPhone and iPod Touch users through Apple's App Store. The application costs $4.99.

Cerulean Studios, the company that created Trillian, said that Trillian for iPhone sports several features users will already find on the company's desktop software. The app displays contacts, grouped and sorted by their respective categories. Users can also view multiple chat windows in a tabbed display. Thanks to updates Apple has made to the iPhone and iPod Touch, Trillian for iPhone also supports copy and paste. As with Trillian for the desktop, users can set their status, choose an avatar, and set up different status messages.

Because the app is always connected to Cerulean Studios' Astra server, users can synchronize content across multiple IM clients. In other words, any changes made on the iPhone version of the app will immediately be reflected on the company's Windows client and the user's Astra profile. Any contacts users add will also be synchronized with their other clients.

According to Cerulean Studios, all chats are maintained on the server, so they are kept in case of a lost connection. The app will also alert users when they receive an instant message, regardless of whether Trillian for iPhone is open or not. When an IM is received, users will see a dialog box, hear the Trillian IM-notification sound, and be able to start Trillian and reply to the person.

Those interested in using Trillian for iPhone will first need a Trillian Astra account. Luckily, the iPhone app allows users to sign up for Astra from within the app.

The simple concept of having virtual-good payments in games sent directly to your cell phone bill has gotten a lot of buzz--and stirred up a lot of rivalry. One of the start-ups looking to pull this off, Boku, announced Monday that it has signed on a dozen new gaming partners, both a few based on the Facebook platform and some others that are either Web-based or desktop downloads.

The partner companies are Waves, Cie Studios, Cyberstep, GameDuell, IGG, King.com, NHN USA, Ntreev, Outspark, PerfectWorld, Snap Interactive, and Zoosk. Most of them aren't household names: they're game manufacturers, not the games themselves, and some of them are most prominent outside the U.S.

There are a handful of companies trying to grab market share in this space, but the two who have been most vocal about making inroads have been Boku and rival Zong, which last month announced that it would allow members to sync credit cards with their phone numbers, allowing for larger payments and putting the company closer to direct competition with the likes of PayPal.

Boku says it's sticking to the mobile-number-only strategy, choosing instead to ink more deals and emphasize its global reach: with the current round of partnerships, the company says it will have 200 million registered users added to its ranks (no word on how active they all are, or how much redundancy there is across games).

Additionally, Boku has made some infrastructure upgrades that it says will improve the user experience, including the ability to detect whether a phone number that has been entered is landline or mobile--and if mobile, what carrier it's coming from.

Is Google really thinking about making a substantial change to its business model by releasing the fabled Gphone?

Would Google really consider derailing Droid momentum with its own phone?

(Credit: Josh Miller/CNET)

TechCrunch sparked the latest round of Gphone rumors Wednesday, reporting that its sources indicate Google is working on releasing a Google-branded Android phone sometime in early 2010 that will be sold directly to consumers at retail, presumably bypassing wireless carriers. Such a phone is supposedly being built by a manufacturing partner with the intent that Google's brand will dominate the phone; TechCrunch compares the strategy to what Microsoft did with Toshiba and the Zune music player.

Well before Google unveiled its Android mobile operating system project two years ago, and almost ever since, persistent rumors have circulated that Google's mobile phone ambitions go beyond software development. Just as consistently, Google executives have downplayed such rumors with statements that the company is most interested in seeding Android far and wide across multiple carriers and hardware manufacturers, rather than following Apple's strategy of designing and building the entire product itself.

Just a few weeks ago, Google's Andy Rubin, vice president of engineering for Android and the head of the project, told CNET that Google had no interest in "competing with its customers" by releasing a Google-developed phone, echoing comments he made earlier in the year that "I'd much rather be the guy that does a platform that's capable of running on multiple companies' phones than just focusing on a single product."

Now, there was some wiggle room in Rubin's statements. Most smartphone hardware brands--even Apple--don't actually build their own phones, they contract with companies in China or Taiwan that assemble the parts. Therefore, Google's statement that "we're not making hardware" doesn't preclude the company from designing hardware.

On Wednesday, Google refused to comment on what it termed "market rumor or speculation." But why would Google build its own phone? What would it have to gain to offset what it could potentially lose?

Google just signed a multiyear collaboration deal with Verizon Wireless, pledging to help develop a family of Android-based products running on Verizon's network. Any attempt on Google's part to bypass Verizon and sell its own branded handset would likely raise a few eyebrows in New Jersey, no matter how close of friends Google CEO Eric Schmidt and Verizon Wireless CEO Lowell McAdam have supposedly become.

So maybe Google wants to completely bypass carrier networks and release the ultimate IP phone, with Google Voice and the technologies it just acquired from Gizmo5. Such a phone would be free of the two-year contracts imposed by the wireless industry, but would it really be compelling without some kind of wide-area networking technology?

Google's Andy Rubin, head of Android development

(Credit: Google)

In the same conversation in which he denied Google was working on its own hardware, Rubin implied that Google doesn't think there's much of a future for WiMax, which Intel and others have long billed as a way around the wireless carriers. The company sat out a recent funding round for WiMax start-up Clearwire after investing around $500 million in the company in 2008, and Rubin said it was planning future Android development around the LTE standard, which is the path that AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon plan to take to 4G networks. LTE carriers will likely insist on the now-familiar two-year contract to offset the costs of building out that network, unless federal regulators tell them they can't.

But assuming Google really is planning on releasing a completely Google-branded phone at retail, such a plan could derail the momentum enjoyed by Google and its Android partners this year.

The Microsoft/Zune strategy alluded to by TechCrunch was a disaster for Microsoft's PlaysForSure hardware partners, who had been working with the company on MP3 players that hooked into Microsoft's media software. It effectively cut them out of that market, and almost certainly created distrust and outright resentment that could come back to hurt Microsoft one day.

Any Google-branded phone would immediately compete with phones that Google partners like Verizon and Motorola are placing huge bets around, namely the Droid. What incentive would those companies have to work with Google in the future should it throw a huge wrench into their product development strategy?

And even putting all that aside, smartphones in the U.S. are only attractive to consumers because no one actually pays what a smartphone is worth. Heavy carrier subsidies knock the price of the average smartphone from around $500 or $600 to around $200, because time and time again most people have shown that even if they will save money in the long run by avoiding a two-year contract, they get sticker shock at the sight of a $599 phone. Just ask Apple: the iPhone would not be the iPhone if it was still selling for $599.

If Google were to release its own phone at retail, would it have to subsidize it itself to get the price down to about $200? Would the federal government look favorably on such a plan, knowing that virtually no other company could afford to sell such a smartphone at a loss?

TechCrunch later reported that Google could be working on a "data-only" device that would ostensibly use AT&T's network for data services, with calls being placed using VoIP technology. That's a bit puzzling as well, since that would allow Google to annoy new best friend Verizon and AT&T to annoy longtime steady Apple, so at this point, it's hard to know exactly what's going on here.

Few businesspeople directly answer questions about major strategy shifts they might be planning, for the obvious reason that surprise is a competitive advantage. But it's hard to imagine why Google would risk stunting Android momentum just as the software is rounding into the best chance for hardware manufacturers and wireless carriers to compete with Apple and AT&T.

That is, unless somebody at Google has decided that they are the ones with the best chance of competing with Apple.

Visual thumbnails for tabs are all new in Opera Mobie 10 beta.

(Credit: Opera Software)

Opera impressed us a few months ago with its beta release of a restyled Mini browser for Java phones. Early in November, they did it again with a standalone mobile browser for Symbian Series 60 handsets that adheres to Opera Mini 5 beta's glossy master design. And on Wednesday, Opera repeats what it hopes to be mobile magic with Opera Mobile 10 beta for Windows phones.

The free Opera Mobile 10 beta starts off with a customizable Speed Dial screen, composed of nine preview thumbnails that whisk you off to a favorite site. Browser tabs receive a new treatment that echoes those thumbnail previews, and other features like the Password Manager get a few behind-the-scenes adjustments.

As with the recent betas for Java and Symbian phones, Opera Mobile 10 beta lacks some features for Windows phones that Opera expects to restore by the time it approves the app for general consumption. Opera Link, its bookmark- and favorite-syncing service, is among the laggers.

Our First Look video of Opera Mobile 10 beta (below) sees the browser tested on a Symbian phone, but it will look and work almost identically on Windows phones. Press "play" to get a good idea of what's in store, including those known bugs.

Note: Since our video, Opera has released an update for Symbian phones that can now handle font for several Asian languages.

Windows Mobile owners can download the mobile browser beta free by navigating to m.opera.com/mobile/ from the phone or www.opera.com/mobile from the desktop. Opera Mobile 10 beta will replace the Opera Mobile 9.7 beta that has previously been available for Windows Mobile phones.

Windows users: how do you like Opera's reworking of the browser? Let us know in the comments.