Microsoft's Silverlight browser plug-in will be bringing videos and other rich media to Nokia smartphones later this year.
The two companies on Tuesday at Microsoft's Mix '08 conference are scheduled to announce that Microsoft will write a version of Silverlight for Nokia's Series 60 (S60) smartphone software that runs on Symbian OS. The software, which will be available later this year, will also run on Series 40 devices and Nokia Internet tablets.
Silverlight videos are coming to Nokia's N96 smartphone.
(Credit: Nokia)For people with compatible devices, it means they will be able to see content, notably video, written for Silverlight, which Microsoft is pushing as an alternative to Adobe's Flash Player. Microsoft has been signing on content partners to use Silverlight for media streaming, including MLB.com and online Olympic games broadcasting with NBC.
For Microsoft, the deal with Nokia is a step in its pledge to make Silverlight "ubiquitous," that is, capable of running on multiple operating systems.
The software giant is trying to lure Web developers toward Silverlight--and away from Flash--to build rich Internet applications or media-oriented Web sites.
The strategy, which Microsoft detailed at last year's Mix conference, hinges on creating tools that let traditional Microsoft developers write Silverlight Web applications with familiar products like Visual Studio and ASP.Net.
Silverlight now runs on Windows and Mac OS, and it has a deal with Novell to build a distribution on Linux.
A version of Silverlight for Windows Mobile will be available later this year, said John Case, a general manager in Microsoft's developer division. "The whole Silverlight strategy is to provide one programming model and ubiquity," he said.
Microsoft chose to work with Nokia because it has the largest market share of mobile phones, but it will sign on with other handset makers to create ports of Silverlight, Case said.
All the main features of Silverlight, including video and interactive Web application development, will be included in all mobile versions.
But there will be some device-specific restraints, which means Microsoft will create editions of Silverlight for different mobile platforms, he said.
(Credit:
MobiTV)
Mobile users who haven't made the jump to watching videos on their cell phones and smartphones may see a juicy, dangling carrot on the horizon. A paper submitted by John Barrett of Parks Associates and David Wertheimer of USC's Entertainment Technology Center (PDF), summarizes that mobile phone users will watch more videos on their phones if they can get them for free. Well, duh. Who doesn't want free?
The study found that only a fraction of users with video-capable phones take advantage of them to watch movies and TV. Many of the reasons boil down to price, low film quality, and video presentation. As one user summed it up, "I don't feel that spending $13 dollars on the iTunes music store in order to get a DVD that I could buy for $5 or $10 somewhere else is reasonable since it's in lower quality." Said another, "I don't want to watch a two-hour movie on a two-inch screen." Roger that.
The authors' solution? Studios need to think like Apple, they say, and use free video content as a lure to premium services that users will be willing to finance as playback technologies mature. Apple's CEO Steve Jobs owes much of his company's recent success to playing Hollywood. Now it could be Hollywood's turn to profit from Apple's model, and build goodwill along the way.
There are awkward times to answer an incoming call, and equally awkward ways to silence it. I can think of a few scenarios where fumbling to locate the ringer or off button is as disruptive and stressful as the constant ringing.
Taking advantage of accelerometer technology, the very same used to reorient phone and camera displays horizontally or vertically, is FlipSilent. With FlipSilent, quieting a call is simple as flipping the phone from its back to its face.
FlipSilent currently works with Symbian S60 phones outfitted with motion-sensing accelerometers. Users willing to make a donation with PayPal can try out the latest beta version, which also hushes a phone alarm when you need to snooze just 5 minutes longer.
I'm curious if the phone has to be flat for FlipSilent to do its duty, or if any 180 degree rotation would silence the call; for instance, if the phone is sitting upright in my purse, will a swivel suffice? While I attempt to get my hands on a compatible phone, try it out and let us know what you think!
[Via The Boy Genius Report]
Cell phones weren't the only items giving off heat on the CTIA conference showroom floor this week. There was also the sizzling of a virtual mobile world, a preview of Guitar Hero Mobile, and really neat motion-sensor games.
Take a look at what was new and interesting in the latest video.
Today bluepulse, a free mobile social network, announced a platform shift that will give smartphone users access to the free service for the first time. Bluepulse is now Webware.
The bluepulse in-box stores incoming and outgoing messages, and status updates.
(Credit: CNET Networks)Until now, the strictly-mobile social network installed on JAD and JAR downloads to Java and Symbian cell phones, but wouldn't run on smartphones like Pocket PCs or Palm Treos. Migrating to a wholly Web-based app opens the door for smartphone users to take advantage of the service's instant messaging and social discovery mash-up.
In addition to making the switch to Web, bluepulse also adds an all-in-one message in-box and out-box that stores status updates, text messages, and friend requests in a single location, much like a Facebook feed. Another feature, group friending, applies the transitive property to help users connect to their friends' friends, thus extending their network.
Adding friends can now also be accomplished en masse through invitations to Facebook, AIM, Hotmail, Yahoo Messenger, Gmail, MSN, and MySpace contacts.
Users can join bluepulse by pointing their mobile browsers to http://www.bluepulse.com.
The iPhone isn't a true mobile computer yet, but it's on the right track, according to a Mozilla executive.
Will there be two separate Firefox browsers for smartphones and PCs or one to rule them all?
(Credit: Mozilla)"Getting a no-compromise web experience on devices requires significant memory (>=64MB) as well as significant CPU horsepower. High end devices today are just approaching these requirements and will be commonplace soon," wrote Mike Schroepfer, vice president of engineering at Mozilla, in a blog post Tuesday, implying that while the iPhone and its current competitors don't quite have what it takes under the hood to be full-fledged mobile computers, we're not all that far away.
It seems to me like there's a bit of a chicken-and-egg thing going on here. Are smartphones slower than people would like because the hardware is too rudimentary, or because truly useful software is too bloated for the limited memory and power requirements of smartphones? I don't think too many people bought an iPhone expecting it would be just as zippy as their PC, but just how much slower is it than a PC?
Schroepfer thinks, based on third-party tests, that the iPhone is about 10 to 100 times slower than a MacBook Pro on scripting benchmarks and about 3 to 5 times slower than a ThinkPad T40 laptop when operating on the same Wi-Fi network. "But rapid improvements in mobile processors will close this gap within a few years," he wrote.
He estimates that the iPhone is using about 128MB of system RAM, and a processor (known to be an ARM-based chip from Samsung) running at between 400MHz and 600MHz. Apple's iPhone application development policy means we're not going to see Firefox on the iPhone anytime soon, but that's information that Mozilla is using to work on future mobile browsers for devices like the iPhone that won't be able to run unmodified PC software for several years.
As Schroepfer notes, the nice thing about the chip industry is that we can be reasonably sure that there will be more performance to work with every couple of years. Both ARM and Intel have set aggressive performance and power consumption goals for chips due out over the next several years.
But Schoepfer seems to be operating under the assumption that it's the hardware that is holding back a true Internet experience on a smartphone. "Up until very recently, device limitations required writing new mobile browsers from the ground up," he wrote. I wonder if that was such a bad thing; I'm sure to save time and effort developers would rather port as much of their PC code as is feasible over to smartphones, but is it better to develop mobile software that's designed specifically for mobile devices or to investigate ways to move the multitude of software that's already out there for PCs to a new category of mobile devices?
Mozilla wants to work both sides of the fence, not wanting to throw away all the work they've done on PC development when mobile processors are bound to get more capable, but recognizing that mobile-computing requirements are different. "There is far from a dominant player in this marketplace and even the best mobile browsers today have compromises in user experience, performance, and compatibility. There is still *plenty* of room for innovation," Schroepfer wrote.
I'm no software developer, and I'd welcome feedback about this from those who are examining this problem. It seems pretty clear to me that true mobile computing is going to require new thinking about software development in addition to faster hardware, the same way multicore processors have shaken up the PC software development industry. And those concepts are even going to merge at some point: by 2010 ARM's partners will have multicore mobile processors on the market.
Does that mean personal-computing software development is headed down two different development paths or that smartphone developers and PC developers are converging at some point down the road? Let me know what you think.
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