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(Credit: Screenshot by Bonnie Cha/CNET)

Delivering on its promise, Google released a new mobile application on Wednesday that brings its Voice Search feature to BlackBerrys, much like it did for the iPhone and Android-based T-Mobile G1.

The Google Mobile App is available now as a free download and allows you to conduct searches with the sound of your voice. To do so, you simply hold down the Talk button on your BlackBerry and then speak your search term into the phone. Brits, you'll also be happy to hear that the app now supports British English accents.

Perhaps even more powerful, the app also includes support for Google's My Locations feature, which brings up search results based on your location as determined by your BlackBerry's GPS, Wi-Fi, and cellular triangulation.

Other enhancements include shortcuts to several Google services, such as Gmail, Maps, News, and Reader. To get Google Mobile App on your BlackBerry, you can point your phone's browser to http://m.google.com or enter your mobile number here. Be aware that the app requires you have to have BlackBerry OS 4.1 or higher and BlackBerry OS 4.2 or higher for Voice Search.

(Sources: Google Mobile Blog, Information Week)

Send a file to a buddy in Skype 3.0 beta.

(Credit: CNET)

Skype's latest mobile beta for Windows Mobile phones graduated to version 3.0 on Tuesday. Skype 3.0 beta for Windows Mobile integrates two big features from the desktop version--file transferring and SMS. Both are welcome additions that bring the mobile VoIP application much closer in line with the newly updated desktop version, Skype 4.0 for Windows.

The SMS feature has been seamlessly added as a shortcut icon on the contact list page (it's the black circle encasing a tiny cell phone), but you can also initiate a text message by selecting "Send SMS" from the Menu options--the cost will come out of your Skype Credit. The file transfer feature is a bit more buried. To use it, select "Contact Options" from the Menu choices, and then "Send File." This will incur a data charge, so it's best to have a data plan in place before going wild with transfers.

As soon as you ship your image, song, or document out to your buddy, a new tab opens in Skype for Windows Mobile 3.0 beta that keeps track of the transfer and lets you know when your contact has accepted the download. File transfers work both ways, of course, so you'll be able to accept files sent through Skype while you're on the go--crazy photos and important business documents included. File transfer worked without a hitch over our 3G network, as did SMS. Wi-Fi will make them even faster.

Update your status message and buy Skype credit in Skype 3.0 beta.

(Credit: CNET)

After SMS and file transferring, the next biggest change is a technical one that most people shouldn't notice--the fact that you won't have to decide between downloading the version for Windows Smartphones or for Pocket PCs. A single one-size-fits-all download makes installation blissfully brainless. In addition, the beta has undergone a few understated, but useful changes to its layout, like being able to update your status, add hyperlinks to chat messages you may have missed, and the option to buy more Skype Credit.

Skype 3.0 beta for Windows Mobile 5.x and 6.x phones is available to try for free. Download it to your PC here or get the CAB file over the air. We're expecting to see the full release available in the next few months, but some of Skype's timeline may depend on the kind of user feedback they get. For our two cents, the additional features have been integrated well, and we hope to see more mobile-specific features in the future, like the capability to snap a picture from within Skype and transfer or SMS it to a pal.

(Credit: Skype)

BARCELONA--Skype is racking up deals with mobile handset makers here at GSMA Mobile World Congress 2009.

On Tuesday, the company, which is owned by eBay, announced a partnership with Nokia, the largest cell phone maker in the world, to put the Skype Internet calling software onto its phones. Nokia will initially offer Skype on its high-end smartphones, the N-series. The N97, Nokia's flagship device that goes on sale in June, will be the first to have Skype embedded. The Skype feature will start shipping on the device in the third quarter of 2009.

Skype will be integrated into the N97 address book, enabling users to see when Skype contacts are online. It will also let people use Skype's instant-messaging client. Most importantly, N97 users will be able to make free and low-cost phone calls over the Internet whether they are on a 3G cellular network or a Wi-Fi network. The Skype-to-Skype voice calls are free. And the SkypeOut service, which allows calls from Skype to landlines and mobile devices, offers low rates.

Nokia's not the only handset maker to announce a deal with Skype at Mobile World Congress. On Monday, Sony Ericsson announced it would be offering a Skype "panel" on the Windows Mobile Xperia1 device.

Adding Skype to smartphones is a great benefit for consumers, especially people who travel internationally or have friends and family overseas. While pricing on domestic voice services has been dropping like a brick from a third-story window, international rates have remained high.

As a consumer who likes to travel and who happens to be traveling internationally right now for this trade show, I am annoyed and almost angered at the outrageous prices mobile operators charge when customers roam in other countries or make international calls from the U.S. They all try to sell "international" plans to help defray the cost, but the plans themselves cost consumers an extra fee every month regardless of whether they're traveling that month or not.

Skype and other VoIP services offer users a more cost-effective alternative. And Skype on a mobile phone, when accessed on a low-cost data network, could help people who travel frequently or make lots of international calls save tons of money.

Of course, the two smartphone makers Skype has announced as partners here are manufacturers that are already struggling to get their high-end devices on American mobile networks. And my guess is that adding Skype won't do much to convince these operators to offer these phones and subsidize them so that American consumers will buy them.

The reason is pretty simple. AT&T, Verizon Wireless, Sprint Nextel, and T-Mobile USA know that a wide-scale deployment of Skype on their phones could cannibalize their international voice services and potentially hurt their domestic voice service.

So if by chance, Nokia or Sony Ericsson manages to win approval from a U.S. operator to get these phones on their networks, I wouldn't be surprised if the Skype feature is stripped from the device in the U.S. version.

That said, AT&T is allowing some voice over IP applications to appear on Apple's iPhone App Store. And Skype users are able to make free and low-cost calls through applications, such as Truphone. But for now, AT&T and Apple seem hesitant to allow Skype's powerful brand, which has more than 400 million registered users, to make it onto the iPhone.

(Credit: YouMail)

YouMail, a free visual voice mail solution to organize cell phone messages like e-mail for online playback and response, announced on Thursday that customers can start viewing those same voice mail messages from their mobile phones.

By pointing the mobile browser to YouMail's home page, fans of the service can access their account with the usual login and pin to view contact's images, play back messages in any order, and forward or reply to voice messages in a form factor tailored from YouMail's servers to many high-end smartphones.

YouMail certainly isn't the first visual voice mail service to succeed in delivering transcribed messages to smartphones, which it does through a separate e-mail or SMS feature. Unlike some competitors for mobile voice message management, however, like PhoneTag (previously SimulScribe) and CallWave, YouMail's new service will retain the audio and organizational features of its rich online product.

The service will be ready for a wide variety of smartphones, YouMail said in a statement, including models from Research In Motion, Nokia, HTC, Morotola, Sony Ericsson, Samsung, and Palm. YouMail claims that YouMail's smartphone formula "even" works on iPhones, which already run on the full mobile Web with manufacturer Apple's Safari browser.

Nokia Maps on Ovi

Planning trips on your Nokia smartphone is about to get a lot easier. Today at Where 2.0, the Finnish cell phone manufacturer announced Maps on Ovi, a Web component designed to complement its mobile mapping software, Nokia Maps 2.0. As part of the Ovi brand of Internet services, which includes the Nokia Music Store and N-Gage gaming platform, Maps on Ovi will allow users to plan their trips on their desktop or laptop and then synchronize (automatically or manually) it with their smartphones. Conversely, if you're already out on the road, you can record routes and points of interest on your handset and then upload them to the Ovi service when you return home to share with family and friends. The interface on the Web side is similar to what you'd see on your phone for ease of use and a more seamless experience.

We got a brief demo of Maps on Ovi, and it looks very cool. Despite being booted off the hotel's Wi-Fi and some technical glitches with search (the service isn't even in beta yet), we can already see the benefits of such a service. The obvious benefit is not having to sit there and peck out addresses on your phone's alphanumeric dialpad, and it's especially helpful when you're planning a multidestination trip. The synchronization from the Web to the phone was smooth. Plus, we like the sharing aspect of Maps on Ovi, and this is a point that Nokia emphasized during our briefing. Michael Halbherr, vice president of context-based services at Nokia, said now it's not so much about route calculation (since that part of the technology is pretty solid) as it is about what we can do with the data. The next step is about discovering, collecting, and sharing those experiences. And this is certainly something I can get onboard with. Having covered portable navigation systems for the past two years, I find that most models offer the same core functions (text- and voice-guided directions, points of interest database, etc.) and do them reasonably well, so now the challenge is to find services that will further improve the driver's or walker's experience (and I don't mean adding multimedia features, people!)

Nokia hopes to have Maps on Ovi ready for public consumption later this summer, and though it will initially only work with S60 series smartphones, such as the Nokia N and E series models, the company said it hopes to develop it as an independent software for all types of form factors. Hear hear!

If the spare contents of your wallet dictate your dining destination, you'll want to know of this reprieve. Cellfire (hands-on review), offers coupon deals with more than 10,000 local U.S. restaurants and services, and chains. With custom-built applications for BlackBerry, Windows Mobile, Symbian, the RAZR, and Nokia phones, Cellfire has rounded the smartphone bases. A WAP site--www.cellfire.com--that works with iPhone and other Internet-enabled devices brings the app home.

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The twice-yearly new product orgy called Demo 08 kicks off tomorrow, but we have a few previews of presenting companies we wanted to write up before the CEOs take the stage. First up: SkyFire, a browser for smartphones.

CEO Nitin Bhandari told me that his goal with Skyfire is to do "true desktop rendering," including media support, on a tiny screen.

Skyfire's CEO showed me a live demo of desktop Flash video running on a Windows smartphone. (Screen capture from Skype session.)

Bhandari showed me a demo during our Skype call, and it appears that his browser does just what he intended. Displaying a sports site, Skyfire played the video and audio on it very well. The browser also recognizes text and reflows it into a phone-size column when you zoom into it, so you don't have to scroll side-to-side to read.

The technical trick of Skyfire is that it's a proxy browser. The Skyfire app itself isn't a full browser. Instead, big Skyfire servers elsewhere process Web pages, including all the media and browser formats--like Flash, Java, and Ajax--that a normal desktop browser would handle but that most phones can't. Then it streams data to phones, which the mobile half of Skyfire displays. To the end user, it looks like a browser, but the mobile app is just one part of the product.

This means that Skyfire can do things on mobile phones that mobile browsers, including Safari and Opera cannot, at least not without bogging down the phone. The danger is that the Skyfire servers themselves will bog down, because of over-use, and ruin the experience for mobile users. This is the experience I had with Micrsoft's Deepfish, a proxy browser project we covered last year and that appears to have gone dormant. Bhandari told me the service is "built to scale," and that "once at escape velocity," the company can plug in additional servers to handle a growing user base. He would not reveal the technical underpinnings of Skyfire beyond that.

The escape velocity that Bhandari refers to includes not just user uptake, but a revenue model, and it's on that second small detail that my confidence in this product begins to wane. Bhandari may "monetize user activity," which means selling ads, and he also hopes to generate revenues from carriers that want a competitor to Apple's iPhone browsing experience. The first revenue model is flawed--in-browser ads on a tiny screen will be annoying and hard to sell. The second model is sound, but incredibly difficult. Many mobile app companies have withered and died while waiting for a good carrier deal. And in this case, the carriers are going to need extra convincing, because supporting Skyfire means running or paying for a bank of proxy servers.

Although I think that proxied browsing is the right solution for mobile devices, I am not convinced that there's a solid business behind it.

Skyfire will go into public beta in a few weeks for Windows smartphones. Other platforms will follow. You should be able to register for the beta this week at the site.

(Credit: Open Handset Alliance)

Like a number of my colleagues here at CNET, I had my ear pressed to the phone yesterday morning as the members of the Open Handset Alliance (OHA), including Google, Motorola, and HTC, revealed their plans for Android, a new open platform for mobile devices. I'm not here to recap all the details of the event here--CNET News.com has a comprehensive story on that--but rather just to jot down some of my thoughts.

Looking at the big picture, I welcome today's news. I think it's a really interesting move for all the parties involved, and I certainly feel that the Android project will lead to more innovative products--both handsets and applications. More importantly, it gives the consumer more power and choice when it comes to buying cell phones and smartphones. But it also raised a lot of questions. One of the first ones that popped into my head is how will Android affect the other mobile operating systems--Windows Mobile, Palm, Symbian, BlackBerry, and Apple. Will they suffer? Compete head-to-head? Or will they join the Open Handset Alliance?

During the press conference, one reporter asked how Android differs from all the other operating systems and I can't recall who responded but the answer was that Android is an open platform and open to third-party developers. Well, OK, but so does Symbian. Symbian really prides itself on this fact, but it hasn't enjoyed widespread adoption here in the United States. Part of the problem is that there are only a limited number of Symbian smartphones available on this side of the pond. Nokia and Sony Ericsson use Symbian, but for whatever reason, U.S. carriers have been reluctant to pick up any of these models. Sure, you can still get them but you often have to pay a steep $400 to $700 for an unlocked version. I don't know about you, but I don't have nor do I want to drop that much money for a cell phone. With this limited visibility and adoption rate in the States, I think Symbian will take the biggest hit. Sadly, I think the Google association alone gives Android more name recognition than Symbian.

And the others? Well, Palm just seems like a sinking ship, though I know it still enjoys a loyal following. Palm/Access needs to breathe some new life into the OS in order for it to keep afloat. I also noticed that the OHA kept focusing on the potential Web browsing capabilities of Android, which is great, but also leaves me to wonder how it will handle corporate e-mail, personal information management, and productivity apps--something Windows Mobile and BlackBerry devices do very well. And CNET News.com's Tom Krazit has an interesting take on how Android will (or won't) affect the Apple iPhone.

Without knowing what Android will entail, it's hard to tell how it will shake things up, but like I said before, I welcome it. I think it can only benefit the consumers. The next few months should be interesting, and I can't wait!

If you've been a smartphone user running Windows Mobile and looking to play around with GetMobio's "lifestyle portal" for various Web 2.0 widgets, there's a new version made just for you. Windows Mobile users can grab it at http://www.GetMobio.com/nowwm, which will direct you towards a small download.

Both versions offer the same selection of the dozen built-in widgets, the most notable ones being a cheap gas finder, a lightweight and good looking version of Twitter, and an integrated RSS reader that remembers all your feeds. We did a hands-on with the service back in June, and since then they've added a movie finder, trivia game, and support for more carriers and handsets.

If you're scared of bookmarks in your mobile browser, or looking for something a little more eye friendly, GetMobio offers up a pretty good smattering of useful widget-like apps. However, despite the move to Windows Mobile, there's nothing particularly platform specific that's going to give users a better experience than the iterations for less capable handsets. But if you've been wanting to give this a go on your snazzy new smartphone, you're now in luck.