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Mozilla previewed the first commercial build of its Firefox operating system and announced several operator and smartphone rollout plans on Sunday at Mobile World Congress.

The OS is being pitched as a better alternative for low-end smartphones in developing markets and is built around applications written using HTML5.

The first phones using the OS are all powered by Qualcomm processors and will be offered by Alcatel One Touch, LG Electronics and ZTE starting this summer, according to Mozilla. Huawei Technologies will also come out with products later this year, it said.

ZTE will officially announce its first phone in Barcelona on Monday.

In addition to the phone makers, 18 operators are also lining up behind Firefox OS, including America Movil, China Unicom, Deutsche Telekom, Japan's KDDI, Sprint, Telecom Italia, Telefonica and Telenor. The operators will first launch phones in Brazil, Colombia, Hungary, Mexico, Montenegro, Poland, Serbia, Spain and Venezuela, they said.

Mozilla expects more phone makers and more markets to added going forward. The U.S. market will have to wait until 2014, it said.

Details: http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9237092/Mozilla_previews_Firefox_OS_with_four_phone_makers_and_18_operators_onboard?source=CTWNLE_nlt_os_2013-02-25

Steve Jobs, the pioneer of the computer as a jail made cool, designed to sever fools from their freedom, has died.

As Chicago Mayor Harold Washington said of the corrupt former Mayor Daley, "I'm not glad he's dead, but I'm glad he's gone."

Nobody deserves to have to die - not Jobs, not Mr. Bill, not even people guilty of bigger evils than theirs. But we all deserve the end of Jobs' malign influence on people's computing.

Unfortunately, that influence continues despite his absence. We can only hope his successors, as they attempt to carry on his legacy, will be less effective.

Steve Jobs recreated the movie industry with Pixar, redefined the music industry with iTunes, restrured the telecom industry with the iPhone, set up highest standard for Unix desktop with OSx, with Applications Store and for hardware with Macintosh, and took the languishing idea of a tablet-sized computer and turned it into the iPad, which is now restructuring the media industry.

That's record of success that will be difficult to match soon.

For President-elect Barack Obama, parting with his Blackberry is such sweet sorrow.

In fact, it isn't yet certain that he'll give up his hand-held device once he takes office.

Obama acknowledged in a nationally broadcast interview Thursday that the Blackberry is a concern, "not just to the Secret Service, but also to lawyers."

Asked in an interview broadcast on NBC's "Today" show whether the issue had been resolved, Obama replied, "I'm still in a scuffle around that." He asked: "How do you stay in touch with the flow of everyday life?"

White House officials have worried that a president's emails can be subpoenaed by Congress and the courts and may be subject to public records laws. Presidents George W. Bush and Bill Clinton didn't email while in office.

The Blackberry is made by Canada's Research in Motion Ltd.

“I AM RICH” is an iPhone application that made a brief debut on Apple’s software store this month. It cost $999.99 and did nothing more than put a glowing ruby on the iPhone’s screen. Seeing it as cynical rather than practical, Apple yanked it (after eight people bought it).

Details: http://www.economist.com/daily/columns/techview/displaystory.cfm?story_id=11919515&fsrc=nwl

I have always wished that my computer would be as easy to use as my telephone. My wish has come true. I no longer know how to use my telephone.

Bjarne Stroustrup

**Global Market**
Sambian	60%
Linux	12%
Microsoft	11%
RIM	11%
Apple	4%

**USA Market**
RIM	43%
Microsoft	25%
Apple	20%
Sambian	5%
Linux	3%

Nokia to buy Symbian and open-source OS code could mean competition for Google's Android platform, which Google executives have said could hit the market sometime during the second half of the year.

Today iPhone's second coming and today's problems from second coming could be viewed here: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/12/business/12iphone.html. From another hand, over the past few months, competing 3G smartphones with touch screens and a host of features have been coming thick and fast. Sprint has started to offer Samsung’s Instinct, which seeks to trump the iPhone with a higher download speed, better video, picture messaging, navigation and applications, plus a battery that can be removed.

Verizon has unleashed two touch-screen 3G smartphones recently that match the new iPhone in speed and visual impact. The Voyager from LG in South Korea is a clamshell that opens to reveal a full QWERTY keyboard. The Dare, also from LG, is a stylish iPhone lookalike that likewise uses a virtual keyboard on its screen. Both have been designed to use Verizon’s fast EV-DO (Evolution-Date Optimised) network capable of speeds in excess of 2.4 megabits per second.

Palm has been staging a comeback with its Centro, a trim little 3G phone and e-mail device aimed squarely at consumers. The Centro costs half as much as even the latest iPhone and is selling briskly.

Meanwhile, to defend its home turf, RIM recently announced an iPhone killer called BlackBerry Bold. This has the Canadian maker’s classic keyboard and trackball, WiFi, Bluetooth and GPS navigation. But it also has a fast processor, a brilliant screen plus four separate radios for tapping the vast majority of 2G, 3G and 3.5G networks around the world.

RIM has clearly learned a lot from its recent foray into the consumer side of the business, with its BlackBerry Pearl and Curve models. Its 16m base of corporate users includes some 60% new subscribers.

Clearly, the BlackBerry Bold raises the game for corporate users everywhere. But perhaps more importantly, it also represents RIM’s most determined effort yet to show consumers that a real smartphone is more than just a pretty face.

Waiting in the wings are any number of open-source smartphones based on the nifty Linux operating system. Apple will need to pull out all the stops if the iPhone is not to be swept aside by the flood of do-it-all smartphones heading for American shores.

Fore more details go to: http://www.economist.com/daily/columns/techview/displaystory.cfm?story_id=11700916&fsrc=nw

Google has unveiled its much-awaited open source handset platform, backed by an alliance of 34 manufacturers, operators and developers (Open Handset Alliance - OHA).

The platform, Android, will be the world’s first open source mobile phone operating system, Google said.

A toolkit will be released next week and the first phones will be available in the second half of 2008.

Details: http://www.americasnetwork.com/americasnetwork/article/articleDetail.jsp?id=470473#Top1
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http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9045560&source=NLT_HW&nlid=51
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http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/date/20071105

Bob Brewin spoke of a "blue shift" and "red shift" phenomenon in computing, comparing IT to the physics concepts of blue and red shifts, in which light turns red as it becomes more distant and blue as it gets closer.

The red shift represents applications on the Web, which go out worldwide and scale to millions of persons. The blue shift represents computing in the enterprise, Brewin said.

Building red shift applications requires thinking about a different application space, one in which there will not just be 10,000 people using the application behind the firewall but one that could serve 10 million customers, Brewin said.

Bob Brewin, Sun Distingushied Engineer and vice president for software.

For reference: http://www.infoworld.com/article/07/09/26/java-iphone_1.html

Why I couldn't buy today a cell phone that didn't have a camera in it?

Lets take for example a new Samsung A707. It's got a camera (that I never use). Web access (that I've only turned on by mistake), an address book, a calendar, and an integrated MP3 player. However, it only download songs from PCs, not Macs and I found that there's a company called Datapilot that makes software that transfers not only MP3 from Macs, but address book and calendar entries, even image files. Unfortunately the A707 is not supported...

Even through I am AT&T cellular customer, I was informed that the iPhone isn't supported by my particular plan. So, being a member of the non-preferred class (an existing customer), if I want an iPhone (for $400 and earlier it was $600) I'll wind up paying about 30% more for my service.
It looks like there are two winners and one loser in this deal. Apple sells an iPhone, and AT&T can jack up the rate while avoiding the cost of a subsidized handset. Guess who the loser is? May be when the initial sales slow down they'll get desperate, start bottom feeding, and find me!

Michael Finneran is president of dBrn Associates, Inc., an independent consulting firm in Hewlett Neck, NY.