Microsoft recently demoed their Zune HD and its been collecting pretty rave reviews from all over. Its screen and UI is being touted as better then iPod touch.
The device is tighter and more physically beautiful than the iPod Touch and it’s got a better UI, the main menu’s scrolling so natural through the swipe gestures. There’s a little note on the side, under the volume toggle—”Hello from Seattle.” The power button is up top. The home button is nice and prominent, a bar rather than a round button on the Touch. It’s smaller. And the accelerometer is more swift in responding to repositioning; images rotate very fast.
Here is the video of the Zune HD in action :
Indeed its impressive, but it faces a uphill battle with iPod Touch, which is having a pretty decent customer score and not to to forget that 40000+ apps store. And as rumored that Apple is coming out with their upgraded iPod Touch model, we will be seeing a pretty good competition between these too .
Windows 6.5 was revealed in MWC 2009 and surely Microsoft has done some very appreciable changes to the whole UI and funtionality.
To be honest yes the changes are amazing but still it will have to do more to compete with iPhone OS and UI which is flawless . As this is not the final version and Microsoft is still working on it, we may see some more improvements and added features.
Major mobile phone company owners declared that by 2012 every mobile will have a same power socket and will be able to use any USB charger, so no more searching and buying separate chargers for different mobiles you have.
Mobile Companies which signed up for the initiative are :
Nokia, LG, Motorola, Samsung and Sony Ericsson
So as you can see, almost all the major mobile phone companies of the world are there except Apple and hence there is no news till now that Apple will be participating in the initiative. Although the initiative will be finished by 2012 and probably by that time Apple will change its mind .
Firefox Mobile just released a very early version of their upcoming mobile browser Fennec. After the great browsing experience provided by safari on iPhone, there is growing demand for a better browser for other mobile platforms.
And Fennec is a step towards that. Please note that the browser is still in very early stage of development but still Mozilla is releasing to get users feedback to improve it before the final stable release.
This is an early developer release of the mobile version of Firefox, for testing purposes only, intended to:
* get wider community feedback on our approach to the user experience
* engage Mozilla community teams, including localizers, add-on developers, and testers
* get feedback from Web developers
The focus of development so far has been on building a new user interface that reflects Firefox’s design principles, and adds touch screen support and other features that are appropriate for mobile phones and other handheld devices. We plan to do further alpha releases which focus on performance, including projects like TraceMonkey, speculative parsing, and many Fennec and Gecko optimizations. But in the meantime, we feel it is important to make this early release available to continue to grow the community and gather feedback as early as possible in the development process.
By seeing the rich html browsing experience provided by different browsers(skyfire,opera) on mobiles, Microsoft is finally updating its Internet Explorer for windows mobile and coming up with a advance version IE 6. It will have flash and ajax support, with better rendering of websites to give a desktop like browsing experience on mobiles.
Currently its in development and probably a alpha version is released. You can see the IE6 for mobiles running on HTC Touch HD in the below video
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