Tomando en cueta la locura del iPhone, Motorola Droid, Palm Pre y Nexus Uno, podría parecer que casi todo el mundo tiene un teléfono inteligente.

Pero la mayoría de los consumidores utilizan teléfonos más simple,  mucho más baratos.

Según datos de la empresa Nielsen, cerca del 82 por ciento de los teléfonos móviles en uso se limitan teléfonos de la función, del tipo que se venden por menos de $ 50 o se regalan junto con un contrato de dos años de servicio.

La industria de la telefonía móvil prefiere llamarlos teléfonos caracteristicos, para distinguirlos de los teléfonos inteligentes como el pre o el droide, pero bien podría ser llamado “un poco los teléfonos inteligentes.”

Aunque una vez, perfectamente identificados por los diseños cuadrado y minúsculas, mal pantallas pixeladas, característica de muchos teléfonos en estos días se parecen más a sus primos más inteligentes porque las mejoras de software que puedan ejecutar aplicaciones móviles más sofisticados.

“Los teléfonos de características está migrando de las pantallas pequeñas que caracteriza su dominio en la era de los Razr de Motorola,” dijo Ross Rubin, analista de la industria con el NPD Group, una compañía de investigación de mercado. “Ellos tienen más sistemas operativos sofisticados, pantallas táctiles y pantallas más grandes.”

Ofertas elegante de Samsung, LG y Motorola han atraído la atención de los empresarios y las empresas de software con la esperanza de las funciones de mercado similares a los encontrados en el iPhone. Uno de los teléfonos, el LG Vu, por ejemplo, tiene una pantalla táctil de tres pulgadas con “feedback táctil” para que el usuario se siente una respuesta al tocar en la pantalla, una cámara de 2 megapíxeles y hasta 4 gigabytes de memoria externa – lo suficiente para ataque de cientos de aplicaciones adicionales. [LEER ORIGINAL EN INGLES]

Twitter 360 is an iPhone app that lets you visually see the flow of tweets from locations nearby, layered on top of your natural “real” environment.

Thanks to to the iPhone’s video camera and Twitter’s new Geotagging feature, you’ll see live Tweets pop up based on your current location. You’ll be able to see where the tweets are coming from as well as how far the person tweeting is. As with most of the augmented reality iPhone apps, you’ll need the built in compass which only comes with the iPhone 3GS.

This isn’t the first stab at the Augmented Reality Twitter app but, as far as we are aware, this is the first app to use the feature with Twitter’s new geo-tagging feature. That said, while this may be the first, don’t expect it to be the last. We’re certain a flurry of these will appear over the coming weeks.

What else does it bring to the table? [FULL STORY]

Posted on Friday, Aug 28, 2009 by Rene Ritchie

Bing Community Blog has announced that Microsoft is “sprinkling some Cocoa” on their Bing. (No laughing!):

The Bing iPhone and Mac SDK is available for download on CodePlex, open source under the Microsoft Public License (MS-PL).

The SDK provides:

• The ability to easily query Bing from within your Cocoa or Cocoa Touch application.
• Perform both synchronous and asynchronous queries.
• Search Bing for Web, Image, Video, News, and Phonebook results.

We hope that you’ll be able to make some great Cocoa/iPhone apps that harness the power of Bing!

Happy Bing-ing!

Of course, the iPhone’s default search is Google, with Yahoo! as an option, and Bing will soon be powering Yahoo! search, so it’s ipso de post facto (pardon the Latin-ish) it’s already there, but still it will be interesting to see what kind of iPhone apps come of — and leverage — this. We just hope it really makes an awesome “BING!” sound whenever a query hits the index…

[Via Macworld]

Writtenon August 27, 2009 by Chris Ryan

In addition to the numerous refinements that Snow Leopard brings, among the first you’ll notice is an easier installation experience. Some options that experienced Apple users have come to know and love have been changed or relocated, resulting in an experience that is far less intimidating than installing Microsoft Windows.

Traditional OS X users may be familiar with some of the more advanced installation options beyond the usual “Upgrade Mac OS X.” Options such as “Erase and Install” and “Archive and Install” have been changed for Snow Leopard. To prevent users from accidentally erasing their hard drive, the erase and install functionality has been relegated to manual formatting via Disk Utility.

Should one need to archive and install (which is where your previous system files are archived in a separate location and a new system is installed in their place), the installer will it automatically when it detects an attempt to install the same operating system as is currently found on the Mac. When installation is complete, Snow Leopard cleans up after itself and doesn’t leave users with an ugly “Previous System” folder as before.

Trickery With Versions

With Snow Leopard’s “behind the scenes” archive and install process, it now automatically installs the current OS version number. For example, if someone is running 10.6.3 and reinstalls, when installation is complete they will still be using 10.6.3 instead of 10.6. This removes the need to run an hour of software updates, but it does present a potential problem. When “dot releases” come out, compatibility is sometimes affected, and users archive and install to revert back to a previous system version. Beyond erasing and installing, this doesn’t seem possible with Snow Leopard.

Wither Rosetta?

By default, when you install Snow Leopard, it will not install Rosetta, Apple’s technology to allow older PowerPC apps to run on Intel processors. As most applications are Universal and Snow Leopard itself requires an Intel processor, Apple is finally making big strides to leave behind the world of PowerPC. Should users still need Rosetta, it is available as an optional install.

QuickTime X vs QuickTime 7

Snow Leopard introduces Apple’s redesigned version of QuickTime, dubbed QuickTime X. Though several of the more popular third party plugins will work with QuickTime X out of the box, users may need to resort to QuickTime 7 and any plugins they’ve used with it for playing more specialized content (or you could just turn to the much more robust VLC).

Snow Leopard will include QuickTime 7 as an option, but will not install it by default unless users already have QuickTime 7 Pro on their system. Should you try to open a file in QuickTime X that requires QuickTime 7, Software Update will automatically download it for you if it’s not already present on the system.

Unanswered Questions

As mentioned earlier, it remains unclear whether Apple has a solution in place in case users install a “dot release” like 10.6.4 and wish to revert back. What we’ve heard about the archive and install seems to infer you would end up with 10.6.4 upon completion.

There’s also still some question as to how Snow Leopard will behave with fresh installs and with older operating systems. Will users need to install Leopard first when swapping in a new hard drive, for example? Recent evidence points to no, but we won’t know for sure until tomorrow.

I’m sure many of you are going to have questions about the installation process, upgrade requirements, and the like. Feel free to use with the comments below to help the process along as the Apple faithful adopt yet another new operating system.