Ranesh was a Nokia fan for a long time and had owned few Nokia’s including an E70. But he made the transition to Verizon for a decent deal on a Voyager two years ago (because he likes qwerty keyboards and that was the only one he liked at the time). Ranesh couldn’t wait for a decent Nokia device to hit the market he liked, so he took the plunge. When he tested out the N97, he was terribly disappointed with the overall OS and decided to hold out for the Christmas season of this year to see what was around the corner and settled on the Motorola Droid running the Android 2.0 OS.

Nokia is readying the release of their flagship handset, the N900. Unfortunately, Nokia posted it’s first loss in 10 years.(We know Nokia Siemens Networks was to blame.) The problem wasn’t lack of phones worldwide but the Chinese “bandit” or known as “shanzhai” manufacturers eating away at Nokia’s bottom line. Several of these manufactures including Shenzhen Evien Co., Ltd., SZ Telstar Co Ltd., T-Link Industrial Development Company Limited, ZTE Corp., Lenovo and Huawei Tech have already infiltrated the Chinese market with a variety of cell phones. This doesn’t include big boys like HTC and Dell, among others that are making a splash into the worldwide market.

Nokia is the largest mobile phone manufacturer but is feeling the confined spaces of the Mobile market more than ever. RIM’s Blackberry (the business mainstay), Apple’s iPhone (of course) and Palm’s Pre (and soon to be Pixi line), have all cut into Nokia’s overall market share. Not to mention Google’s Android is having huge success with HTC building some great quality phones and across other manufacturers too. While still fighting off fierce competition in the high end cell phone range, Nokia has to contend with middle and low end all at the same time. A feat never before performed for his Helsinki, Finland company.

Step in Maemo: Nokia decided to strike back with the flagship N900 which runs its latest OS based off of Linux called Maemo. This new handset is set to change the direction for Nokia in the mid to higher end device range. Nokia began shipments on November 10^th and are expected to hit retailers shortly, for an estimated price of EUR 500 ($746.00 USD).

Will Nokia be able to break through the obstacles of intruders into its once dominant domain? The N900 comes packed with plenty of features WAY ahead of phones in its class: ARM Cortex-A8 processor, up to 1GB of total application memory. widgets, contacts and shortcuts all on the desktop,. Pictures and videos taken with the 5Mpx Carl Zeiss camera automatically are tagged where they were taken, SMS and IM, standard built-in 32 GB storage is big enough to store up to 7,000 songs or 40 hours of DVD-quality video, and it can be expanded up to 48GB with an external microSD card.

Image Courtesy of tnkgrl

The phone is amazing and packs an MMA like punch compared to other phones in the market place at this time, but Nokia will have to bring the beautiful Maemo OS down to the mid and perhaps even lower range handsets to regain what market share has already been lost. If anyone can do this, Nokia can and with the N900, where they proved that they are listening to the consumer.

• Hello Moto becomes Hello Samsung as Motorola looses global market share
• Motorola launches Made in India phone
• Ebooks coming to your nokia smartphone
• Motorola Droid Enjoys Great Sales!
• Nokia N900 Fondle Video

It has been reported that an Australian programmer under the codename of lkee wrote a virus (worm) for the Apple iPhone specially the one that had been jailbroken.

The worm was programmed to scan the networks of Telus, Optus and Vodafone in Australia. Once infected, the worm would automatically change the wallpaper of the iPhone.

lkee states that he developed this worm as a warning to users and not to get extract any information. He wanted to motivate users to change their root password. The unchanged root password is the reason why the worm enters the iPhone. By default, it is set as “alpine” in jailbroken iPhones.

But this week, another person has created a modified version of this worm called “iPhone/Privacy.A”. It is programmed to retrieve messages, emails, photos, videos or any other data stored on the phone silently.

So to take precaution, please change your root password. It is not guaranteed to work but at least it’s worth the prevention.

Source

• Jailbroken iPhone Users, Beware of the iPhone Worm
• iGoogle Updated for iPhone
• O2 Now Allowing iPhone Unlocking but with Restrictions!
• Apple iPhone 3.0.1 OS Update Released Fixes SMS Vulnerability
• Download Facebook for iPhone 3.0 Soon

Apple has been setting records everywhere it goes and the cellphone industry is not an exception. Apple has enjoyed tremendous success with the launch of the Apple iPhone.

Now according to sources, Apple also seems to be making more profit by selling it’s iPhone than the profit made by the cellphone giant-Nokia. Apple surpassed Nokia or the first time in the 3rd quarter of 2009 to become the most profitable handset maker.

Apple made a profit of 1.6 Billion US$ while Nokia managed to get only 1.1 Billion US$. This fact is believable considering the huge iPhone sales and recent decline of Nokia’s handset sales. Nokia’s global marketshare too fell down from 41% to 35%.

Apple’s position as a cellphone maker is now stronger than ever. Nokia is also looking to regain it’s position with the launch of the Nokia N900 which is also one of the most expected handsets of 2009.

Source

• Apple planning big for the 3G iPhone
• iPhone 3GS India Launch Delayed not coming on August 9th
• iPhone 3G S Finally Getting Launched in India But At A Horrendous Price Tag
• Is The iPhone The Ultimate Windows Mobile Device?
• 3G iPhone Coming

Joe Hewitt, the brains behind the Facebook application for the Apple iPhone has quit further development of the application.

“Time for me to try something new. I’ve handed the Facebook iPhone app off to another engineer, and I’m onto a new project. My decision to stop iPhone development has had everything to do with Apple’s policies.” – Joe Hewitt

The Facebook application by Hewitt is the most popular application ever created for the platform. Thus this move will have a huge impact on the development of the application. The application will continue to develop but not at the excellent speed and quality as before.

Joe Hewitt is also known for his contribution towards the Mozilla Firefox Web browser.

Source

• Firefox for Maemo Beta 4 caught running on Nokia N900
• Download Facebook for iPhone 3.0 Soon
• Mozilla Firefox for mobile phones soon
• Facebook Connects with iPhone
• Nokia N900 Browser Shown off on Video

As Orange released the Apple iPhone 3GS on it’s network, O2 felt that it needs to come up with something good for it’s customers too. Hence they decided to unlock the Apple iPhones for their customers. The Apple iPhone unlocking is available to O2 customers in the UK from 10th November onwards but under the following conditions:

Pay Monthly Customers- You can unlock the handset at anytime for free. but you will still have to honour your remainder minimum term of the contract.

Pay and Go- You can unlock the iPhone after 12 months for which a one-time fee of 14.69 pounds will be deducted from your balance.

Steps to Unlock the iPhone- First, submit an unlocking application to O2. Unlocking will take upto 14 days and you will receive a text message confirming the unlock.  Then place a non-O2 sim into the iPhone and connect to iTunes via a USB cable. iTunes will confirm that the iPhone has been successfully unlocked.

Source

• Apple iPhone 3.0.1 OS Update Released Fixes SMS Vulnerability
• iPhone in India through Airtel and Vodafone
• AT&T to offer unlocked iPhone 3G without contract
• Handwriting Recognition on iPhone
• Apple iPhone SDK 3.0 released

iPhone apps are so much fun to use !  There is always something interesting about the new apps on the Apple app Store. I just spotted an app which makes sending a photo as a MMS over AT&T pointless.  The Kocking iPhone app developed by Pointy Heads Software in USA redefines photo sharing on the iPhone.

You can share photos seamlessly over a WiFi or 3G Connection instantly . Heard of screensharing ?

You can share your photos worth sharing to your friend and your friend can even save the images to his phone if he likes it.

Download the app for free from the app store [iTunes Link] Hurry up its free for only the first 50000 users.

Visit http://knockinglive.com for more info about the product

The app currently is out only from iphone , but from the product page a Blackberry version and a Android version is also in the works !

Watch a demo of the app in action in the video below

• Nokia Ovi Store goes live in some countries, coming soon to AT&T
• Apple iPhone 3.0 new improved version in June 2009
• AT&T to offer unlocked iPhone 3G without contract
• Breaking : iPhone 3G Now Available Officially without a contract
• AT&T Finally To Launch MMS for iPhone On September 25

Good news ! The hacker who had promised an iPhone unlock for the latest baseband has released BlackSn0w or Blacksnow much ahead of schedule and you can now Download Blacksnow and Unlock your iPhone 3GS for free

blackra1n RC3 is also live for both Windows and Mac!!! Clean firmware 3.1.2 and baseband 05.11.07 are recommended.

Updates:
Unlock!!!
Hacktivation
Keep legit activation if activated before running app
15 seconds faster, you’ll feel it
Tiger + PPC support

Hit http://www.blackra1n.com/ for the download for windows and mac.

• iPhone 3.1.2 Jailbreak is out after Purplera1n its Blackra1n !
• iPhone 3GS 05.11.07 baseband unlocked , releasing on Nov 4th
• O2 Now Allowing iPhone Unlocking but with Restrictions!
• Is The iPhone The Ultimate Windows Mobile Device?
• Apple iPhone 3GS Jailbroken/Hacked!

Gizmodo first reported this news few hours ago.  The company ChinaOnTrade calls it the midboard of the iPhone 4G.

Looks like Apple knows that even its best offering – the  3GS is loosing it’s shine mainly due to more feature rich offerings from other brands like Nokia N900 , HTC HD 2 ,  Sony Xperia X10.

Perhaps the iPhone 4G is launching sooner than expected. And India might get the 3GS once the 4G is out as they dump stocks here.

Another interesting piece of information on the chinese site.

We also have final pictures of iPhone 4 Generation with amazingly beautiful back cover

We look forward to seeing the back cover.

• Foxconn Employee Commits Suicide After Losing 4G iPhone Prototype

The cat and mouse game between Apple and the Hackers is on again. Now George Hotz , creator of Jailbreaking software for iPhones has made an announcement that he has successfully unlocked the latest unjailbreakable baseband of iPhone aka 05.11.07

tell the iPhone owning world all they need is at blackra1n.com, including blacksn0w instructions on it’s release date, 11/04/09(yes, will support hacktivation). You do your part, and I’ll do mine making things as simple, reliable, and straightforward as possible.

Its amazing how hackers find holes in Apple’s closed walls.Here is the proof of the unlock and the tool in action .

We’ll let you know once the tool is available for download on Nov 4th, so watch this space.

We expect iPhone 3GS prices to fall considerably in the grey market once this tool as out . So if you can postpone your 3GS purchase till Nov4th , would be worth it !

• Download Blacksnow and Unlock iPhone 3GS for free

Yes, apple have released a WiFi-less iPhone, something that I consider very important since the iPhone’s software is kinda designed to always work best on WiFi networks. But if you Chinese guys(and ladies) can live without WiFi then you can always pick them up at 4,999 yuan($730) and 6,999 yuan($1,025). This pricing is quite strange since a regular iPhone 3GS(with wifi) can easily be bought for $835 in the black.

But this WiFi-less version of the iPhone may soon disapear considering that this initial batch was built when the Chinese government had it’s WiFi ban in force and since this was recently lifted I guess it won’t be soon before we see WiFi coming to these chinese iPhones. Maybe this is why the folks over at 163.com are reporting that there aren’t many people rushing to buy the iPhones.

Sources:
http://mashable.com/2009/10/30/china-iphone-wifi/

• Apple iPhone China launch on 1st October
• Apple iPhone 3G and MacWorld coming in 2008
• China Unicom and Apple bring iPhone to China , India is still waiting for 3GS
• iPhone Flops in India now onto China
• 3G iPhone Coming