The first news to share is that of Palm. People know that I have a Palm Zire 71 and I haven't upgraded it. It's actually not in use right now since I have found out that the Nokia N82 is serving my needs quite well for now. It seems that Palm is coming out with the Palm Treo Pro, and by the looks of it, it's getting some good reviews and looks really sleek.
It's been a while since Palm came out with a good device, Palm has lost its PDA and smartphone marketshare to Apple's iPhone, RIM and Windows Mobile. This shows that Palm is still not dead yet. In fact, in this article, Palm has a plan to come back into the game. They just hired Jon Rubinstein to help them out with their design and save Palm. Jon Rubinstein apparently is noted in the industry, he helped Apple get back on its feet with the hit iMac and iPod designs. In fact, Jon has hired a bunch of other employees previously working at Apple, to reign the ships at Palm. I think this is really good news for Palm. And Palm is working on their next generation OS, Palm OS 2.0 which features stuff from BeOS that Palm bought a couple of years ago. Let's see how this goes, having many competitors boosts great value for customers.
The second news is that an Android phone maybe coming to market this year. Android is the software from Google for creating a mobile phone OS that is open source. There has been talk about Android for a while now, but no actual phones that are powered by Android. There are rumours that T-Mobile in the US is going to come out with an Android phone called the HTC Dream later this year. More details can be found here. Latest news that I've found is that the date for launch of the HTC Dream is October 13. I think this will spur great innovation and customer choice in making the phone become more open source and allowing developers to develop easily for phones as they can now for PCs. I can see great momentum and excitement in the mobile arena. Can't wait to see how the Android phone will look like. I wonder how many will buy the Android phone and how the numbers will compare to Apple's first launch of the iPhone.
Third bit of news is that Japan is planning to open up their technology for wallet phones that uses a computer chip called FeliCa for allowing you to pay for goods using a reader installed at cash terminals. I think it uses NFC communications. I've been waiting for a eWallet like this, I carry so many cards (as I'm sure many of you do as well) it would be nice to loosen my pants (not physically of course!). And how many times you can't find the right credit card or loyalty card because you left it at home!
Anyways, this sounds something similar to RF tags like Esso's SpeedPass or the Dexit tag which I've tried back in Canada. I would love this on my phone. Of course, one thing to make note of is that if I were to lose my phone, there needs to be an option where others wouldn't be able to access my credentials. Maybe something where the phone automatically erases all the information when an attacker tries to get in or the phone explodes. Kind of like a sci-fi scene.
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