Nokia's strong start for its Windows Phone handsets

Nokia today unveiled its first smartphones based on Microsoft's mobile OS, Windows Phone 7.5, along with bold promises and big ambitions.

Based on the twitterstream that followed the announcements, at the Nokia World conference starting today in London, many tech savvy users, bloggers and journalists were unimpressed with the new phones. But those first impressions of that select group underestimate or miss Nokia's achievements.

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Steve Jobs and Life in the Shadow of Death

Six years ago, standing in the warm California sun on June 12, 2005, Apple co-founder and then-CEO Steve Jobs spoke to the graduating class of Stanford University. It was a spare and deceptively simple speech "about three stories from my life. That's it. No big deal. Just three stories."

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Saks 5th Avenue store features 64 iPads in interactive display

Sixty-four iPad 2's and a bunch of Apple's high-end 27-inch Cinema Displays are being used to create an online storefront display in Saks' flagship 5th Avenue store in New York City.

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Close encounters with Steve Jobs

Have you ever met, talked with, or seen Steve Jobs? Famously private, the ex-Apple CEO is far from being a social butterly. But he's not a recluse, and he's been around for a quite awhile. And that means: human contact.

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Microsoft updates portal for Windows Phone 7 developers

Microsoft announced today a revamped developer portal for Windows Phone 7 developers. And they'll be able to start submitting their new WP7 Mango applications for review in August.

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Soaring iOS device sales reap record Apple revenues, profits

Apple continues to be planet’s mobile powerhouse, announcing record quarterly revenues and profits that were fueled by still-rising sales pace for its mobile devices. The company sold just over 20 million iPhones and just over 9 million iPads in the quarter ending June 25.

What’s more, accessories for those iOS devices is, all by itself, a multi-billion business for Apple: $6 billion in the just-ended quarter, compared to $2.2 billion a year ago.

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"The Trials of the Hogwarts IT Director" re-presented in honor of the last Harry Potter movie

The last Harry Potter movie is opening this week, to spectacular reviews as collected at RottenTomatoes.

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Development benefits, and security risks, of HTML5 'hybrid' mobile apps

So-called hybrid mobile apps are a way to finesse the debate over whether native apps, written in a given language for a specific OS, or web apps, written in HTML5, CSS and Javascript, are best.

A pair of well-written blogposts, neither of which are intended as a programmers' tutorial, highlight the emerging opportunities, and risks, of hybrid mobile apps.

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N9 + WP7 = the future of the smartphone

Nokia's just-announced N9 smartphone  has, from what I can tell, been getting generally favorable reviews: among them are MobileCrunch, Engadget, TechRadar, and

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Apple's iOS 5 and the cloud

With iOS 5 and iCloud, Apple is re-orienting its mobile devices. Subtly, its shifting the locus of the "mobile experience" from the personal device by itself, or as an adjunct to a personal computer, to a networked personal device leveraging cloud-based services. In some respects, it's catching up to Palm's webOS, Google Android, and Microsoft Windows Phone 7, as a range of pundits have argued. But that's not the point.

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Why Windows Phone 7 "Mango" is bango

Microsoft's Mango release of Windows Phone 7 qualifies as a Big Deal.

Last week, the company made available the beta software development kit for developers, with production release set for Fall 2011, not quite a year after Windows Phone 7 debuted on the first handsets designed for it. It's likely a new generation of smartphones will be announced then, too, from new handset partners. And Nokia this week

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Another black mark against the white iPhone

A scuffle over buying a white iPhone at an Apple retail store in Beijing, China led to a shattered glass door, and injuries to customers and at least one Apple employee. The incident happened over the past weekend.

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The Network World Annotated Guide to the Apple Q&A on iPhone Location Data

Apple released on Wednesday a Question-Answer document that re-explained what it explained in July 2010 about its iPhone policies and practices on collecting location data. The document and at least one almost unprecedented media interview granted by Apple CEO Steve Jobs were responding to the discovery that iPhones are storing a lot of location data.

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Unsecured Wi-Fi router brings federal agents, assault rifles on early morning visit

A Buffalo homeowner found himself facedown on the floor of his house, looking up a group of federal agents, who were looking at him over gun barrels. They were executing a warrant alleging he was downloading reams of child pornography over the Internet. He was baffled.

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Cisco vs Wi-Fi rivals: its latest Wi-Fi controller software dissected

Cisco latest wireless LAN controller software is the just-released version 7.0.116.0, with a string of improvements that are dissected in a blogpost by Andrew vonNagy, a lead wireless engineer with an unnamed Fortune 50 retailer. A number of the main ones are aimed at improving administration, security and operations for remote Cisco access points without a local controller.

Among the main changes he looks at are (check his blog, RevolutionWiFi, for full details):

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iPads, iPhones, and the cloud

Apple calls its iPad a "post-PC" device. Yet it's dependent for syncing information on a connection to either a Mac or a PC running iTunes.

John Gruber at Daring Fireball has some interesting preliminary ideas about what Apple is doing, or not doing, about the cloud and iOS devices, and why. Most rival products, he says, have at least somewhat more advanced cloud features.

Picking up on a piece by Macworld's Chad Olson, Gruber notes that iOS devices today rely on the iTunes-Mac/PC link for 4 functions:

- moving stuff into the device

- updating iOs

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Apple rules the tablet market because Toys 'R Us can sell the iPad

If an online report is correct, Apple is about to confirm in a striking way the new direction for high tech products: selling them as, essentially, toys. And "toy" means something specific in this context: it's something that you don't need to be trained or educated or expert to use. You simply pick it up and...play.

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AT&T's T-Mobile deal means more, not less competition.

A lot of the commentary, complaints, and denunciations about the AT&T plan to buy T-Mobile begins with the assumption that fewer players in a market automatically means less competition and therefore greater customer victimization. That assumption is fundamentally wrong.

Real capitalism is summed in the image of two dogs with one bone. The dogs do not live in Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood. They do not believe in sharing. Sharing is bad. Having the whole thing is good. And they'll fight to get it.

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What reviewers are saying about iPad 2

iPad 2. Here's a summary of what gadget blogs and tech news sites are saying in early reviews of iPad 2.

The new device is little changed from the original: it's thinner and lighter, and has the same screen size and resolution (9.7-inch, 1024 x 768 pixels). On the front, there's 640 x 480 pixel webcam, mainly for Apple's FaceTime video calls; on the back, a video camera that can shoot 720p HD at 30 frames/second (or still), with a 5x digital zoom feature. You can check the details on Apple's specifications page.

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The "Network World" Enterprise Tablet Recommendation Poll

Your CEO glares at you over a desk the size of an aircraft carrier, chews on an unlit cigar, and then she says, "OK, propellerhead. I'm taking this company into the future and the future is mobile. What tablet do we go with?"

This is your chance.

Now, you can, of course, start explaining to her about the security and management trade-offs, the application development challenges, the controversy over HTML5 vs Adobe Flash for video, revamping the entire IT support infrastructure. Or you can just suck it up, take a deep breath and blurt out...What. You. Really. Think. 

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