Motorola plays iTunes

Motorola has unveiled its highly anticipated iTunes-playing 3G phone, the E1060, at the 3GSM Congress in Cannes, France With up to 512MB of additional storage via a removable card, the phone will have the same capacity as the smaller of the iPod shuffle models, though whether it will match Apple's device for sound quality remains to be seen. Although iTunes will be the default media player, it will not be the only one. 'We're committed to have iTunes as the default music client, but we'll also continue to support other music players such as RealPlayer,' said Amer Husaini, vice president for Motorola's mobile devices group in Europe, the Middle East, Africa and South Asia. ...more

Japan leads the world in wireless Net access

A recent survey by Accenture has revealed the extent to which the world is ready for the wireless Web, and the answer is… we’re not. Not unless you’re in Japan, that is, where 72 per cent of cell phone owners used their handsets to connect to the Web. Obviously, they’re getting a much better Net experience with their i-mode service than we do with WAP, but fortunately NTT DoCoMo is to roll out i-mode throughout Europe soon. ...more

News roundup... [05-06-2002]

Here, in brief, are some of the day's other stories. Java - the building continues Borland has announced the availability of JBuilder 7, its Java development software system. The main features of this release are better support for the whole application development lifecycle (there's integration with Borland's collaborative TeamSource platform and its Optimizeit Suite for tuning Java performance) and improved configuration management for customising the build process. ...more

Philips unveils three way compatible Blu-Ray R/W drive

Dutch electronics giant Royal Philips Electronics has developed a optical drive which can read and write to CDs, DVDs and the upcoming Blu-Ray disc format. The announcement of a fully compatible drive which can burn and play in the three most common optical disc formats will be seen as a big boost for the Blu-Ray format over the rival HD-DVD format favoured by Toshiba and many of the big Hollywood studios. Philips has achieved its three-way compatibility by the simple expedient of fitting the drive with three lasers. ...more

Microsoft's ZenZui zooms in on mobile interfaces

Microsoft has spun off a project within its research labs as a separate company under the flag ZenZui. ZenZui will market and sell its Zooming User Interface, developed to make it easier for people using mobile devices with small screens to access and enjoy web content. The project has been in incubation for three years at Microsoft and is led by experts in human-computer interaction and data visualisation. ...more