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Shachaf writes "A new virus, CommWarrior.a, is the first to replicate over MMS (Multimedia Message Service). From the article: 'Multimedia Message Service (MMS) is a more advanced version of the Short Message Service (SMS) familiar to users of GSM based handsets around the world, and allows rich content such as pictures, sounds, video, and applications to be sent as well as text.', and '"With MMS messages typically costing between $0.25 and $1.00 CommWarrior could prove expensive to anyone unlucky enough to be infected by it. As the virus runs silently in the background it could be quite some time before the user becomes aware of the potentially hundreds of MMS messages that have been sent," said Aaron Davidson, CEO of SimWorks.'"

Various newsbits from the Consumer Electronics Show: Verizon promises cell phone TV; USB flash drives get more useful; Transmeta promises a fanless media center device, sometime; things you can stick on your iPod; and a tech site offers a photographic overview of day 0 of the convention.

Omniscientist writes "Just when you thought your Series 60 smartphones were safe, a trojan has surfaced with a two-pronged attack that also in turn disables any anti-virus protection available. Infosyncworld has news about a trojan masquerading itself as a port for the Metal Gear game that disables all anti-virus software on the phone and other necessary utilities like file managers. Also, it affects other phones nearby it via Bluetooth. This trojan has been dubbed 'Metal Gear.a,' quite aptly."

Eugenia writes "Facing stiff competition and low sales, a Sharp representative has informed InfoSyncWorld that the company has decided to fully withdraw its Zaurus SL line of Linux-based handhelds from the U.S. market and focus on its home market in Japan. The recent similar withdraws of Sony and Toshiba pretty much left PalmOne and RIM fighting alone HP and Dell in a saturated PDA market inundated with U.S. brands. People don't seem to be willing to pay a premium for gadgets and alternative systems, and primarily in the corporate market customers prefer to buy from the same suppliers as for their corporate hardware."

wan-fu writes "After all that talk about bluetooth vulnerabilities and mobile phone virii there will finally be a mobile phone with virus protection. Nokia's 6670 smart phone will be released in October and features software from F-Secure. Perhaps this will raise the eyebrows of some other mobile phone manufacturers to step up and increase their security policies for their phones' operating systems."

Dozix007 writes "IEEE has approved a new wireless security protocol dubbed 802.11i, intended to finally provide sufficient security for wireless connections that users don't need to rely on alternate security layers. The new specification works by using AES encryption in the transceiver itself, encrypting data directly at the level just above the actual radio pulses themselves. That makes it transparent for applications sending data through the radio, so legacy programs running on new 802.11i-compliant hardware will automatically get the benefits of the new protocol without the need for modification."

Mr_Silver writes "Infosync is reporting that iRiver is soon to release the Linux based PMP-120 media player which through its colour screen can support MP3, ASF, Ogg Vorbis, JPEG, BMP, AVI, MP4, DivX 3.x, 4.x, 5.x, XviD, MPEG4 SP, Advanced SP and MPEG1. Technically very cool (even more so if it is hackable), but really really ugly. iRiver really should learn how to design nice looking hardware from the experts."

Mr_Silver writes "Infosync is reporting that iRiver is soon to release the Linux based PMP-120 media player which through its colour screen can support MP3, ASF, Ogg Vorbis, JPEG, BMP, AVI, MP4, DivX 3.x, 4.x, 5.x, XviD, MPEG4 SP, Advanced SP and MPEG1. Technically very cool (even more so if it is hackable), but really really ugly. iRiver really should learn how to design nice looking hardware from the experts."

prostoalex writes "InfoSync talks about a new MemoryStick card with wireless 802.11b support. The launch date is Dec 1st, the price is $130." Update by J : It's for Palm OS 5 devices like the CLIE, and not made by Sony.

r.future writes " InfoSync World and netstumbler.com have posted an interesting story that speculates about the financial growth of WiFi networks In Europe anD North America from 2003-2008. The story states: 'Insight Research's analysis of the WiFi industry, WiFi in North America and Europe: Telecommunications' Future 2003-2008, suggests that wireless LAN technology - increasingly popping up in public spaces such as airports and cafes, in private residences, and in businesses - will grow faster in Europe than North America. Worldwide WiFi revenues are expected to grow from $7 billion USD in 2003 to over $44 billion USD by 2008, at a compounded annual rate of 44 percent.'"

r.future writes " InfoSync World and netstumbler.com have posted an interesting story that speculates about the financial growth of WiFi networks In Europe anD North America from 2003-2008. The story states: 'Insight Research's analysis of the WiFi industry, WiFi in North America and Europe: Telecommunications' Future 2003-2008, suggests that wireless LAN technology - increasingly popping up in public spaces such as airports and cafes, in private residences, and in businesses - will grow faster in Europe than North America. Worldwide WiFi revenues are expected to grow from $7 billion USD in 2003 to over $44 billion USD by 2008, at a compounded annual rate of 44 percent.'"

Geartest.com writes "PalmOne (AKA Palm) launched three new handhelds today: The Tungsten T3, Tungsten E and Zire 21. Without going on at length about the features of every model, the T3 has 64 MB RAM, a 320x480 display that rotates from portrait to landscape mode, a software writing area that slides out of the way when you aren't using it, built-in Bluetooth, a voice recorder, and Palm OS 5.2.1 that runs on an Intel XScale 400 MHz processor, which Sony dropped from the top-end CLIE in favor of its own silicon. InfoSyncWorld reviews the Tungsten T3, Tungsten E and Zire 21. PalmInfocenter also has a T3 review. ZDNet UK has a Tungsten T3 preview. And the Detroit Free Press has an overview of all three devices."

Geartest.com writes "PalmOne (AKA Palm) launched three new handhelds today: The Tungsten T3, Tungsten E and Zire 21. Without going on at length about the features of every model, the T3 has 64 MB RAM, a 320x480 display that rotates from portrait to landscape mode, a software writing area that slides out of the way when you aren't using it, built-in Bluetooth, a voice recorder, and Palm OS 5.2.1 that runs on an Intel XScale 400 MHz processor, which Sony dropped from the top-end CLIE in favor of its own silicon. InfoSyncWorld reviews the Tungsten T3, Tungsten E and Zire 21. PalmInfocenter also has a T3 review. ZDNet UK has a Tungsten T3 preview. And the Detroit Free Press has an overview of all three devices."

Geartest.com writes "PalmOne (AKA Palm) launched three new handhelds today: The Tungsten T3, Tungsten E and Zire 21. Without going on at length about the features of every model, the T3 has 64 MB RAM, a 320x480 display that rotates from portrait to landscape mode, a software writing area that slides out of the way when you aren't using it, built-in Bluetooth, a voice recorder, and Palm OS 5.2.1 that runs on an Intel XScale 400 MHz processor, which Sony dropped from the top-end CLIE in favor of its own silicon. InfoSyncWorld reviews the Tungsten T3, Tungsten E and Zire 21. PalmInfocenter also has a T3 review. ZDNet UK has a Tungsten T3 preview. And the Detroit Free Press has an overview of all three devices."

Geartest.com writes "PalmOne (AKA Palm) launched three new handhelds today: The Tungsten T3, Tungsten E and Zire 21. Without going on at length about the features of every model, the T3 has 64 MB RAM, a 320x480 display that rotates from portrait to landscape mode, a software writing area that slides out of the way when you aren't using it, built-in Bluetooth, a voice recorder, and Palm OS 5.2.1 that runs on an Intel XScale 400 MHz processor, which Sony dropped from the top-end CLIE in favor of its own silicon. InfoSyncWorld reviews the Tungsten T3, Tungsten E and Zire 21. PalmInfocenter also has a T3 review. ZDNet UK has a Tungsten T3 preview. And the Detroit Free Press has an overview of all three devices."

nut writes "MIDP 2.0 is the latest version of the most common J2ME Profile. It comprises the Java Connected Limited Device Configuration (Usually referred to just as the CLDC) and a Java API for handheld wireless devices -- i.e. mobile phones, PDAs, etc. The MIDP 2.0 Style Guide for the Java 2 Platform, Micro Edition is one of a class of books that every application developer should read, and that not enough do, much like Nielsen's classic Designing Web Usability. It provides cheap access to knowledge that is expensive to obtain. The title is almost a misnomer; Call it a usability guide and give a better idea of its usefulness." Read on for the rest of nut's review. MIDP 2.0 Style Guide for the Java 2 Platform, Micro Edition author Cynthia Bloch, Annet Wagner pages 260 pages approx. publisher Addison Wesley rating 8 reviewer nut ISBN 0321198018 summary A comprehensive guide to usability in MIDP 2.0 programming.

MIDP 2.0 is also a fairly new specification -- in fact, the final release only came out in November of last year. Some phone and handheld manufacturers are already supporting it, however. Nokia, for example, have announced support for MIDP 2.0 on their Series 60 devices quite recently, and I would be very surprised if the competition hangs back in the wake of the success of the MIDP 1.0 specification.

A lot of the content in this book can be usefully applied to the many MIDP 1.0 devices. There is in fact a MIDP 1.0 style guide, now available online, but I would still recommend this book for the wealth of extra content that it has.

The MIDP 2.0 Style Guide is a widget-by-widget guide to best-practice programming with the MIDP 2.0 API. The information contained within comes from established design principles, J2ME programming and implementation experience, and usability studies. Usability studies, especially, don't come cheap. Such labour-intensive research is well out of the reach of most individual programmers and small companies, so there is real value for money here.

The layout is very browseable, with most of the sixteen chapters each being a set of recommendations for a specific widget such as a text box or a gauge. The first three chapters (this includes the introduction) are more concerned with defining the goals of the book, the technology it relates to and the bones of a user-interface design process. For the most part, each chapter follows a standard format that is defined in the introduction.

Some of the later chapters cover topics that have less to do with user interface design, such as application installation and management, and the security API. The table of contents is comprehensive, listing not only chapters but two layers of headings within chapters -- useful in a reference book.

There are two target audiences here: J2ME developers and MIDP 2.0 implementors. For the former, it's an excellent resource. For the latter, I would say it was required reading. This is because it ends up defining what amounts to a contract between MIDP implementors and application developers.

For instance, from two successive recommendations on text boxes:

Application Developers
"Use [The NON_PREDICTIVE] modifier in a textbox that has a URL, EMAIL, NUMERIC, or DECIMAL constraint. Email addresses and domain names are not typical words, so turning off predictive text input ..."

And in the next paragraph,

MIDP Implementors
"If the application specifies the NON_PREDICTIVE modifier, allow users to enter one character at a time without any predictive input facilities."

Clearly the first recommendation is only meaningful if the second has been followed already. There are lot of these sort of co-dependent recommendations, covering areas such as default actions for abstract commands, list selection defaults, field constraints, etc.

There is still a lot of slop in the MIDP 2.0 specification. Its scope is, after all, fairly broad -- encompassing forms and form widgets, graphics canvases, game canvases and sprites, command design patterns, messaging and networking, security and application delivery APIs. Besides which, large chunks of the spec are optional, or can be implemented in more than one way. In part this is to preserve backward compatibility with MIDP 1.0, but it also means that your UDP-based streaming video application might work on only some the devices that support the same standard.

This looseness is only to be expected in such a young technology, but it means that books such as this may help to define the standard if people use the recommendations they provide. I would expect many of the recommendations in here to become part of future versions of the MIDP specification.

NOTES:
For more information on J2ME in general, and MIDP in particular, I also recommend Programming Wireless Devices with the Java 2 Platform, Micro edition [2nd ed.] and, of course, there are all the specifications and tutorials at Sun's Java site.

The J2ME Wireless Toolkits versions 1.0.x and 2.0 are good starting points for development as well. Version 2.0 of the wireless toolkit supports MIDP 2.0.

You can purchase MIDP 2.0 Style Guide for the Java 2 Platform, Micro Edition from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

An anonymous reader writes "infoSync World writes about two new high-end Pocket PC models from JVC, the MP-PV131 and MP-PV331. Running on Windows Mobile 2003, the Pocket PCs boast 128 MB SDRAM, built-in Wi-Fi and MPEG4 video and audio streaming and capture capabilities. The new devices are also equipped with software for use along with JVC camcorders. The new models will be available in the U.S. in September at $499.95 US and $599.95 US respectively"

An anonymous reader writes "infoSync World writes about two new high-end Pocket PC models from JVC, the MP-PV131 and MP-PV331. Running on Windows Mobile 2003, the Pocket PCs boast 128 MB SDRAM, built-in Wi-Fi and MPEG4 video and audio streaming and capture capabilities. The new devices are also equipped with software for use along with JVC camcorders. The new models will be available in the U.S. in September at $499.95 US and $599.95 US respectively"

Ch_Omega writes "Symbian Ltd has announced the release of the latest version of Symbian OS, the global open industry standard operating system for advanced mobile phones, sporting enhanced networking capabilities, support for Java MIDP 2.0, a multimedia framework and new language variants. Here's the official press release and more coverage over at infoSync."

cemysce writes "Orange has decided to yeild to developer and owner pressure and remove code signing requirements from their Orange SPV phone, based on the Microsoft Smartphone 2002 platform. This move was taken after a workaround to the code signing became widespread."