Meet:Mobility Podcast 64 is now available.

Sashca, JKK and Chippy discuss the Nokia news from Fridays announcement and how that impacts MeeGo. We cover new netbook news and discuss MWC 2011

Listen, subscribe and download at MeetMobility here.

Meet:Mobility Podcast 63 is now available.

JKK (JKKMobile), Chippy (Carrypad) and special guest Al Sutton (Funky Android) talk in depth about Honeycomb and some of the tablet and netbook news from the last 2 weeks including Fusion, WebOS and Galaxy Tab 2

Listen, subscribe and download at MeetMobility here.

Meet:Mobility Podcast 43 was a great session recorded live at the Intel booth at Mobile World Congress 2010 in front of a live audience. In the 40-minute podcast we talk about some of the best hardware and software aspects of MWC and hook into the money and business aspects of development for mobile software platforms. Round the table for podcast 43 were…

• Matthäus Krzykowski [Twitter]- Agora 9 Group and Venture Beat
• Monty Metzger [Twitter] – Ahead of Time / Mocom 2020
• Hubert Nguyuen [Twitter] – Ubergizmo
• Sascha Pallenberg [Twitter] – Netbooknews
• Host: Steve ‘Chippy’ Paine [Twitter] – Carrypad / UMPCPortal

The audio version of the podcast, with show notes, will be in the normal channels soon but if you can’t wait for that, the video’s are available here.

Many thanks to Pages Media (YouTube-Channel : RedaktionPages ) and Software-Dev-Blog for their support in making this video and thanks to the live audience and of course to the Intel Developer Network who made this live session possible.

Podcast 44, a studio-based warm-up to CeBIT is coming tomorrow and the team will also be bringing you mini-podcasts each day from CeBIT as the news breaks.

Thanks for listening and watching.

Clearly the GSMA have been looking for guidance on what to choose as a top mobile gadget at MWC, saw that we had awarded Mobile Accesory of the Year to Novatel’s MiFi and followed suit by giving their own little award for Best Connected Device (Non-handset)

Or maybe they checked it out and realised it was a damn fine bit of kit on their own.

Either way, Novatel just picked up another award for the MiFi from the GSMA

SAN DIEGO ­ Feb. 22, 2010 ­ Novatel Wireless (NASDAQ: NVTL), a leading
provider of wireless broadband solutions, is pleased to announce that its
MiFi  Intelligent Mobile Hotspot has won the GSMA Global Mobile Award for
Best Mobile Connected Device (non-handset). The GSMA Global Mobile Awards is
the mobile industry¹s leading annual award presentation that honors
excellence and innovation in the mobile communications industry worldwide.

Full press release.

Well done Novatel. Keep that Mifi-love flowing. Our wish-list is below:

• 10 hours battery life (Bigger battery version?)
• USB charging without becoming a USB device
• Easier to understand indicator lights. (After nearly a year, I still don’t understand them!)
• Less heat
• Faster cold boot
• Firmware upgrade for existing owners to enable GPS and applications support.

The MiFi 2352 (HSDPA version) saved our bacon quite a few times at MWC. It was the hotel WiFi, our live podcast feed and we used it countless times around the site and at events with a cheap, 35 Euro flat rate SIM card from Vodafone ES. I even used it for advertising. I set my SSID as ‘Chippy and Carrypad are here’ and people actually found me because of it too.

It goes without saying that we thoroughly recommend it and if you’re interested in the HSDPA version, it’s available through our friends at Mobilx for just 214 Euro inclusive of EU taxes. Trust us, it’s worth it! (Affiliate link.)

What a fantastic start to the year we’ve had at Meet Mobility. First we’re live in Vegas at the Runcore booth and then a few weeks later, we’re running four sessions in Barcelona at the Intel booth at Mobile World Congress. I think I can speak for the whole Meet:Mobility team when I say that joining our individual web forces for podcasts and events has been one of most rewarding and exciting things we’ve done. You can guarantee we’ll be organising more of these events and as I write this, Sascha and JKK are trying to organise something for CeBIT next week so stay tuned.

My favourite session at MWC last week was the 30 minutes we spent with Scott Apeland. Scott is Director of Intel’s Developer Network and was able to answer most of our questions on the Intel Atom Developer Program, the AppUp Center Beta and the MeeGo announcement. The session is split into three parts and is available over at MeetMobility.

I’ve just got back to the hotel after hosting the MeetMobility podcast 43 live from the Intel booth at MWC where Sascha Pallenberg (NetbookNews), Matthäus Krzykowski (Agora 9 Group and contributor to VentureBeat,) Hubert Nguyen (Ubergizmo,) Monty Metzger (Ahead of Time and founder of Mocom 2020) and myself talked over the important topics coming out of MWC. We took a few minutes to put together and agenda that included hardware, software and business. We steered clear of pure phone-related topics (as is normal) for the podcast and ended up with this set of bullet points which is a good representation of the top mobile-computing news at MWC.

Products

Dell Mini 5 – Well-equipped 3G enabled MID running Android.

Compaq AirLife 100 – Android-based touchscreen netbook-style device that introduces the ‘always on’ model of computing.

Qualcomm Mirasol E-Reader – Color ereader device with Mirasol display technology.

Acer Aspire One 532G – First Pinetrail netbook with Nvidia Ion2 GPU and HDMI-out.

Software

MeeGo – The joint venture between Intel and Nokia to provide a single Linux-based software stack that can be used across multiple device segments using different CPU architechtures.

Flash 10.1 – GPU-aware version of Adobe Flash arriving soon on a number of devices and platforms in including Android (the new HTC Desire for example.)

The rest of the podcast was spent talking about the developer community. Matthaus had some great input from his work with mobile start-ups and we hope we can bring you the full podcast soon so you can hear that important input. We had some problems recording the full show on Ustream due to poor Wifi coverage but we have another source that we’ll edit-up and bring to you on the usual MeetMobility podcast channel as soon as we can.

That’s what we’re seeing from within MWC. How are people seeing it from the outside? What news is rising to the top for you?

Image credit to Frank Gruber.

For the next 6 days, Intel are sponsoring me to attend Mobile World Congress where I will join with our podcast partner, Sascha to learn more about the Intel Atom Developer program, Moblin and the AppUp Store. We will also present some sessions where we will talk about the IADP ecosystem an try to help developers understand where it does (and could) fit in.

I’m already here in Barcelona (tweeting and buzzing) and Sacha from NetbookNews is on his way from the airport as I write. We’ll be doing some work under our MeetMobility banner and also taking time to check out everything else that’s happening here. 3G is already sorted out (7-days unlimited via Vodafone ES for 18 Euros) and we’re packing some of the best mobile kit we could lay our hands on. We’re also looking forward to meeting our peers at the networking events stay tuned over the next 5 days for a full update on how mobility is spreading hard and fast beyond the mobile phone.

A few dates for your diary:

• Sunday evening: Showstoppers and press events.
• Monday morning: Joint Intel and Nokia Press conference.
• Monday evening: Pepcom event.
• Wednesday 11am: Live Q&A with Scott Apeland, Director of Intel’s Developer Network. (We’ll be watching the chat channel for your questions.)
• Wednesday 2pm: Live MeetMobility Podcast. (here.)

Meet:Mobility Podcast 42 is now available. Recorded on  10th Feb 2010. Podcast notes below.

Listen to the podcasts by clicking on the mp3 link or download/play via the link. Subscription info below. (RSS, iTunes)

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You can also find the podcast on iTunes (Please rate the show on iTunes.) You can also subscribe via RSS.

Show Notes:

Netbooks

Samsung N150, NB50  arrived at netbook news
Info and test coming at Netbooknews.com

Battery battle. Marketing. Differential between marketing and real-world getting too wide.
Steve Jobs said that 10hrs is enough – Overnight charging is good enough. Really?

Smartphones/Smartbooks/MIDs

Android stuff
- multitouch to maps browser etc
- Milestone to 2.01 camera fix, new lock etc hacks
Archos goes Linux
Joo Joo to ship by end of Feb. App store

There are now 40+ app stores in total

UMPCs

UMID BZ now shipping from Dynamism $549
ExoPC, Nav 9, Evi Group Pad.

MWC

Dell Mini 5
Inbrics
HP new 3G device. Tablet.
Notion Ink latest-gen NVIDIA Tegra chipset and Pixel Qi’s (Slashgearnews)
Meetmobility event:
http://meetmobility.com/2010/02/09/meet-mobility-at-mwc-2010/

It’s been a significant week for Intel. At the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, they announced that they are entering the phone market. Quite significant if you ask me!

Actually I think the rather significant news got drowned out by the amount of news coming out of MWC, the fact that it wasn’t accompanied by any images of prototypes (always gets the bloggers excited!) and that it’s something planned for 2010 rather than something we can see happening soon.  There’s also a little bit of confusion as to whether the announcement really does mean that LG will make a voice-enabled device or just whether they will just use a voice-enabled OS on a MID

From the press release: Intel’s “Moorestown”-based MIDs are expected to reduce idle power consumption by a factor of greater than 10 versus today’s Intel Atom processor-based MIDs. Additionally, the Moorestown platform will be accompanied by a newer Moblin software version, Moblin v2.0, that is based on the Linux operating system. This software is designed specifically to deliver a great PC-like Internet experience while also supporting cell phone voice capabilities. The “Moorestown” platform is expected to come to market by 2010. “[Full news at UMPCPortal]

The offline chat I had with people at Intel certainly made it sound like it was a voice-enabled LG device and this article about the LG device screen technology seems to back that up…

“LG has not given the planned mirasol phones a name, nor has it identified the new mobiles it is developing with Intel that will be based on the chip giant’s Moorestown platform.” [Source]

Don’t under-estimate the significance of that screen tech announcement either. The Mirasol technology is vastly different to LED-backlit LCD screen technology and could make a huge difference to power drain and outside readability.

MWC isn’t over yet and we’ve yet to see reports about the devices Intel took with them to Barcelona. I’m particularly interested to see the UMID and the response it gets.

Finally, there was an announcement that Telmap will be porting a navigation application over to Moblin. This is obviously great news as so far, none of the Moblin MIDs I’ve seen apart from the Navigation-focused ClarionMiND have had navigation software on them. I’m looking forward to getting a look at that, hopefully at CeBIT next month.