JLA Ventures: RIM, RBC, and Thomson

RIM is rocking with its announcement to make a $150 million fund that will invest in companies creating software for BlackBerrys and other mobile devices. The Royal Bank of Canada and Thomson Reuters are co-investors.

The BlackBerry Partners Fund will be managed by JLA Ventures and RBC Venture Partners. This move from RIM smells similar to Apple's March declaration that it would set up a $100 million "iFund" for the development of iPhone and iPod Touch applications.

Well, this new BlackBerry model in more than a year: the Bold, a high-end model that further expresses the company's wish to make tools for work with fun and frolic. The Bold, or 9000, has twice the screen resolution of the current Curve model, making for a very sharp display. It matches the resolution, but not the size, of the screen on Apple's iPhone, which has emerged as a potent competitor in the "smart phone" category. It also has much more internal memory, a glossy metallic look, and adds corporate-strength Wi-Fi capabilities to third-generation cellular and Bluetooth radios.

A horizontal screen above a trackball and a keyboard with one letter per key seems impressive. This Canadian, Waterloo based RIM didn't declare a price for their new model 'Bold', nor did it sepcify any agreements with specific cellphone carriers. Assumption is the phone would be available from various carriers this summer. The initial model would support GSM networks, the kind employed by AT&T and T-Mobile. Later models could work on the Sprint Nextel Corp. and Verizon Wireless networks.

Like the Curve and the Pearl, BlackBerry's consumer-oriented phones, the Bold has a full-size headset jack and a camera that can also capture video. At the same time, it has dual-band Wi-Fi, a feature previously only found on a model aimed at the corporate market.The Bold will also have exchangable back plates in different colors, a first for a BlackBerry.

iPhone's Global Reach

The paucity of iPhones for sale in some markets comes as Apple is hustling to meet its goal of selling 10 million of the hybrid iPod-cell phone-Internet surfing gadgets by the end of 2008. So far, Apple has sold 5.4 million iPhones, according to the latest data as of the end of March.

Apple, is rapidly linking its network with the world wide wireless carriers to expand its presence across the Globe. In the Asia-Pacific region, SingTel will sell the gadget in Singapore, Bharti Airtel in India, Globe Telecom in the Philippines and Optus in Australia, SingTel has about 2.3 million mobile subscribers in Singapore and around 7 million in Australia.

According to data as of Dec. 31, 2007. Bharti currently has about 64 million subscribers, while Globe reported a 21.3 million mobile subscriber base for the quarter ended March 31.

Last week, the top mobile phone operator in Latin America, America Movil SAB, also announced plans to deliver the iPhone to its region. America Movil has 159.2 million subscribers in 16 countries, including Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia and Mexico.

In recent weeks Apple has also signed deals with Rogers Communications Inc. to sell the device in Canada; Milan-based Telecom Italia to sell the iPhone in Italy; and Vodafone Group, the world's biggest mobile company by sales, to sell it in a total of 10 countries, including Australia, India, Italy and Turkey

Apple is also planning a software update for this summer that makes the iPhone work better with corporate e-mail, a necessary upgrade to help the iPhone compete with Research in Motion Ltd.'s BlackBerry and Palm Inc.'s Treo smart phones. Girding for a fight with Apple in the business-oriented smart-phone space, Research In Motion on Monday unveiled the Bold, its first BlackBerry model to work over 3G.

iPhone Touch screen GPS Games

Today, when cell phones are the best personal assistant every one carries all the time, we want this assistant to be capable of doing most of the every day tasks. What we are looking into is a hand held device easy to maneuver on the run with the capabilities of storing contacts, document viewer, emails, text messages, notes, music, mp3, board games, camera, video streaming, business card scanner, ability to write with a free hand on the screen, converting and saving it in the required format in the phone or a PC itself. To name a few models from Nokia, LG and Samsung that has most of the features that we look for in a cell phone. Despite of the best of cell phones in the market, we still come across some frustrations at various features that could have been made better? Is someone thinking about it? Something out of the box. Of course, not out of the cell phone box, but a new generation cell phone that could fill up the missing part from one cell phone to another. On the other hand it should open up new venues for the manufacturer, ISP, Gaming Software etc.


Nokia N96 Camera and Display
The Nokia N96 takes pride in its 2.8 inch screen that guarantees a 240 by 320 pixel resolution. This is with an active TFT of about 16M colors. Many even mention that this new 3G mobile from Nokia is a personal window to actual entertainment.

LG KT610
The LG KT610 is an extraordinary GPS-enabled stylish mobile phone. It has a unique and charming 2.4” VGA flip-type screen which holds a QWERTY keypad that resembles the one for the PCs.

Samsung SCH-i760
Verizon scores a big one with the release of the Samsung SCH-i760. Announced last 2006, the i760 is a Pocket PC phone with a number pad and a built-in QWERTY keyboard. It operates on the Windows Mobile 6 operating system which includes the Office 2007. This is in contradiction to earlier reports that the i760 will run under the Smart phone version of the Windows operating system. It also does not include the Windows Live integration that other units of its class offer and will be missed by those who are used to having their services.

Another great source of frustration probably has to do something with either the display hardware or drivers as some programs are unable to display videos in landscape mode, which should have been one of the great features.

Possible New Version iPhone
May be we need something in between a smart phone and a tiny note book that could do all. To provide users a satisfying experience Nokia, Motorola, LG, Samsung, Sony, and RIM spending enormous amount of money on the R&D to stay up in the race with beautiful skinniest model bundled up with all the possible features in one. These are the big players offering the best cell phone technology today. However, Apple is dormant player this stream that could come with some revolutionary idea like no one thought about iPod, until it existed. What our silent killer Apple is up to? No one knows, people have some educated guesses what Apple should or could come up with? From touch to tactile? What will the next version of the iPhone have that the current one doesn’t? Will it have a keyboard for those who haven’t been touched — in a good way — by the iPhone’s touchscreen? How about GPS capabilities? Will there be iPhones in different sizes, similar to what Apple has done with its iPod digital music player?

Once again, a new model may be released within the next few months; it’s natural to pose the questions. And, the new one is possibly coming with 3G along with a faster broadband connection. No doubt, Apple must be working on some new generation iPhone, a combination of iPod with cellphone features. Apple does not talk about their product in development, a lesson learned from their past mistake. Well, I don’t need to tell the story of ‘Pirates of the Silicon Valley’ here. “They’re clearly one of the more secretive organizations around,” said Ken Dulaney, vice president of Gartner Research.

I guess, we are expecting at least one major physical change to the iPhone. There are a lot of people who would like to have a 12-key keypad, because it’s easier for them to dial. Our habits less often for composing e-mail than reading it, typing a long message seems a bit cumbersome. No doubt, the existence of physical keyboard in a cell phone is gradually evolving into a touch screen.

Some of the indicator from Apple’s free iPhone 2.0 software upgrade, due in late June, will include Microsoft’s Exchange Active Sync software. The program synchronizes with a PC for e-mail, calendar and contact information. By doing so, Apple is aiming to grab a share of the business smartphone market now dominated by Research in Motion’s BlackBerry. A PC World contributing editor, wrote a recent open letter to Jobs about the “top things to fix” in the next iPhone. Among them: the need for a keyboard. “Yeah, the touchscreen is cool. And maybe the kids are down with doing the two-finger tango,” he wrote. “But we thumb typists are tapping our fingers in frustration.” J He suggested a “slide-out keyboard option,” and said, “even an add-on Bluetooth keyboard might work.”

GPS and a little light
As per one of the Gartner studies, adding a GPS chip to the iPhone would be a “logical” enhancement to the phone’s location-mapping software. It lets users approximate their locations, using phone cell towers and local Wi-Fi networks. GPS would offer additional accuracy and a room to generate more revenue. Definitely, cheaper than paying $500 for a GPS system.

Nevertheless, Apple might change the iPhone’s LCD screen to a more energy-efficient OLED (Organic Light-Emitting Diode) screen. Although OLED is about twice as expensive as using LCD, it’s also more energy-efficient, takes less physical space in the device and would allow for other technologies like GPS or 3G, without having an impact on its battery life.

Games
In the beginning of gaming there was the board. And yes, mankind played an assortment of games on it. Many were the hour spent on the wondrous entertainment it provided. And then along came the PC and ruined it all. Suddenly boards went into the background and everything went cyber with a vengeance. Some popular board games got converted into videogames that bore little semblance to their origins—most people would accuse you of having had a drop too many if you were to tell them that the spectacular Neverwinter Nights series was actually based on the rules of a board game called Dungeons and Dragons! As the PC took over, games like Ludo, Snakes and Ladders, Scrabble and several other board games seemed set to be consigned to the realms of nostalgia or at best, played before one was old enough to be trusted with a computer. Gaming was serious business with people talking of high-end graphics, non-stop action and immersive environments. Saved by the cell? Fortunately, the emergence of mobile gaming has changed all that. Suddenly, classic board games are back in fashion. And they are being played not on boards or on PCs but on cellphones. In fact, cellphone gaming seems to be totally distinct from its PC and console brethren—the user generally has far lesser time at his/her disposal and is, in most cases, looking for a short spell of entertainment rather than being anchored to a device for hours. The learning curve also has to be much shorter as the mobile user does not really have time to learn complicated keystroke combinations (which are difficult to execute on cellphones anyway—ever tried holding down two keys at the same time on a cell?) And classic board games fit right into the slot. Most users are familiar with the rules and developers are saved the trouble of having to come up with a brand new concept. All one has to do is work on the interface. The result has been a revival in the popularity of old classics such as Snakes and Ladders, Battleships, Mah Jongg and Chinese Checkers to more recent paper and pencil affairs like Sudoku. There’s even a mobile version of Book Cricket—the game which involved opening a page and taking the digit in the unit’s place as the batsman’s score (‘0’ in the unit’s place meant a dismissal!). And as GPRS and Bluetooth-enabled handsets gain popularity, there are versions that actually allow users to play games like Battleships and Snakes and Ladders with each other, instead of competing against the cellphone itself. A blip or a wave? Mind you, this is not to say that the mobile avatars of board games are perfect. For one, there are far too many versions of each game. Just try Googling for ‘cellphone chess’ and you will find yourself staring at dozens of games, each claiming to deliver a ‘real chess experience’. And as making mobile games is easy (compared to making one for a console or PC), almost every major developer has his or her version of a board classic. Which makes it all very confusing for the user, who cannot really experiment much, as most of the games come with a price tag. There is also the little matter of the gaming experience. Some of the games are a trifle dull to play—there’s a version of Snakes and Ladders where all you do is hit the button for revolving the dice (you cannot even control when the dice stops rolling or how many times you want it to spin). The fact that demo versions are relatively rare in mobile games does not help matters. All of which has led some gaming observers to believe that this sudden popularity of board classics is just a blip. As the likes of Nokia invest in cellphones with better graphics facilities, they predict that mobile gaming will soon be on par with its counterparts on consoles and PCs. But given the fact that most mobile versions of board games can run on mainstream (even lower-end) phones, there is reason to believe that board games are going to be around for a while— even if it is on cellphones, rather than on cardboard and wood. If you think that’s far-fetched, just head to the Google search box, enter the name of your favorite board game, attach the word ‘mobile’ ahead of it... and prepare to be flooded!