ITGumbo: spicing IT up

Google just launched the upgraded version of Google Maps for mobile service with the new My Location feature that can be used even for non GPS-enabled mobile phones. My Location technology uses the information broadcast from cell towers that approximates a user’s current location on the map. User would know where they are, what’s around them, where they want to go and how to get there without having to key in a lot of data.

And so the iPhone hype slowly fades away. Apple’s ultimate phone, despite the flaws and shortcomings still is, in its own sense, a revolutionary phone, or better yet gadget. For describing it as a mobile phone is like undermining its multi-functionality and revolutionary approach to the way we use and view the mobile phone.

But going back to the AT & T 2nd quarter earnings, reports post rising at $2.9 billion or 47 cents per share, as compared to last year’s $1.81 billion or 46 cents per share. Likewise wireless subscribers rose by 1.5 million to 63.7 million. A part of this increase was traced during the release of the iPhone.

The interweb has been deluded with iPhone news, blog posts, predictions, press releases and what-have-yous, the past couple of days. On June 29, at exactly 6pm (Eastern Time), the first units of the "be-all-end-all" of mobile phone will be shipped out and made available in U.S. stores.
Are you willing to shell out $500 for a piece of hardware that is touted to revolutionize mobile communication?

USA Today says, don't rush into stores and wait for a few more months after the iPhone is released. This way, Apple would have gathered initial feedbacks from users and probably introduced a better version of the iPhone later on.

Wall Street Journal's Walt Mossberg whose been lucky enough to have been testing the iPhone for the past two weeks, describes Apple Inc's ultimate mobile phone as:

The Apple phone combines intelligent voice calling, and a full-blown iPod, with a beautiful new interface for music and video playback. It offers the best Web browser we have seen on a smart phone, and robust email software. And it synchronizes easily and well with both Windows and Macintosh computers using Apple's iTunes software.

If that's enough reasons to make you get an AT & T account and buy the iPhone, wait again. You might want to check out NYT's FAQs on the iPhone.

As for me? Well, too bad, we won't be seeing the iPhone in the next couple of months or probably years in our country. It would have been a big hit among my fellow mobile-phone-savvy countrymen.

For those of you who are buying, enjoy your new "toy" once it lands on your hands.

In the rural areas of the developing countries such as Cambodia, Paraguay, Rwanda and India, folks get their dose of the internet via a bus that zaps updated web content into their PCs. These buses and even some motorcycles serve as the web server that that can be access through home PCs via wi-fi connection. And for additional rupee, rural folks in India could even request for particular information, say something about Britney Spears. The wi-fi enabled buses would then go back to the city to update their "portal" with the requested information. The buses would then return to the rural for the rural folks to get the "new information" into their home PCs.

[via Yahoo Tech News]

With today’s highly advanced mobile phone technology, it is just a matter of time that an online business company comes up with a technology that could further revolutionize everyone’s mobile web browsing experience. Enter ZenZui, a newly formed company that spun out of Microsoft Corp’s technology research with its zooming interfaces on mobile phones.

Finally, two Google executives clarified the ongoing rumor that Google is secretly manufacturing its own mobile phone. Richard Kimber, Google's South-East Asia managing director of sales and operations, and Vinton Cerf, Google's chief Internet evangelist, said that Google has no intention of becoming a mobile phone manufacturer.