That’s right, I haven’t finished with the new Mobile Computing Platform yet, specifically software for this platform. The platform is available on the Apple iPod Touch, iPhone and iPhone 3G.

I was trying to find a reference to most of the Apple iPhone App store applications being priced around $9.99. Instead I came across the following interesting information. Developers cannot charge more than $999 for a single application, and the maximum size of a single application is 2GB (see Mobile Magazine.com). I’m trying to imagine an application which would run on the iPhone and cost $999, it would have to be a very specialized vertical market application.

According to Techcrunch.com, when “iPhone App Store launched last Friday” (Friday July 11, 2008) “along with the new 3G iPhone, free apps made up 24 percent of the 552 apps available“. The article is bemoaning the low availability of free (or freeware) applications, but that isn’t a bad percentage, considering that the majority of the applications seem to be priced at or below $9.99.

If you had to look at a website selling mobile applications for Windows Mobile or Palm, the prices would be generally higher, as these are more mature platforms. In the case of Palm, which is unfortunately in decline, a number of shareware (not free) applications have simply been discontinued.

Development for Palm devices has been in the doldrums for several years now. The success of the Palm Centro smartphone is relatively small in comparison with Palm’s previous market domination. Developers who could rewrote their software for Windows Mobile and other platforms. Developers of development software had a harder time, some of them closing shop altogether.

Now the Apple iPhone/Touch has become a platform worth targeting for mobile applications. With 6 million first generation and 1 million 3G iPhones shipped it is already a customer base to be reckoned with.

There is a catch though. Although the iPhone SDK (Software Developer’s Kit) costs $99 a year, there is another cost. The SDK requires an Intel Mac running Mac OS X Leopard. For software developers who have been focusing on Palm and Windows Mobile development, this almost certainly means buying new hardware. Fortunately with Boot Camp (included with Apple Inc.’s Mac OS X v10.5) developer’s can dual boot their Mac’s into Windows XP or Vista, which makes it more of a multi-purpose development machine. Parallels Desktop for Mac allows running of Windows XP or Vista in a window on a Mac.

There are a couple of companies which have announced software for the iPhone. They already have their software running on numerous other mobile platforms.

Dell has a new line of notebooks, the Dell Studio. The line fits between the budget Dell Inspiron line of laptops and the high-end Dell XPS. It first caught my eye in a catalog with cool designs and a range of colors. The Studio line offers more personalization options (colors and graphic imprints) than Dell’s other laptops That is important in a laptop (I guess!). The specifications aren’t bad either.

The Dell Studio comes with two screen sizes – the Dell Studio 15 with 15.4 inch screens, and the Dell Studio 17 with 17 inch screens. I’ll concentrate on the more portable Studio 15. which weighs in at 6 pounds plus.

The Studio line features Intel Core 2 Duo Processors up to 2.5GHz, with a maximum of 4 GB of RAM, and hard drives with capacities up to 320GB. A biometric fingerprint reader appears to be standard. The Studio has a slot-loading optical drive and an Express Card slot that doubles as a holder for a small media remote. It also has a built-in 2.0 Megapixel webcam. The optical drive can be upgraded to a Blu-Ray drive, and the notebook has HDMI output to connect to a HDTV.

The Operating System is a choice of either Windows Vista Home Premium or Vista Ultimate Edition (I guess you can’t have it all).

Spies like our PCs, spies as in Spyware that is.

Currently I’m trying to de-gunk a Dell notebook which had two anti-virus programs (one expired and just working as a firewall), but no Anti-Spyware program. It really needed one, because it was infected by one worm, and three key-loggers of various flavors – very nasty stuff. For a relatively new PC with 1GB RAM and Windows XP it was running as slow as molasses.

Just having an Anti-virus program is no good, unless it is a Security Suite which includes an Anti-spyware component. Symantec Norton Internet Security 2008 is one such Security Suite.

Unlike Anti-virus programs, you can run more than one Anti-Spyware program. Experts recommend running a commercial anti-spyware program, and also running one of the many free anti-spyware programs. Here it really helps to read reviews of the anti-spyware program, as the top program from two years ago may just not have kept up with technology, even though gets regular signature updates. I have run into minor conflicts while running two anti-spyware programs which both do background (real-time) scanning, but they were very minor.

Also, beware of fake Anti-Spyware programs. The Spyware Warrior website has a list of “Rogue/Suspect Anti-Spyware Products & Web Sites“.

One of the aspects of being a computer professional (or geek if you prefer), is being asked to look at computers with problems by friends and acquaintances.

On at least two occasions when I’ve looked at computers that were either having errors on startup, or running very slow, there was something immediately obvious. In the mistaken belief that the more anti-virus programs the better, more than one anti-virus program had been installed. This is a case of two not being better than one.

Brian Krebs’ blog at washingtonpost.com has a transcript of a security question and answer session, and he says this is response to the question of running two different anti-virus programs on the same machine:

“…Having two anti-virus programs running at once is at the very least asking for your system to slow to a crawl. At worst, each could identify the other as a potential threat…”
There are a few exceptions; some anti-virus programs like ClamWin Antivirus “…don’t load when Windows starts up, …and they don’t do real time protection… If you felt you really wanted that, I don’t see the problem with it…”

My advice is - don’t even try to have more than one anti-virus program running on your computer. It will save a lot of headaches.

I noticed that on Pricegrabber.com, the Anti-virus with the highest User Rating currently is Kaspersky Lab Anti-Virus 7.0. Hmm, maybe I’ll try that one once my current anti-virus subscription runs out.

The iPod Touch is a converged device; a portable media player and a basic PDA. At the moment it appears to be the younger (and neglected) sibling to the iPhone. It also appears at first glance to be more expensive than the iPhone:

iPod Touch 8GB costs $299, 8GB 3G iPhone to cost $199
iPod Touch 16GB costs $399, 16GB 3G iPhone to cost $299
iPod Touch 32GB costs $499, no 32GB iPhone yet.

Of course the 3G iPhone comes with a two year contract which costs at least $70 per month (without any text messaging package). That means after two months the a 3G iPhone will cost more than the same capacity iPod Touch.

Two weeks ago I was almost sure there wouldn’t be a price cut for the iPod Touch, now I’m not sure.
The iPod Touch is an important device, it is the next generation iPod, a true portable media player with a wide screen and closer to a PDA than any other iPod before it. With the next firmware update, which unfortunately is not free, the SDK will be added. Now third party developers can legally write applications for both the iPhone and the iPod Touch. I know of at least one commercial developer with several applications which run on everything from Palm to Blackberry to Symbian devices. They are now developing for the iPhone as well. This will bring some world class applications to both the iPhone and the iPod Touch.

This was meant to be a feedback blog in which I happily told how successful I was browsing the internet with the Nokia N800 Internet Tablet hooked up to the Nokia E51 smartphone. Fortunately though I was willing to bet on my success I didn’t put any money down. So I guess you could say it “didn’t work as expected”.

I found a blog “Internet Tablet School” which had a tutorial on connecting the Nokia N800 to the internet using a Bluetooth phone. The cellphone must support the the DUN (Dial-Up Networking) Bluetooth profile. They even have an embedded YouTube video showing how it is done, and they manage to succeed! It turns out that you need to switch the cellphone Bluetooth on and then run a search for Bluetooth devices from the Nokia Tablet.

Connecting the N800 to the cellphone went well, so did telling the N800 to use the phone to connect to the internet. When it came to actually opening up a webpage in the browser on the N800, it timed out after a few minutes. After fiddling around with the settings a while, realized that the problem was most likely caused by the way my Nokia E51 was configured to connect to the data network. To fix this would involve deleting a whole lot of settings on the phone and starting again from scratch, something I may try at a later date. Alternatively I could wait for the Nokia N810 with WiMax and for Sprint to roll out WiMax in my area.

Wireless internet on an itty-bitty phone.

Sometime ago I mentioned my current cellular handset of choice - the Nokia E51. Along with many other features it has built-in wireless. Great, you can browse the web at a wireless access point, as well as using EDGE. Maybe I’m spoiled because of the larger screens on PDAs, but browsing the internet on a 2 inch 240 by 320 pixel screen really doesn’t do it for me. Make no mistake, the Nokia E51 web browser is no slouch, and has an easy way of navigating around web pages not meant for mobile devices.

Then I remembered something from the manual (yes, I glanced through the manual, I couldn’t help it!); the Nokia E51 can be used as a cellular modem. The manual describes using a laptop to connect to the Nokia E51 with either Infrared or Bluetooth, and so browse the internet on a bigger screen. I was looking for a more portable solution though.

I have not tried it yet, but I’d be willing to bet that it may be possible to use the E51 as a cellular modem for the Nokia N800 Internet tablet. This may be possible especially since both devices are made by Nokia, even though they have different Operating Systems.

The update to the popular Asus Eee PC 700 arrived over a month ago. The Asus Eee PC 900 adds a bigger screen (almost 9 inches). There are only minor differences in the Windows and Linux configurations.

Both versions are slightly larger and heavier. They have 1GB of RAM (as opposed to 512MB) and weigh 2.2 pounds. The larger screen now has a resolution of 1024 by 600 instead of 800 by 480. The processor has not been upgraded though, and is still the same 900MHz Celeron processor.

One of the more remarkable improvements is the touch pad. It is larger and supports a handful of gesture controls. Images can be pinched (or un-pinched) with the thumb and forefinger to zoom in and out, and two fingers can be used to scroll up and down Web pages (sounds familiar doesn’t it?)

Now we come to the difference between the Linux and the Windows XP versions. The Linux version has a 20GB SSD hard drive, while the Windows XP version only has a 12GB SSD hard drive. This is presumably to pay for the license of Windows XP. In a perfect world the Windows XP version would have the larger flash hard drive, as it needs more space.

Price wise, the new models are over $500, which does not seem as much of a budget buy as the first models.

What is a GPS doing on a computer blog? Well, this particular GPS is a converged device. Not converged with an MP3 player (although it can play MP3s), but converged with a Windows Mobile handheld computer.

It is is the HP Compaq iPAQ rx5915 PDA, otherwise known as the HP iPaq rx5915 Travel Companion. The design is more like that of a GPS, although it is a fully functional Pocket PC with Wi-Fi (b and g), Bluetooth, standard Windows Mobile applications and it runs Windows Mobile 5.0. The main difference it that is has 2GB of onboard flash ROM, in which the maps are stored. The device comes preloaded with the maps for North America (US and Canada) including Alaska and Hawaii as well as Tom Tom navigation software, so after the first charge it is ready to go. The screen also has transflective antiglare coating designed to reduce glare and improve readability outside.

Prior to an upcoming trip I decided to update the map files, since I haven’t updated them since getting the iPaq rx5915 almost two years ago.

The installation instructions with the map update were not very positive – to get it to work you either had to delete the “iPAQ GPS” folder from Rom, which meant all your maps and the mapping software would be gone if the update wasn’t successful, or “Run the update four times. The fourth time the update is run, it will proceed successfully…. This map update requires at least 45 minutes to complete“.

I tried the map update once, and got an error message about an invalid system configuration. After re-reading the install instructions figured I would rather take a chance on map data which was a bit out of date.