OStatic

Things looked admittedly bleak for UIQ in June, when the mobile software company's code was slated to be integrated into the Symbian Foundation's open source platform. Yesterday it was announced that Motorola and Sony Ericsson, joint owners of UIQ, declared the company insolvent. On December 30th, UIQ filed for bankruptcy (as is required of insolvent companies under Swedish law).

Stefano Maffulli, the community manager at Funambol's repository/forge portal recently announced the latest Code Sniper challenge.

The Code Sniper Program offers bounties (yes, real bounties, in the form of cash awards) for client and connector code submitted by community members. The chosen application and code is opened and given back to the community. There are a number of projects on the hit list, and the latest target was named yesterday.

In early October, Lisa wrote about open source mobile push and sync provider Funambol, and its decision to try supporting its services with ad revenue. Lisa felt (and OStatic commenters seemed to agree) that as long as the service was good, and the ads weren't intrusive, it wasn't a bad trade.

Today, Funambol released the results of its user survey regarding its ad funded mobile email service. The survey results echo some of the comments here -- ads that are non-intrusive, relevant, and respect user privacy are acceptable when subsidizing the cost of useful, free applications. It seems targeted ads, paired with the right services, could prove to be a solid market model.

Canonical has announced that because of increased demand from hardware manufacturers, it will begin supporting ARMv7 processors (used in many smaller and system-on-a-chip (SoC) devices) with an optimized, commercially supported, full version of the Ubuntu desktop.

Recently, there's been a lot of noise regarding Linux netbooks -- from how well the devices have sold to the return rates. Sam mentioned in a post that reasonable expectations need to be set for netbooks.

I agree with Sam on this point (which applies to more than netbooks, when it's fully considered). These machines are designed for basic tasks, not to serve as a complete office substitute when traveling.

In the last few days, I've begun to wonder if Linux based netbooks are having to fight another battle -- messages from the media and retailers that seem at odds.

BMW announced this week at the Convergence 2008 automotive electronics conference that it is in search of an open source partner in developing a car computing platform.

Some speculate that an agreement between BMW and Mercedes-Benz that determines some hardware purchasing decisions is a major influence in BMW's preference for an open source system. Another factor BMW credits is how fast technology changes, and how open platforms are able to keep pace.

Recently, there has been a lot of buzz surrounding the Moblin Project, designed to bring open source applications to mobile devices. Though the news generally focuses on big name distributions getting involved, Moblin still features the community feel and involvement that draws many to open source projects.

One tool that Moblin offers the community to (hopefully) encourage participation is the Moblin Image Creator. The MIC allows developers to easily define projects, build them for mobile platforms, add applications and function sets to the target system images, and easily create images for live distributions (with the option of enabling rewrites/persistence), installation, or testing in virtual terminals.

Mozilla Labs recently offered a sneak peak and download of Geode. Geode is one of the first applications to use the new W3C geolocation specification API. It is currently available as a plug-in for Firefox 3 (and seems to only support Windows and Mac systems at this time). Mozilla Labs indicates it will likely be a new feature integrated in an upcoming browser release.

Geode uses web-based tracking, which tends to be faster than the traditional GPS geolocation methods. This would enable Firefox to sense the user's location and give information, for example, on local businesses, or quick access to local news.

Original Post authored by Jason Harris on 2/19/2008 on GigaOm

Nokiaﾒs E series and N Series phones are attractive options for mobile phone consumers. Nokia openly goes after other handset makers and telcos for crippling features and stripping out functionality such as fully enabled Bluetooth, Wi-Fi access and so on. Nokia and their use of the Symbian operating system create a fertile ground for mobile application developers.