Mobile & Wireless

I've been predicting for years that Wi-Fi would get freer and freer until almost nobody could muster the gall to charge for it.

Microsoft certainly isn't making it difficult for its detractors to denounce their foray into iPhone Apps. Their first product, which ships today and is dubbed Seadragon Mobile, is fundamentally broken - or so they say in the iTunes description and on the company's website....but that doesn't mean it isn't a great app...

One of the greatest things about the iPhone App Store is that the barrier to entry is pretty low. This means anyone with some solid coding skills and an good idea can hop in. Apple takes care of the hosting, the credit card authorization and even some of the marketing.

But this is also one of the downfalls of the App Store...

In Friday's IT Blogwatch, Richi Jennings watches bloggers watch Google lose the "beta" tag from its Chrome browser. Not to mention Charlie The Unicorn II...

In today's podcast: Mozilla security chief Snyder steps down; Yahoo begins promised round of layoffs; and Apple registers Grand Central trademark.

SANTA BARBARA, CALIF. -- HP plans to offer as an optional upgrade for some consumer notebooks a new kind of lithium ion battery that charges faster than regular batteries and lasts three times longer.

SANTA BARBARA, CALIF. -- A company called MTI MicroFuel Cells announced a new fuel cell charger called Mobion, that will give you up to 25 hours of power for recharging cell phones, iPods, digital cameras or whatever gadgets need charging.

A lot has been made of Apple's seemingly sure move to Walmart as a point of sale for the iPhone.  Whether or not Apple releases an "everyman" $99 4Gb iPhone still remains to be seen, but it isn't the main point.  The macro trend, if you haven't recognized it yet, is that the iPhone has gone mainstream.

Its employees like the idea of choosing their own end computing devices - even if it means going elsewhere for support.

NEW YORK, NEW YORK -- Facing a downturn in book buying, and competition from online e-books, publishers are increasingly turning to cell phones.

NEW YORK, NEW YORK -- A Belgian health products distributor plans to introduce tomorrow a new stick-on cell phone chip that somehow counters the

The Mumbai terrorists' most powerful weapon appears not to have been guns or grenades, but instead their handheld VoIP phones, which allowed them to get detailed, live instructions from handlers on how to evade police, and where to attack next, while the police where powerless to detect them. So reports the New York Times.

NEW YORK, NEW YORK -- My trusty old Dell served me well on extended adventures, from the jungles of Guatemala to the islands of the Mediterranean.

It's demonstration time at this manufacturing company, where the engineering department is set to show off two financial information systems -- one of which is clearly not the favorite....

The Apple tablet has been a topic of discussion ever since Steve Jobs yanked the Newton out of the product line in the late 90's. Speculation was rejuvenated at last month's conference call, where Jobs himself was on hand to say of the Netbook category:

"entrance into that category" is the iPhone. But then he admitted that Apple is going to "wait and see" how the category evolves and "we've got some pretty interesting ideas if it does evolve."

To many, including me, that seemed to scream "tablet." To get a better idea about this category, however, I talked to Bob Morris at ARM who had a wealth of information on the topic.