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Image by Quang Minh (YILKA) via Flickr

Since the death of my faithful Nokia N95, I was wondering whether an iPhone 3G could be both a replacement and a good companion when it comes to use it for business.

When I say for business, I mean full access to email everywhere and a deep usage of voice calls. At the same time, the BlackBerry Bold is a smartphone I saw the first time in the US thanks to Jim Courtney who showed it to me during one of the famous wine dinners organized by pal Andy Abramson.

My experience with the iPhone is limited to the 2G version I gave to my wife a couple of months ago, bought in Cupertino. That model is not bad, battery duration is enough and overall experience is not bad. On the contrary, feedbacks I got from iPhone 3G users are not that great, aside from Dan York who seems much satisfied about that (his company, Voxeo, replaced Blackberries with iPhones).

The question is: what’s a better choice for business usage? Honestly, I never had a Blackberry myself but the feedbacks I’m getting everywhere is that those are solid and fully functional devices which make your business day really effective, regardless the location you are staying in. The new Bold seems to be a major upgrade of previous models and with a high definition display, 3G and Wifi included it offers you a wide range of possibilities when it comes to manage your business life on the go.

The new Storm, at a higher price, offers you an iPhone-like experience too, with a touch screen in place of the standard qwerty keyboard. Jim Courtney pointed out that a BlackBerry App Store will be available in March ‘09, making the gap between RIM smartphones and the iPhone even smaller.

What do you think? For business, BlackBerry Bold/Storm or iPhone3G? 

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Technorati Tags: App Store, BlackBerry App Store, BlackBerry Bold, iphone, luca filigheddu, Nokia N95, Smartphone, Storm

Image via CrunchBase

I just received a note from Fring informing me that the popular mobile IM/VoIP service has been selected by Mobikom’s brand A1 to be distributed to their customers in Austria.

Here is an excerpt from the official press release:

Under the agreement, mobilkom austria will give its customers access to a dedicated version of the fring mobile client, containing fring’s entire open-platform, feature-rich suite of internet based mobile communications & community services, allowing A1 over IP users to talk, chat and interact with each other & all of their online communities, and access fun mobile web applications, using the internet connection capability of their mobile device.

In Phase 1 of the project, the A1 over IP service will be integrated into fring’s SIP service, offering fring users the opportunity of using A1 over IP accounts and also the ability to configure their A1 over IP accounts to work within fring.

Phase 2 will see a fring application being built into mobilkom austria’s mobile offering and pre installed onto a large number of mobile devices. This will comprise fring’s entire feature set of voice over IP, instant messaging, real-time presence / availability indication, file transfer and access to fring’s new always-on mobile internet applications (fring Add-ons)

This is definitely a major news for the Israeli-based service, which is continuosly bringing innovation to the mobile market and making the mobile IM/VoIP experience much better than what you can get by other competitors.

Skype, Twitter, all major IM networks, SIP calling and much more are the key ingredients for this growing success. Moreover, they recently announced that Fring is finally available on the Apple iPhone’s App Store but if you don’t own an iPhone and you are a Symbian user, you can get the latest version of Fring released yesterday.

Congrats to all Fring’s team for these continuous important announcements, keep up the good work!

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Technorati Tags: App Store, deal, fring, Instant messaging & messengers, iphone, luca filigheddu, mobile voip

Image via CrunchBase, source unknown

In the effort of pushing their mobile platform, Google announced yesterday the launch of Android Market, a place where people can easily download and buy content for their Android-powered device.

Anyone familiar with Apple would compare this new marketplace to the mobile App Store, but I don’t think they have that much in common.

Currently Android Market is no more than a developer thing, through which early developers on the Android platform can easily reach a “decent” user base, even if it is certainly the first step to provide operators and handset manufacturers (which will bet on this new mobile OS) with a comprehensive set of online software services to immediately create a new revenue stream coming from value added contents sold to their users.

Some question arise, as Alec Saunders points out on his blog as well. Developers are currently focused on Apple which is performing amazingly with the recent launch of the iPhone 3G in different markets and with a huge user base of owners of the new Cupertino’s toy willing to fill it with new applications. Moreover, only HTC and LG are, to my knowledge, the only big players developing android-powered handsets and HTC alone is going to deliver a number of handsets which is only a small slice of the market owned by Apple with its iPhone (and HTC will release Android handsets with a huge delay).

The other problem for Google raised by the report is that software developers are said to have their hands full with the mobile phone software that’s actually available for development, such as Windows Mobile, Symbian, BlackBerry, and the iPhone. HTC is worried enough about a lack of attention as to demand a “minimum revenue guarantee” from Google in exchange for launching an Android handest.

What’s next with Android? Is Google talking with too much fanfare about its mobile platform despite developers are looking elsewhere?

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Technorati Tags: Android, android market, App Store, Apple, Google, HTC, iphone, iPhone 3G, LG, luca filigheddu