Coming from the mobile conference, after a shot of innovative technology, I was reading about the launch of the ZTE S302 phone.
It was advertised as a phone for seniors and it seems a success so far. Of course, we cannot discuss about mobile web here 
, but sometimes simplicity and ease of use takes over functionality. Just 15 big keys, a monochrome screen with 12 big digits and a big red emergency button in the back.
That’s completely insane. US Patent and Trademark Office issued a patent on smartphones. Actually the term is “Mobile entertainment and communication device”.
The patent holder filed three lawsuits against almost anyone who ever thought to a smartphone once. They even did it one day before the patent was officially issued and they had to do it again next day.
This made me think at those stupid, frivolous lawsuits against multinational corporations (e.g. McDonalds, Marlboro etc).
I bought me one of the HP iPAQ 500 series Voice Messenger. I finally dropped my old (and lacking of any cool features) phone. If you’re not a game addict then probably the below will be interesting for you.
I mainly like the Outlook synchronization. So practically you have all the appointments and contacts from Outlook directly to your phone. And I will describe how to make the best out of it.
But first things first. How did I moved the contacts from the old phone to the new one? I have to remind you that the last phone was a really old one and it didn’t feature any synchronization with Outlook. I could though edit the agenda on the phone using Oxygen. I didn’t have the application (and the special USB cable) with me, so I simply copied the contacts to the SIM card. I’ve put the SIM card into the new smartphone. Unfortunately Outlook synchronization doesn’t work for the contacts on the SIM card, but only for those on the phone. So I’ve downloaded a small application to be able to copy the contacts from SIM card to phone and then synchronize with Outlook. Actually I moved the contacts from the SIM and the uninstall the application, after all from now on I can synchronize with Outlook.
Another thing that you have to take into account is that ActiveSync synchronizes only the Contacts folder from the Outlook contacts. So if you’re using subfolders, forget about them. But there’s a much cleaner way to organize your contacts: categories. There are like the tags (a real trend now in web – GMail, Flickr). So assign to all the contacts in a subfolders some corresponding category (or categories) and then move them to the Contacts folder. This way they will all be synchronized with your smartphone. And the good thing that you can even filter the agenda on the phone (or Outlook) using these categories. So after all this came even more handy than the subfolders.
And the last thing was birthday reminders. I know that the Calendar on the phone automatically puts the birthday reminders (if you specified one for your contacts), but I wanted something more. So I searched and found NS Birthday. The nice things about this application is that it also tells you how many days are until every birthday in the agenda.
So now I have a very cool agenda solution, easy synchronized between my phone and my Outlook. All I have to do is to put all the info for every contact in Outlook. But this comes in time and anyway is much easier with a real PC keyboard.
I have to admit that MS Surface really looks cool, but at the price that they intend to sell it, I doubt its usefulness. Anyway, like the iPhone, and other gadgets, I’m pretty sure that it will represent a milestone in this area. For fun watch the parody.
I think everybody dreamed of a small computer that will be able to integrate everything for your mobile needs: pda, mobile phone, gps, media center. So far minimizing all the subcomponents of a computer it wasn’t such a pretty hard job. Although there are a few areas where big progresses aren’t still made, such as display and input devices. But some breakthroughs made me confident that in a few years I’ll have my dream computer in my shirt pocket and at an affordable price.
The most important technology to be mentioned is the Digismart miniature projection from the Digislide company. The fact that will be embedded in mobile phones and PDAs could be a hint of a low price too. A demo was already made and the company hopes to incorporate the technology into mobile devices by the end of the year.
Another device present on the market for some time is the Virtual Keyboard, a virtual keyboard. Still a little bit high priced, around $200, it represents a good hope for the future.
When it comes to memory things are looking even better. The equivalent of 400,000 CDs, or 60,000 DVDs, or 126 years of MPG music may be stored on a polymer memory chip the size of a credit card.
And if you want to be totally in Sci-fi then you should definately check-out the 3D projector.
So there is big hope that in a few years I’ll get rid of all the cables and big boxes and I can install my brand new mobile computer directly from my wallet.
