Fuel cells for mobiles get serious

Nasdaq-listed Medis Technologies said in a letter to shareholders on 28 December that its fuel-cell based Power Packs would be available for testing with mobile products in 2006 and be for sale in 2007. According to the company, its scientists have chosen “not to follow the traditional approach of fuel cells, including direct methanol fuel cells, which require the use of pumps or other moving parts.

“Instead, taking advantage of their specialisation in materials science, they developed an entirely different fuel cell technology which emphasizes the use of the materials, themselves, rather than complex support systems, to create the resulting power.”

The company says it “has developed a small, light weight, safe product, capable of charging a broad array of portable devices, multiple times (providing 20 to 30 hours of talk time for a cellphone and 60 to 80 hours of use time for certain iPods) at an attractive cost.”

Medis plans to manufacture 100,000 Power Packs in 2006, mostly for product testing. About 1,000 will go to opinion formers, including the media.

Mass production starts in 2007 – it has manufacturing capacity of up to 1.5 million units a month - and the company hopes to make $3 per unit (before sales, general and administration costs).
http://www.medistechnologies.com/

Mobile Gmail

Gmail, Google’s web-based email service, is now available from US mobile phones. To look at emails on the move, type http://m.gmail.com/ into your handset’s browser. It is also possible to open Microsoft Word or Adobe Acrobat attachments to emails.

A couple of other recent improvements to Gmail include the ability to set up contact lists for a group of email contacts, such as your neighbours.

There’s also an Out-of-office auto reply service for when you’re on business trips or away on holiday. Google has given it the not-very-sexy title of “Vacation auto-responder”.

http://www.google.com/glm/gmail

Seen in Sweden

Mobile start ups seen in Sweden recently included Neonode, which produces limited edition touch-screen handsets operated by gesture. Swipe your thumb to the right to start dialling, and to the left to end it.

Gesture is the next big thing in user interface design, according to Jonas Lofgren, marketing manager of the company. More obviously useful, is the fact that a phone number can be dialled by touching the number keys with a finger. A stylus is not needed.

Also of interest was a language-learning tool from Vocab that encourages the reader to repeat difficult words like exacerbate (long and abstract) more often than easy words like dog (short and easy to grasp).

It also lets the learner study words in a context that interests them. For example, they can look at a news story from CNN.com and the learning tool will pull out the words and phrases that they need to know.

The company plans to introduce a service in the UK in 2006 but at present the languages available are Swedish/English, Swedish/Russian, Swedish/German and Swedish/Spanish. The service is web-based or can be downloaded to a mobile phone.

Other mobile companies showing their wares were Ocean Observations, which has done soon good branding work for companies like Hutchison’s 3 3G network (it designed its appealing icons) and Samsung, the mobile handset maker. Mobilico showed a mobile poker game which lets you play against other players.
http://www.neonode.com/
http://www.oceanobservations.com/
http://www.vocab.se/company.html (in Swedish)
http://www.mobilico.net/

Leaves on the (phone) line

A UK-based bulk deliverer of SMS text-messages, KAPOW!, is to harness people power by setting up a trial SMS railway-commuter club.

Commuters arriving at a station to find severe delays will notify other commuters of cancellations and delays as soon as they hear about them.

Kapow! has also published traditional British railway excuses – not all serious - in five different languages so that club members and others can tell foreign visitors why there is no train or about other inconveniences.

The first trial club will cover neighbouring stations Sidcup, inKent, and New Eltham, south London. The trial will test the viability of the service over a two-month period and will be provided free to a limited number of commuters. If successful, commuters will be able to register to receive warning messages for a small charge per SMS.

Steve Petty, who has commuted from Sidcup to London for 10 years said: "This.. could save significant inconvenience for commuters. It is so frustrating to rush down to the station just to wait on a crowded platform, when I could have made other arrangements if only I'd known earlier.

“It seems a shame that the railway operators themselves couldn't do this but in so many cases they don't even tell the staff on the stations what is happening, so in the end passengers are forced to help themselves.”
http://www.kapow.co.uk/rail

The candour of Zander

Ed Zander, chief executive of Motorola, has won financial website MarketWatch’s CEO of the Year award. The Dow Jones' website credits him with encouraging more open discussion at mobile phone maker Motorola.

The approachable Zander has turned round Motorola’s mobile phone business, increasing sales by nearly 60% to around $37bn. Its super-slim RAZR phone has sold well and at the big 3GSM show in Cannes last year, Zander told how he took a prototype of the phone home.

The company was planning to make it in silver rather than black, but the black prototype went down so well with Zander’s family, Motorola made one in Black too – in time to be seen at the Oscars.

Two of Zander’s strengths are that he invites ideas - even from people he does not know that well - and that he surrounds himself with strong managers.
http://www.marketwatch.com/news/

Phone that helps you check your lipstick

Nokia demonstrated some future handsets at a press party in London on Thursday night. They included the 7380 "lipstick" phone. Long and thin, it has a mirror on one side (for checking your lipstick).

The phone – due out in the first quarter of 2006 - does not have a standard keypad. Instead, it has a kind of touch-sensitive circle, enabling the user to scroll through a choice of letters to compose a text message, or select other options.

A lower-end candy-bar-shaped phone in Gold, with a little macramé loop to hang on a belt, or leave to dangle, looked stylish and easy to use. There was also a 3 megapixel camera phone, the N80, and a black third-generation mobile (3G) phone with a Carl Zeiss lens that can take an hour of video footage. The 3250 video phone can swivel in new ways.

Some of the handsets had a rather masculine, squared off shape, and one slide-open N-series phone in highly-finished metal gave my finger a nasty pinch.

But a pre-Christmas phone with metallic finish and rounded corners that fits neatly into the palm of the hand, looked set to be a winner with women. Only the screen shows till you slide it up, when the keypad appears. It is available in girly pink, or black - for a more metrosexual (metropolitan heterosexual) appeal.

A "Blackberry killer" – the E61 - phone with a very high resolution screen will offer a range of office applications (in addition to email). The office applications looked more attractive to use than on a Blackberry, partly because of the clarity of the screen and icons.

The keyboard seemed a bit harder to type on, but acceptable. The real test will be whether Nokia's mobile email device can equal the Blackberry's two main advantages - very long battery life and very easy-to-use email - when it comes on to the market around May 2006.
http://www.nokia.co.uk/nokia/0,,18062,00.html
http://www.nokia.co.uk/nokia/0,,76565,00.html